The Phoenix lights - aliens, hoax or mistaken identity?

Are you sure all those witnesses have no agenda?

People make money out of UFOs. There's an industry out there promoting them. Not everybody is in it for the money, of course. Some of them are in it for the publicity - their 15 minutes of fame on the nightly news or on the UFO web sites. Some make a career out of being a UFO "expert" who has had many personal experiences. Some of those people are flat-out fraudsters.

And even the ones who are honest are often mistaken about what they think they saw, as I have explained.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And there simply is no extraordinary evidence that a football-field- sized spacecraft ever flew over Phoenix (or anywhere else for that matter).

But don't take my word for it. Investigate for yourself. Believing the UFO nuts is just as bad as believing me. If you're going to be skeptical about what I have to say, then apply that same skepticism to the people who are saying what you'd like to be true.

 

There were hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw lights (in the second event, the one that occurred at around 10pm). However it wasn't really extraordinary. At all. And it was explained and verified as being flares used by the National Guard, verified by a pilot who flew in that training mission and gave the exact location of where it was, which was consistent with what eyewitnesses saw that night (see below in Part II).

In regards to those hundreds of eyewitnesses, what did they want to see in those lights? What did they want them to be? I am not doubting that they saw them. But I think the hype of wanting them to be out-worldly kind of outshone the more mundane reality of it.

During the Phoenix event, numerous still photographs and videotapes were made, distinctly showing a series of lights appearing at a regular interval, remaining illuminated for several moments and then going out. These images have been repeatedly aired by documentary television channels such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel as part of their UFO documentary programming.

The most frequently seen sequence shows what appears to be an arc of lights appearing one by one, then going out one by one. UFO advocates claim that these images show that the lights were some form of "running light" or other aircraft illumination along the leading edge of a large craft — estimated to be as large as a mile (1.6 km) in diameter — hovering over the city of Phoenix. Other similar sequences reportedly taken over a half hour period show differing numbers of lights in a V or arrowhead array. Thousands of witnesses throughout Arizona also reported a silent, mile wide V or boomerang shaped craft with varying numbers of huge orbs. A significant number of witnesses reported that the craft was silently gliding directly overhead at low altitude. The first-hand witnesses consistently reported that the lights appeared as "canisters of swimming light", while the underbelly of the craft was undulating "like looking through water".[15] However, skeptics claim that the video is evidence that mountains not visible at night partially obstructed views from certain angles, thereby bolstering the claim that the lights were more distant than UFO advocates claim.[16]

UFO advocate Jim Dilettoso claimed to have performed "spectral analysis" of photographs and video imagery that proved the lights could not have been produced by a man-made source. Dilettoso claimed to have used software called "Image Pro Plus" (exact version unknown) to determine the amount of red, green and blue in the various photographic and video images and construct histograms of the data, which were then compared to several photographs known to be of flares. Several sources have pointed out, however, that it is impossible to determine the spectral signature of a light source based solely on photographic or video imagery, as film and electronics inherently alter the spectral signature of a light source by shifting hue in the visible spectrum, and experts in spectroscopy have dismissed his claims as being scientifically invalid.[16][17] Normal photographic equipment also eliminates light outside the visible spectrum — e.g., infrared and ultraviolet — that would be necessary for a complete spectral analysis. The maker of "Image Pro Plus", Media Cybernetic, has stated that its software is incapable of performing spectroscopic analysis.[16]

Cognitech, an independent video laboratory, superimposed video imagery taken of the Phoenix Lights onto video imagery it shot during daytime from the same location. In the composite image, the lights are seen to extinguish at the moment they reach the Estrella mountain range, which is visible in the daytime, but invisible in the footage shot at night. A broadcast by local Fox Broadcasting Company affiliate KSAZ-TV claimed to have performed a similar test that showed the lights were in front of the mountain range and suggested that the Cognitech data might have been altered. Dr. Paul Scowen, visiting professor of Astronomy at Arizona State University, performed a third analysis using daytime imagery overlaid with video shot of the lights and his findings were consistent with Cognitech. The Phoenix New Times subsequently reported the television station had simply overlaid two video tracks on a video editing machine without using a computer to match the zoom and scale of the two images.[16]​

So who should be believed? Which study carries more weight? The UFO advocate who performed a "spectral analysis" (sounds fancy, doesn't it? Makes it sound all professional) using a software version not known to anyone but himself. His whole study sounded so out there, made it seem so real. The reality is that the software he used is not capable of the type of analysis he claimed to have performed on lights caught on people's cameras and video cameras. Or the more boring tests carried out by independent sources and scientists?

