Of all of the UFO sightings and encounters on record, very few can claim to have been witnessed by more than a few people at a time at best. These are typically very isolated incidents, seen by only small groups of people at most, and this has only further served to generate doubt on the part of skeptics or for those who place no veracity on UFO phenomena as a whole. Yet, every once in a while, there are truly spectacular cases of mass sightings that get plenty of documentation and exposure. Although rarer than most accounts, such mass sightings typically provide a rich variety of witnesses, many of them often very trusted people in social high standing, or professionals, trained personnel, and experts. They often serve to be harder to explain away than typical sightings, and usually earn their place among the more bizarre UFO accounts.
One of the most intriguing mass UFO sighting flaps in U.S. history started as a normal day like any other in the small suburban town of Wanaque, New Jersey, but as the day came to a close, a bizarre series of events would begin to play out. On the crisp and clear evening of January 11, 1966, at around 6:30 PM, calls began to come in from all over the area describing what seemed to be an extremely bright glowing light out over the nearby Wanaque Reservoir. Dozens of calls were coming in from panicked residents and workers at the reservoir describing more or less the same thing, with most reports saying it was a very bright light, larger and brighter than a star, mostly white but sometimes changing to colors such as red, blue and green. The mystery object was described as hovering over the frozen lake surface and roving about in what seemed to be a deliberate pattern at an altitude of between 250 and 1,000 feet, sometimes performing seemingly physics-defying maneuvers and sudden vertical drops and rises. Even weirder were the reports of the object projecting some sort of beam downwards to the reservoir, which was powerful enough to melt holes in the ice.
Before long, the police who were getting these calls were seeing the strange object for themselves, and one of these was police patrolman Joseph Cisco, who just happened to be near the reservoir when the reports began flooding in. He would then drive out there to investigate and look out over the water to see something very strange for himself, of which he said:
“There was a light that looked bigger than any of the stars, about the size of a softball or volleyball. It was a pulsating, white, stationary light changing to red. It stayed in the air; there was no noise. I was trying to figure out what it was.”
The object would then swoop in low and begin shooting a beam to the lake surface, and Cisco soon got a call from another officer on the radio, saying in a panic, “Something landed in front of the dam. Something’s burning a hole in the ice! Something with a bright light on it, going up and down!” Another policeman who saw the thing was Sgt. Ben Thompson, who said it actually caused the water to rise below it and sucked together treetops, and yet another Officer George Dyckman would say, “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.” Several other police officers being called to the area also saw the otherworldly object, including Patrolmen Edward Nestor and Jack Wardlaw, a Sgt. Bobby Gordon, Reservoir Police and Personnel, George Destito, Charles Theodora, Fred Steines, and even Chief of Police Floyd Elson. Chief John Casazza of the Wanaque Reservoir Police would say of his own sighting:
“It was a bright white light. As I said: just like on a locomotive. It was funnel-shaped. It seemed to come out of some object, like a funnel. In other words, it spread out as if it were focused through a telescope. It was narrow at one end in the sky and spread out into a very wide beam as it approached our upper gatehouse at the dam. The strangest part of it was that there was no noise attached to this object. None whatsoever. It was absolutely silent. A silent light.”
News crews who started to trickle in also reported seeing the strange sight, with one reporter, Howard Ball, with the Paterson News, saying:
“I was near the junction of Colfax Road and Hamburg Turnpike… I saw a very extremely bright light… The thing that really brought my attention was, as I traveled along, a white starlight seems to come at me… then it stopped and it made a transverse movement to the west. No color, but if I’d give it a color I’d say brilliant blue-white, similar to the ignition of a magnesium and pure oxygen… really bright light.”
