The Phoenix Lights

Book Excerpt: Chapter One

1.  Showtime . . . The Phoenix Lights

     On the evening of March 13, 1997, a collection of unidentified flying objects crossed the state of Arizona from north to south and back again. It was an incident that has become known worldwide as the Phoenix Lights.
     It began when a former police officer called the highway patrol from his home in the northern mountains to report a group of ?bright red-orange lights formed in the shape of a boomerang? that was headed south. No engines could be heard, he said, which was surprising since the lights were ?large and in formation.?
     Next to witness the mysterious lights were travelers on Interstate 17, the freeway connecting Northern Arizona with the capital city of Phoenix. Some drivers nearly left the road watching the massive array of lights. No sound accompanied the lights and they moved in unison, ?as though they were connected,? said one witness.
     When the display came over the mountains of North Phoenix and moved over the city, thousands of people saw it. The route the mysterious lights took that night can be followed by tracking the 911 calls that came into the Phoenix police department. In the north valley, people talked frantically to emergency operators about a ?strange soundless craft? moving over their heads. One man directly under the lights said that looking at the shimmering area between them was like ?looking through water at the sky.? An 11-year-old boy, Tim MacDonald, came out of his Cub Scout meeting and watched the triangle shape of lights for nearly three minutes. ?I thought it was a UFO,? he told a newspaper reporter. Golfers at driving ranges froze as they caught sight of the glimmering collection. Commercial airline pilots radioed the tower to find out what those strange lights were. A cement driver, Bill Greiner, watched the lights from a spot near Luke Air Force Base, where he reported seeing fighter planes take off and head for the strange objects, their afterburners roaring at liftoff.
     For several minutes the city stood still as these lights swept overhead on their way toward Tucson, where truck drivers called one another on their CB radios, and families on the dark freeway stopped and stared in awe at the passing giant formation.
     But unlike others who had been taken by surprise that night and didn?t have time to grab a camera, I was ready. For the past two years my husband and I had been taking both still photographs and video footage of the heavenly lights. At times they had been so close that we could have thrown a rock from our bedroom balcony and hit them. At other times they were so distant and high that I knew others must have seen them too. I tracked down a few people who had seen them, including some air traffic controllers at the airport. We were all grateful to know that we were not alone in witnessing these bizarre orbs of light, yet we were surprised that so few of us had seen them.
     But this time it would be different. There is no way the entire city couldn?t be seeing this, I told myself. About an hour and a half after the triangle shape of lights passed over Arizona, I videotaped the strange orbs that appeared to hover over the city of Phoenix. I filmed the lights from the porch of my home in the mountains overlooking the city.
     As my husband, Frank, and I watched the lights, I could only imagine their effect on people. All the while I thought about the first time I saw these lights, and what seeing them had done to me. . . .

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