For the residents of Phoenix, it was the end of just another day.
It was a warm spring night in the desert.
But things were about to get exciting, and this Hollywood movie star had a bird’s-eye view of it all!
“Pa? What are those lights?”
Kurt Russell was flying his son Oliver to Phoenix to visit his girlfriend.
As they approached the airport, the pair spotted some strange lights in the distance.
“I saw six lights over the airport in absolute uniform in a V-shape,” Russel later recalled.
The actor stated that his son asked, “Pa, what are those lights?”
“Then I kind of came out of my reverie, and I said, ‘I don’t know what they are.’”
His son Oliver then asked, “‘Are we okay here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to call in, and I reported it.’”
Russell reported the encounter to the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport Control Tower, who replied that there was nothing else in the sky showing on radar, and he was cleared to land.
The actor landed, dropped his son off, and returned to L.A., saying that he “didn’t think much of the incident after that.”
But thousands of residents in the Phoenix area were about to have a lot to think about!
The Phoenix Lights
It was around 7:30PM (MST) on the night of March 13, 1997, when the first reports started coming in.
This sighting was reported from Nevada, southeast to Phoenix, covering an area of over 300 miles and making this one of the largest mass reported UFO sighting incidents in U.S. history.
Residents of Henderson, Nevada, began calling the local authorities, stating that a large “V” with 5 bright lights, bigger than a 747, was flying slowly over the area.
Other reports said that the unidentified object looked like a framing or carpenter’s square.
At 8:15PM, a police officer in Paulden, Arizona, called his dispatch to report a strange cluster of red lights.
He couldn’t tell if it was a single object or five individual unidentified aircraft.
Hundreds of people in the area were calling in and reporting similar encounters.
Around 10PM, the Prescott, Arizona, authorities started getting calls of a large lighted object over the city that blocked the sky as it moved.
South of the city came similar reports of a large object flying at an estimated 1,000 feet, moving slower than was possible for an aircraft.
One eyewitness claimed that the craft suddenly banked to the right towards the Prescott Valley and disappeared into the night sky.
In Phoenix, Vice Mayor Frances Barwood stated that the city had received over 700 reports of a “V”-shaped object that was over a mile wide, with others claiming to have seen “orbs” and boomerang-shaped craft moving silently over the city.
Other reports claimed to have seen a row of brilliant lights hovering, then slowly falling towards the horizon.
The calls kept coming in until around 10:30PM.
So, What Were People Seeing?
Well?
Opinions certainly vary.
Shortly after the sightings, the U.S. Air Force stated that there were two separate reasons for the reports.
The early sightings of the “flying triangle” could be linked to a National Guard pilot training program called Operation Snowbird.
That evening the Air National Guard was conducting training flights with A-10 Thunderbolt II jet fighters, where 5 were flying at high altitude that would include being in a V formation. The training operation took place over most of the area where the UFO sightings were made.
The jets in question were part of the ANG, 104th Fighter Squadron out of Maryland.
As for the row of brilliant lights hovering and slowly falling in the sky, Lt. Col. Ed Jones later stated to the media that they had flown the aircraft and the formation had dropped slow-falling, long-burning illumination flares over the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, located southwest of Phoenix.
Arizona Governor Fife Symington, who also claimed to have seen the mysterious lights, later held a press conference claiming that “they had found who was responsible” and had an aide dressed as an alien walk out and join him.
The country had an official answer, but many refused to accept the government explanation, but like so often happens, years passed, and the excitement of the incident mostly faded away.
Several years later, Kurt Russell was on a talk show touting the release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and he stated he had largely forgotten about the incident until one night he noticed his wife Goldie Hawn watching a television show about UFOs, and he got all excited as he recalled the long-forgotten incident where he explained to her what he and their son Oliver had seen over Phoenix.
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