One of the more prominent witnesses to the outlandish event was the town Mayor, Harry T. Wolfe, who had made his way out to the reservoir along with Councilmen Warren Hagstrom and Arthur Barton and the Mayor’s 14-year-old son, Billy, out of sheer curiosity when the reports kept coming in a deluge. They would witness a light that was “a brilliance, a little brighter than a star” that seemed to emit a reddish or pale green light or yellowish light and which was moving “oddly” over the lake. Closer inspection showed that it was some sort of oval-shaped object around 9 feet in diameter, coming in low over the water to shoot down a beam that put a hole in the ice as they looked on in astonishment. Councilman Hagstrom would say of what they saw that night:
“There was something up there that was awful bright. We don’t know what it was. We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn’t hear a motor. It looked like a helicopter with big landing lights on. We got goose bumps all over when we saw where the hole was.”
Before long, there were throngs of people gathered at the reservoir watching this thing go about its inscrutable business, and the mysterious object would do its strange act over the water for over an hour before finally speeding off into the night at great speed and without warning. Moments later, it would be reported as hovering over Lakeland Regional High School and stopping at several other locations in the area before vanishing to leave residents in a state of shock. So many people had seen it, including many policemen and even city officials, and all of them agreed it was not a normal aircraft or celestial phenomenon, but rather something truly unexplainable and baffling. To make it all even weirder still is that it would seem as if the strangeness wasn’t quite over yet. The object would make another brief appearance over the reservoir the following evening as well, before seeming to go away for good, but it would make yet another appearance later that year.
In October of 1966, just as people were starting to try and put the whole bizarre incident at Wanaque reservoir out of their minds, a new spate of sightings emanated from the lake. At 9 PM on October 10, the object was seen by several witnesses, including an off-duty police officer by the name of Robert Gordon, who saw it with his wife, Betty, who described it as a bright white light that moved with “a definite pattern” towards the reservoir. This sighting was soon joined by that of a policeman, Sgt. Ben Thompson, who had seen the object during its first appearance, and had quite a harrowing experience when the UFO allegedly flew right at him and he saw it at fairly close quarters. He would say of this:
“I saw the object coming at me. There was an extremely bright light. It was a bright white light, bright like when a light bulb is about to blow. It was very low. It appeared to be about 75 feet over the mountain. That would be Windbeam Mountain. It was traveling very quickly and in a definite pattern; first right, then up and down, then repeating the pattern. Distances are deceiving, but it might have covered an area of a half a mile. It went straight over my head, stopped in mid-air and backed right up. It then started zig-zagging from left to right. It was doing tricks. Making acute angular turns instead of gradual curved ones. It looked as big as a parachute. I got out of my car and continued to watch it for almost five minutes. It was about 200 to 250 yards away. It was the shape of a basketball with the center scooped out and a football thrust through it. Sometimes the football appeared to be perpendicular to the basketball and sometimes standing up on end. There were two different gadgets. It didn’t make much noise, but as it was moving, it raised the water beneath it. I watched it maneuver, stirring up brush and water in the reservoir, it was about 150 feet up…I had difficulty seeing because the light was so bright it blinded me.”
Once again, the police were flooded with dozens of calls from terrified residents seeing the object in the vicinity of the reservoir, and it would be seen again on October 15 before finally disappearing again, this time apparently for good. In the wake of the UFO flap over Wanaque reservoir, there would be some strange and sometimes ominous stories coming out of the area. It was reported that unknown men posing as military officials from the Air Force were doing the rounds in the area, intimidating residents and discouraging people from talking about what they had seen, and some people even claimed that these mysterious men had confiscated photographs taken of the phenomena. The military would deny that these people were with them, or that they had had anyone in the area to investigate at all, and one Air Force Colonel Freeman would state, “We have checked a number of these cases and these men are not connected with the Air Force in any way.” Other witnesses would also insist that they had seen military helicopters and even jets in the area shortly after the initial sightings and in the months after, but the Air Force denied this as well, while at the same time making efforts to explain away the UFO sightings as misidentified aircraft or a weather balloon. What happened here, and did the military have any connection to these events or not? Were they trying to hide something or cover it up? No one knows.