More mundane studies and tests by scientists support that the lights, the great V shape that everyone was so surprised about, actually matched up with the National Guard who flew in formation and were using flares. And how boring that sounds, huh? There's no zing to it. It's just.. So Earthly. Not interesting at all. And it may not have been what people wanted it to be. And that is the issue. People wanted it to be one and not the other. So we get people like Dilettoso and sites like your 'dudeman' website, who are simply giving people what they want it to be, by providing a viewpoint that is slanted to being what people want to read. It's like when ultra-right conservatives read Fox News, for example, or listen to Rush Limbaugh. They aren't listening to them and believing it because they want the truth. They are listening and watching them because those people tell them a version of reality that fits their personal beliefs and viewpoints. And the same goes to the left. Sometimes, the truth is just too boring and mundane and people would rather believe it is aliens.

 

Part II

I will get to your source in a second.. Firstly I want to discuss the second so called event.

The second "event" or the one that occurred later that night that was witnessed by so many people, was explained as being flares from the nearby air force base.

The second event was the set of nine lights appearing to "hover" over the city of Phoenix at around 10 pm. The second event has been more thoroughly covered by the media, due in part to the numerous video images taken of the lights. This was also observed by numerous people who may have thought they were seeing the same lights as those reported earlier.

The U.S. Air Force explained the second event as slow-falling, long-burning LUU-2B/B illumination flares dropped by a flight of four A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range at Luke Air Force Base. According to this explanation, the flares would have been visible in Phoenix and appeared to hover due to rising heat from the burning flares creating a "balloon" effect on their parachutes, which slowed the descent.[20] The lights then appeared to wink out as they fell behind the Sierra Estrella, a mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix.

A Maryland Air National Guard pilot, Lt. Col. Ed Jones, responding to a March 2007 media query, confirmed that he had flown one of the aircraft in the formation that dropped flares on the night in question.[20] The squadron to which he belonged was in fact at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona on a training exercise at the time and flew training sorties to the Barry Goldwater Range on the night in question, according to the Maryland Air National Guard. A history of the Maryland Air National Guard published in 2000 asserted that the squadron, the 104th Fighter Squadron, was responsible for the incident.[21] The first reports that members of the Maryland Air National Guard were responsible for the incident were published in The Arizona Republic newspaper in July 1997.[22]

Military flares[23][24] such as these can be seen from hundreds of miles given ideal environmental conditions. Later comparisons with known military flare drops were reported on local television stations, showing similarities between the known military flare drops and the Phoenix Lights.[4][5] An analysis of the luminosity of LUU-2B/B illumination flares, the type which would have been in use by A-10 aircraft at the time, determined that the luminosity of such flares at a range of approximately 50–70 miles would fall well within the range of the lights viewed from Phoenix.[17]

Dr. Bruce Maccabee did an extensive triangulation of the four videotapes, determining that the objects were near or over the Goldwater Proving Grounds.[25] Page 5 of Dr. Maccabee's analysis refers to Bill Hamilton and Tom King's sighting position at Steve Blonder's home. Blonder has worked with Dr. Maccabee to fully include his sighting position in the triangulation report. Maccabee has also refined three other sighting positions and lines of sight in 2012​

So we can pretty much rule that out.

The first so called "event"..

I had a read of the site you just linked. To be honest with you, I think perhaps you need to find better sources. Because the site you linked, under the "siriusly" menu from its front page had a very interesting (if not somewhat bizarre) discussion about the "face on Mars". Suffice to say, the site appears to be giving readers what they want to read. And that is inherently bad in and of itself. Because it slants the stories to reflect what they personally believe. Reality can sometimes just be too boring and it does not reflect what people want it to be, like the site you linked. They weren't interested in what it could be. Only in what they wanted it to be. After all, there is no fame, fortune or interest if it is just planes, is there?

The first event — the "V", which appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson — was the apparently "wedge-shaped" object reported by then-Governor Symington and many others. This event started at about 20:15 MST over the Prescott area, and was seen south of Tucson by about 20:45 MST.


Proponents of two separate events propose that the first event still has no provable explanation, but that some evidence exists that the lights were in fact airplanes. According to an article by reporter Janet Gonzales that appeared in the Phoenix New Times, videotape of the v shape shows the lights moving as separate entities, not as a single object; a phenomenon known as illusory contours can cause the human eye to see unconnected lines or dots as forming a single shape.

Mitch Stanley, an amateur astronomer, observed high altitude lights flying in formation using a Dobsonian telescope giving 43× magnification. After observing the lights, he told his mother, who was present at the time, that the lights were aircraft.[18] According to Stanley, the lights were quite clearly individual airplanes; a companion who was with him recalled asking Stanley at the time what the lights were, and he said, "Planes". When Stanley first gave an account of his observation at the Discovery Channel Town Hall Meeting with all the witnesses there he was shouted down in his assertion that what he saw was what other witnesses saw. Some have claimed that Stanley was seeing the Maryland National Guard jets flying in formation during a routine training mission at the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range south of Phoenix. It is possible that the Phoenix Lights Vee is actually a group of planes based on the explanation of a similar sighting in South California.
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