William J. Birnes - Unsolved UFO Mysteries: The Worlds Most Compelling Cases of Alien Encounter

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright 2000 by William J. Birnes and Harold Burt

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They were staring at a large pyramid-shaped object with a red light on top. It was clearly a machine of some sort, Airman Warren thought, but he had never seen its like before. If he looked at it directly, it seemed that its shape was changing. A ball of light emerged from behind the object. The light separated into three distinct orbs, each containing one creature inside.

The creatures inside the orbs were small, about four feet tall and dressed in what looked like silvery one-piece flight suits. They had overly large black eyes that were dominant features in their faces. The orbs hung in the air in front of the officers until Wing Commander Williams stepped up to them.

To Warren, the creatures seemed to be communicating with Gordon Williams.

The authors wish to thank the editors and writers at UFO Magazine, and especially editor in chief Vicki Ecker and news director Don Ecker. Thanks to CAUS director Peter Gersten for allowing us to cite material from his personal contacts page at www.CAUS.org. Thanks also to Dr. Roger Leir, Bill Hamilton of Skywatch, Pam Hamilton, Nikolay Subbotin at RUFORS, Clifford Stone, Peter Robbins, and to all our friends at Orange County and Ventura County MUFON. A special thanks to our research editor, Ron Press, for his almost magical abilities to find information on the Internet that nobody knew existed. We acknowledge also the editorial expertise, insight, but mostly the support of our editor at Warner Books, Betsy Mitchell, editor in chief of Aspect.

Finally, we dedicate this book to our wives, Gina Burt and Nancy Hayfield Birnes, with thanks and love.

So womanly, so benigne, and so meke

That in this world, thogh that men wolde seke,

Half hire beaute shulde ment fynde

In creature that formed ys by kynde.

And therefore may I seyn, as thynketh me,

This song in preysyng of this lady fre.

Geoffrey Chaucer

What Was Behind the Phoenix Lights?

If we were being attacked by space aliens we wouldn't be playing these kinds of games.

President Bill Clinton, in response to learning about House of Representatives budget cuts, October 1999

A RIZONA HAS HAD A LONG HISTORY OF REPORTED UFO sightings. For fifty years residents of the state have reported the sightings of strange craft. But in March 1997 there began a series of events that would stun American television audiences from coast to coast, gluing them to evening news broadcasts of strange lights floating through the skies above Phoenix. This event, which continued off and on for the next few months, is known as the Phoenix Lights: formations of yellow, orange, amber, and white lights that flew over the city and surrounding areas along a corridor stretching northwest to southeast.

The well-photographed and videotaped Phoenix Lights were the subject of heavy news coverage, but their origin has never been fully explained. To many investigators, they were UFOs, plain and simple. To others, they were flares dropped from military aircraft as part of an exercise.

The Witness Reports

Although March 13, 1997, has been cited as the first appearance of the Phoenix Lights, according to some of the postings on the Internet and phone calls to UFO researchers in the Phoenix area there were sightings of V-shaped configurations of lights even before that date, north and west of Phoenix. One observer was a private pilot who was driving well west of Phoenix along a route that took him near the landing approach paths to Luke Air Force Base. At first he thought the lights ahead of him along the road were landing lights, maybe on a jet coming just a bit too low on its approach to the runway about thirty to forty miles away from him.

This was a kind of yellow light he'd never seen before, and he looked around to see if there were any other strange lights in the sky. He found one, brighter than the first but the same color. When he turned back to check on the position of the original light, it had disappeared.

Just three days later, other families witnessed and photographed strange lights floating over the general vicinity where the yellow lights had been spotted. Each witness knew nothing about the experiences of the others, but the lights continued to appear during the ensuing nights with enough frequency that witnesses began posting their sightings on Internet news groups and Web sites.

Then, on March 13, the light show began in earnest. The first display took place somewhere around 8:30 P.M. when a series of yellowish orange lights just seemed to turn on in the sky north and west of Phoenix. The first observers didn't report seeing a craft of any kind, simply lights that appeared to float in the air in a straight line, angled back from each other as if they were in a formation. The news media reported at least two separate displays of floating lights that night, one beginning about two hours after sundown and the other two-and-a-half hours after the first. They continued until midnight or even later as the lights traveled across the state of Arizona from the northwest to the southeast.

Some cases of the sightings weren't disclosed until one or two days later when observers called their local newspapers to tell their stories. Gradually, the entire time sequence of the appearance of the lights began to take shape. One report, for example, received at Peter Davenport's National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, said that a formation of yellow lights appeared in Nevada near Nellis Air Force Base at 8:15, heading south and west. Another sighting, of a flying V of yellow lights, took place near Lake Mead at 7:30 P.M. and appeared to be heading west toward Phoenix. Additionally, two different observers reported seeing a large triangular-shaped arrangement of five yellow lights near Prescott, Arizona, heading west.

Then, it seemed, lights turned up all over the skies over Prescott, Arizona. From 8:15 to 8:30, yellowish orange and yellowish white lights turned on one by one in a V-shaped formation and floated through the skies without a sound. Some of the light formations moved as slowly as fifty miles per hour. Others seemed to move faster and performed sharp turns and other maneuvers. But all the observers reported seeing lights with a similar yellow hue, and most of the lights were flying in either a V or triangle formation. Yet another observer in Prescott reported a cluster of V-shapes, almost like a military chevron of three rows of five yellow-white lights floating overhead without a sound and heading south and west.