The claims of mysterious officials confiscating photographic evidence are cited as one of the reasons there is so little such documentation of the incident. Indeed, although the UFO was witnessed by so many people, including police and high-ranking officials, there is oddly only a handful of photographs of the alleged craft known to exist, most of which were later sent in anonymously to make it hard to ascertain who took them in the first place or whether they are real or hoaxes. One photo in particular, showing the object shooting a beam of light downwards, has become intensely debated and analyzed in the years since, with no real conclusion. Since we don’t know who took these photos and have no negatives, it is hard to say. What we do know is that the incident did happen, and so this odd lack of photographic evidence from such a well-documented mass sighting has been seen as proof that someone has tried to suppress the event.
Today, there have been many proposed explanations, including helicopters with spotlights, atmospheric phenomena, Venus, weather balloons, or even ball lightning, but there are problems with these explanations in that so many reliable witnesses saw them and insist that what they witnessed was none of these things. One unidentified witness has said of this to researcher Anthony Bragalia, of UFO Explorations, as follows:
“I remember the thing very well. I still do not know what it was. I think about it from time to time, but it’s no use because it doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing what it was. Maybe things that aren’t from here aren’t meant to be understood by us here. Ask anyone who will tell you, it was not a helicopter or something astronomical. It was…not…from our military or something we misidentified. It was a UFO, from somewhere else. The beams or ray thing that came out from the bottom of the globe was the thing that got to me. It made the light cut the ice out. It frightened us kids. And I’m sure the adults. Because we don’t have anything like that even today. The adults didn’t really speak much about it after the initial thing that I could tell. I’d talk about it with my friends some time later and one of them told me that people came around to not say anything.”
Amazingly, there has apparently been very little follow-up investigation done into the case. It seems that no one ever went back to examine those holes in the ice, nor were there any water or radiation measurements taken, and the proper authorities don’t seem to have ever made any real efforts to interview witnesses. Most of what we know is from independent UFO researchers who pieced together what happened from newspaper articles of the time. We are left to wonder just what happened out over that expanse of frigid ice all of those decades ago and what it all means. Was this all the result of mundane phenomena and misidentification, or something else? Has there been some sort of cover-up put into effect that has managed to keep such a spectacular incident largely buried in history? If this was really an alien craft, then what was it doing at that reservoir, and what did it want? These are questions that linger, and which may never be satisfactorily answered, and the UFO wave of New Jersey’s Wanaque reservoir remains a very compelling case of a mass UFO sighting that has been largely forgotten.
Moving on to our next case, on July 11, 1991, a total solar eclipse occurred from the Pacific Ocean to Brazil, passing over Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and South America. In Mexico City, Mexico, thousands of people were out to get a look at the rare celestial event that day. Two of these observers were Guillermo Arragin, a television executive, and Jaime Maussan, a journalist, who were shocked to notice a bright, disk-like metallic object hovering in the sky and were able to videotape it easily, as they had already been taping the eclipse. They sent the tape to Jaime Maussan, who produced, directed and hosted Sesenta Minutos, Mexico’s edition of Sixty Minutes. When this footage was shown on TV eight days later, it started a deluge of others calling in to report that they had seen or videotaped the same thing during the eclipse, of which Maussan would say:
“The telephone lines blew up. I mean 40,000 calls at the same time. Then the system was completely shut out. We received more than 15 videos and we now know for sure that in at least 7 of them, we can see the same ship that was recorded by Guillermo Arragin.”
It would turn out that many thousands of people had seen the mysterious object, and all of them described the same metallic shining object, with some reports stating it merely hovered in a stationary position, while others said it moved around while leaving a vaporous trail in its wake, and there were also mentions of the thing having three blinking lights on it. After this, it seems that whatever it was disappeared as the sun emerged once again to bring broad daylight. Among the many people sending in videos of the thing was 19-year-old student Erick Aguilar, who saw it while videotaping the eclipse from a rooftop with his friends and girlfriend. He would describe it as looking like a white point of light that got bigger and brighter as they watched it. At the same time, about 60 miles from Mexico City, a businessman named Luis Lara videotaped an object that was identical to the one on Aguilar’s footage, and he was convinced it was not a star, explaining that there was some sort of dark shadow under the object. The Breton family also filmed a similar object in Puebla, eighty miles from Mexico City, and they described the object as pulsating and having a strange wave-like disturbance behind it. It is unclear if this was the same object or a different one. In total, there were over a dozen videos of what seemed to be the same object from different angles and distances, making it one of the most videotaped UFOs ever.
After this appearance on Sesenta Minutos, the UFO sightings were all over the news, becoming a sensation in Mexico and sparking a mass hysteria, and this was only further fueled when a similar object was spotted just two months later at a military air show at Mexico City. On this occasion, an engineer named Vincente Sanchez was filming the air show when he noticed something very bizarre up in the air with those planes. He would say of it:
“I was following one of the planes and I saw a shiny dot in the camera. It didn’t fly like a plane; it was undulating. I didn’t know what it was so I let the planes go off and I focused more on this shiny dot in the sky. What I saw was a bright, round object, about 10 meters in diameter. It was made of silver, was shining very brightly and reflected the sunlight a lot. The object appeared, undulated, and moved around quickly.”
The object would be seen again at the same air show a year later, this time with the disc descending rapidly to seemingly vanish into thin air. At the same air show in 1993, it was seen yet again, this time apparently flying in close proximity to a squadron of helicopters. It is not clear if these sightings have any connection to the mass sighting on July 11, 1991, but at the time, many were linking them and even claiming they were the very same object. Over the years, the various footage taken on July 11, 1991, has been debated and analyzed, and one astronomer by the name of Tim Printy has given a pretty good argument that it was all down to the planet Venus. As evidence, he states that the object can’t be conclusively shown to be moving in any of the videos, the alignment of the object in the footage in relation to other celestial objects shown in some of the videos, such as Mars and Regulus, correlates to the position of where Venus should be, and the object disappears when the sun comes back out. Most damningly, he points out that not a single Mexican astronomer, of which there would have been many recording the eclipse, reported any UFO or anything out of the ordinary at all. According to Printy, the videos only appear to show something truly strange because of camera artifacts and the fact that there are no uncropped videos of the object, which makes it all appear even more mysterious.
Nevertheless, despite such criticism of the videos, many still believe them to be good UFO evidence, and some have gone and to take it all to new levels of weirdness. One of these is a couple by the name of Lee and Brit Elders, who believe that the UFO appearance during the eclipse was not only aliens, but that the whole incident was prophesied by the Mayans more than 1200 years ago. The Elders claim that through various ancient documents, they have deduced that the Mayans predicted that the aliens would arrive in the area of Mexico City on July 11, 1991, as harbingers of world change and “cosmic awareness through encounters with masters of the stars,” to usher in “a new era that will rise on the ashes of the one before.” The couple even made a whole series of videos talking about this, titled Messengers of Destiny, Masters of the Stars, and Voyagers of the Sixth Sun, and it all revolves around this supposed ancient prophecy and the July 11, 1991, UFO over Mexico City. Printy has a lot to say about the Elders, and does not mince words at all when he says of what he calls their “pure bunk for sale”:
“Not only do the Elder’s state that Venus was a UFO, but they also make a profound statement that the Mayans predicted the arrival of the UFOs! Exactly when did the Maya predict such an event? The Elders state there are several ancient documents that state this. However, is there any basis for such a claim? The Elders rarely, if ever, give details. They seem to expound on new age mysticism trying to link statements from various documents in order to create some strange prediction to meet their needs. Are their statements correct? Are these source documents accurate? The credibility of the Elders is important to understand how accurately they represented the UFOs shown in the videos.
Despite a wealth of evidence that Venus was the likely culprit in many of these videos, the Elders went out of their way to create a story that describes alien visitation. The mixing and matching of Mayan and Aztec myths and then trying to make some form of prediction made by the Maya is another case of the Elders trying to deceive the viewers of real facts. The Mexico City eclipse UFO story is nothing but a new age myth generated by a couple of con-artists, who rely on the viewer to be uninformed and willing to believe the most ridiculous claims. The Messengers of Destiny/Masters of the Stars/Voyagers of the sixth sun prediction is nothing but a new age myth designed to make money!”
The Mexican UFO has also been the source of conspiracies, such as one that states the U.S. government knew about the event in Mexico, but tried to suppress it so that the public would not panic, which is supposedly why the story failed to produce even a blip in the American news. According to a report from the site Cool Interesting Stuff, there was a Kremlin report that supposedly not only mentions this, but also that the incident of July 11, 1991, in Mexico City put the Americans on alert for a “war” against UFOs based on or near the Continent of Antarctica.” The site says:
“A report circulating in the Kremlin prepared for President Medvedev by Russian Space Forces (VKS) 45th Division of Space Control says that an upcoming WikiLeaks release of secret US cables details that the Americans have been “engaged” since 2004 in a “war” against UFO’s based on or near the Continent of Antarctica, particularly the Southern Ocean. According to this report, the United States went to its highest alert level on June 10, 2004 after a massive fleet of UFO’s “suddenly emerged” from the Southern Ocean and approached Guadalajara, Mexico barely 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the American border. Prior to reaching the US border, however, this massive UFO fleet is said in this report to have “dimensionally returned” to their Southern Ocean “home base.”
The fears of the Americans regarding these Southern Ocean UFO’s began, this report says, during the unprecedented events of July 11, 1991 (referred to as 7/11) when during the Solar Eclipse these mysterious aircraft appeared by the hundreds over nearly all of Mexico, even their Capital city. Most notable about the events of 7/11 were that as millions of Mexicans were watching on their televisions the National broadcasts of these UFO’s over Mexico City, the American media refused to allow their people to view it.”
Is there anything to this? What was going on here with this incident? Was this an otherworldly presence, celestial gods on some mission to fulfill a Mayan prophecy, or merely the planet Venus and mass hysteria? How can we account for so many sightings? Were they all misidentifying a mundane phenomenon? Whatever the case may be, the July 11, 1991, UFO flap over Mexico City has gone on to become one of the most widely witnessed and most videotaped UFO encounters there is, and it remains a curious case in the annals of ufology.
Moving along, the beginning of what has gone on to be one of the most talked about mass UFO sighting incidents in recent memory was on March 30, 1993, in England. On this evening, there suddenly began a deluge of reports coming in from across a swath of southwest England, particularly in the vicinity of Shropshire, of something decidedly weird in the sky, from witnesses of all walks of life and many of them traditionally reliable witnesses. One of the first reports came from a policeman who claimed to have seen a massive object resembling “two Concordes flying side by side and joined together,” and there were other reports that put the object’s size at a massive 200 meters long. Other reports claimed that the object had been observed sometimes flying very low to the ground, and there was even a panicked resident who claimed that it had landed in a field. Dozens of reports like this came in, and curiously, people were giving different descriptions, including a cylindrical object, a triangular-shaped craft with three lights, and a pair of lights seeming to emit a tail-like plume, suggesting there was more than one aerial disturbance at work. Yet this was only the beginning.
Continuing into March 31st, 1993, the reports kept coming in, and it seemed as if the phenomena had gotten even more active. The evening of the 31st would also mark a series of high-level sightings from police and military personnel, who had been on alert due to the sheer number of anomalous reports the night before. There would be several sightings made from RAF bases in the region, including sightings of a fast-moving red light by personnel at RAF Cosford and another incident at RAF Shawbury. One meteorologist at RAF Shawbury by the name of Wayne Elliot would claim that a triangular-shaped craft measuring around 200 feet across had slowly approached his base while emitting a low humming noise, and then shot a bright beam of light towards the ground before shooting off at amazing speed while leaving a luminous vapor trail in its wake. At no point were any of these objects picked up on radar at the bases. Some of the reports were scattered over a wide area, as another military encounter with one of the objects allegedly happened to an Irish military helicopter en route to Ireland over the coast of southwest Wales. The crew would report seeing “two white lights at a fixed distance apart in the horizontal plane” with trails visible through night vision equipment, which appeared to close the distance and pace them for a time.
The sightings were investigated by Nick Pope, who ran the UFO project run by the British Ministry of Defense (MoD), and he collected a steady stream of the reports, which he described as “coming in thick and fast,” in particular from the areas of Devon, Cornwall and Wales. Pope would claim to gather several hundred eyewitness reports of the bizarre unidentified aerial phenomena from March 30 and 31, and he also asserted that it was such a major and anomalous incident that it had even captured the attention of military officials at the Pentagon, who he believed included it in their 490-page secret report under the part of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. Pope has said of this:
“The Cosford Incident was the most high-profile and compelling UFO incident that took place during my time on the MoD’s UFO project in the early Nineties. It is probably among the best cases in our entire archive, which goes back decades and includes around 12,000 sightings. It is inconceivable to me that this wouldn’t be one of the incidents mentioned in the secret US report. I’m sure the Americans knew all about the Cosford Incident, and maybe conducted some discreet enquiries of their own.”
Despite how amazing this may all seem, we are still left to wonder about just what exactly was seen by all of these witnesses, and there has been much debate on the matter. One very prevalent theory is that the aerial phenomena were caused by some kind of falling space debris, notably the re-entry of a Russian satellite called the Cosmos 2238, which it turns out was scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere on the evening of March 31. This would not be out of the question, as falling space debris has caused UFO flaps before, and incidentally, a similar Cosmos satellite that had gone down in the winter of 1978 also coincided with a wave of UFO sightings.
A reentering satellite might explain some of the sightings, but it would not really explain the fact that many of the reports describe distinctly triangular objects that were allegedly seen flying in a seemingly intelligently controlled manner, including changing speed, hovering, or flying low to the ground, even in one case landing and taking off, which doesn’t really fit in with the space debris theory. The Russian satellite angle also would not explain the sightings going on during the evening of March 30, nor the insistence of some very trained witnesses that these were not space debris. So what are some of the other possibilities? Other ideas are that this was some sort of top-secret experimental aircraft being tested, a military black op, or some strange atmospheric phenomenon. There is also the possibility that this was just a misidentified normal aircraft, such as an airplane or helicopter. One local police investigator has said of this likelihood:
“If there’s no full moon you would not necessarily see the shape of the aircraft just the three lights and perhaps the searchlight. On a number of occasions in the last nine years we have had people ringing the police to report UFOs and when we have checked our operation logs it has turned out to be our helicopter. On other occasions we have had people reporting UFOs who have actually seen airliners descending into Manchester who have switched their landing lights on or off. Most people have no idea of spatial awareness at night and cannot accurately judge the height or distance. We have had people saying they have seen things at treetop height and when we have checked it has been an aircraft descending into Manchester at 10,000 feet or more.”
One argument against this is that many of the observers were reliable, trained witnesses such as RAF personnel, police officers, and the meteorologist, so how could they all misidentify a helicopter or plane? UFO investigator Chris Fowler has addressed this by explaining the problems with leaning too heavily on supposed expert witnesses, pointing out that even trained and seasoned individuals can be fooled by innate problems with our senses of perception. Fowler says of this:
“The human visual perceptual system and cognizance are very discerning but easily fooled by events like those described here. It is part of common UFO reportage that lights and aircraft flying at night can lead to false reports of distance, altitude, time estimates, size and other fundamental attributes. We should take note all observers are fallible to misperception and illusory effects and to false interpretation and apply adequate reasoning here. These 1993 events may be exemplary in providing more evidence of the inability of those often described as ‘trained observers’ to discern altitude in lights than is supposed. It is fallacious to assume that certain subsets of people, by occupation, may be more or less accurate in their observations of lights, shapes, distance and altitude without providing evidence. Observational accuracy by any subset of witnesses depends upon circumstance and a willingness to apply useful pragmatic means to recording observations at the time and on some understanding of limitations.”
One of the problems with trying to get to the bottom of the Cosford Incident is that Nick Pope has been accused by skeptics and even others within the UFO field of being a bit overzealous in his approach and too willing to try and fit everything into his own preconceived theories. He has been accused of cherry-picking, twisting and misrepresenting data to fit his needs, leading witnesses in interviews into the outcomes he wants, and generally exaggerating certain elements of the cases, giving misleading statements, or leaving out certain information to misrepresent the facts. For instance, although Pope has admitted that some of the sightings could have been space debris, he rarely mentions this, instead focusing on the more bizarre and mysterious sightings and elements. UFO researcher Gary Anthony has criticized Pope’s approach in relation to his participation in a documentary of the incident called The British UFO Mystery – Stranger Than Fiction, saying of it:
“After watching the documentary myself, I wondered if Nick Pope had lost the real plot or not because in places there were exaggerative comments and the reports were misrepresented both by Nick and in the visual continuity and the narrating voice. The presentation was more geared towards Pope’s own personal and theatrical interpretation of the sightings and was laid out fallaciously for an unsuspecting public. Relevant information was not included, witness participation was minimal and some of the facts presented were grossly out of context. He clearly has fallen into the trap of not recognizing salient features and errors of multiple witness reports, making links that do not exist and falling back on the questionable prowess of ‘trained observers,’ endowed with super-human abilities of discerning distance, altitudes and size in lights seen at night. A real house of cards. The programme featured only one witness, a lady who saw a row of lights whilst driving home. For the 45-minute plus feature exclusively on these sightings none of the official witnesses used to bolster the theme appeared.”
In the end, the whole incident has sort of quietly been brushed away, and is rarely talked about outside of UFO circles, despite how many witnesses there apparently were. What was going on here? Was this merely space debris? Was it experimental aircraft, aliens, atmospheric phenomena, or all of the above? How reliable is Pope’s documentation of the supposed events, and is there anything we are missing? There is no way to really know the answers to such questions and others like them, and we are left to wonder just what went on over the English countryside in March of 1993.
Finally, what has gone on to become one of the most well-known and oft-discussed, and debated mass UFO sightings in history is widely accepted as having started on March 13, 1997, in the skies over Henderson, Nevada, in the United States. Here, a witness claimed that at approximately 6:55 PM, he saw a large, V-shaped object about the same size as a passenger airliner with a formation of six lights along its front edge, which flew across the sky at a good clip with a sort of whooshing noise to disappear to the southeast. This same object would soon after be witnessed by a police officer from Paulden, Arizona, at around 8:15 PM, who said that he saw a triangular formation of four mysterious lights trailed by a fifth, and claimed to have watched the strange sight through his binoculars as they travelled south.
This would be the beginning of one of the most famous UFO cases there is. Before long, there were sightings of something strange in the sky coming in from the area of Prescott, Arizona, and the Prescott Valley. Many of the witnesses at the time described it as being definitely solid, blocking out the stars and the sky as it passed over, and it was mostly explained as being rather enormous. One witness who saw the boomerang-shaped object said it was massive, at least a mile wide, stating:
“We don’t have anything that big. It was totally silent. I’ve never seen anything even close to the colors from the exhaust that propelled that thing. It was as big as downtown Prescott and completely blocked out the stars.”
The object or objects were usually described as being a V-shaped or wedge-shaped formation of red or orange lights, with the leading light being a bright white, usually said to be embedded within a solid object, but descriptions varied, and they were sometimes claimed to be separate lights moving independently. At the time, there were dozens of witnesses from all ages and walks of life observing it as it made its way inexorably towards Phoenix to the southeast. The lights were also seen from the nearby town of Dewey, around 10 miles away, and as they drew closer to the greater Phoenix area, there would be a deluge of people seeing whatever it was that had come in from out of the unknown.
The phenomenon reached Phoenix at around 8:30 PM, after which it hovered over the area for around two hours, being seen by thousands of people in the process. During this time, it seems that there were actually two separate events going on over the region at the same time, with one being the massive V-shaped group of lights moving through the air, and a second formation of lights south of Phoenix that seemed to be stationary or moving very slowly. These lights, which would go on to collectively be known as the “Phoenix Lights,” were seen by people from all walks of life, including police officers, pilots, military personnel, and even the governor, none of whom could come up with any explanation for what was going on. While most of the reports described some massive solid object, an interesting aspect of it all is that witness descriptions of the phenomena tended to vary to quite a wide degree, of which UFOlogist Peter B. Davenport has said:
“Witnesses were reporting such markedly different objects and events that night that it was difficult for investigators to understand what was taking place. Some witnesses reported five lights, others seven, or even more. Some reported that the lights were distinctly orange or red, whereas others reported distinctly white or yellow lights. Many reported the lights were moving across the sky at seemingly high speed, whereas others reported they moved at a slow (angular) velocity, or they even hovered for several minutes.”
The objects were being seen all over the place at the time, seen in places as far away as Las Vegas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, always inspiring awe and dread. In the meantime, the media didn’t really seem to show much interest in it, and officials seemed to treat it as a big joke, with Arizona Governor Fife Symington III holding a press conference on the situation flanked by an aide wearing an alien costume. However, when the story hit USA Today, it blew up into national news, appearing all over newspapers and TV shows. The USA Today piece was quite sensational, including the line, “The incident over Arizona was the most dramatic I’ve seen. . . . What we have here is the real thing. They are here,” and people ate it up. Before long, the Phoenix lights were being talked about and widely discussed all over the nation, with theories being thrown about as to what the phenomenon could have been, which is made somewhat complicated by the fact that it seems that there were two separate phenomena going on at the same time, the large moving object and the hovering lights.
One of the main ideas put forward was that at least the second event concerning the stationary lights was simply flares dropped by the military during a nighttime training exercise, but this has been challenged by many. Curiously, one of the main opponents of the flare theory was the governor himself, who would end up later changing his tune entirely, claiming to have seen the lights himself, and he would say of this:
“As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man made object I’d ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation. It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape. I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery.”
Symington also found it odd that his attempts to get more information from the government on what was going on out there were shot down with basically “no comment,” and that no government agency had made any effort to seriously investigate. Another opponent of the flare theory was UFO enthusiast Jim Dilettoso, who claimed that he had done a full spectral analysis of the lights in one of the videos and determined that they could not have possibly come from a manmade source. However, considering that such an analysis on video footage images would be inaccurate, this has been criticized as an incomplete analysis at best. It has also been pointed out that the wind direction and speed at the time were consistent with flares as to the movement seen with the pattern of lights, which also supports the flare theory, as does the fact that the lights seemed to dip over the horizon and disappear, very much as flares would do. With regards to at least this aspect of the event, even UFOlogists have conceded that it could have been flares in this case.
A photo of the Phoenix Lights
The first event, which covers that huge, light-studded craft moving over the state and blocking out the stars, has been more difficult to explain. Skeptics say that it was just a formation of high altitude aircraft flying in formation on a classified mission, the blackened sky just an illusion. This has been corroborated by amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley, who claims that on the night of the incident, he had observed the large V-shaped craft through a telescope to find that it was unambiguously an aircraft, specifically a formation of five planes that were either A-10s or possibly T-37 fighter-trainers. However, many of the thousands of witnesses have denied that this could have been the case; the planes were apparently not picked up on radar, and the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson did not assert that they had any aircraft in the air at the time. In the end, it all remains a curious oddity, of which one investigator with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) has said:
“Do we have evidence that it was an extraterrestrial event? No. We have evidence that it was an extremely bizarre event. We can’t put a label on it other than it was an anomaly.”
Interestingly, there have been reemergences of the lights in later years that have been explained as flares. On February 6, 2007, almost the same thing was seen over Phoenix, and military officials were quick to admit that it was flares they had dropped, and on April 21, 2008, there was another wave of sightings of the lights, this time found to be flares attached to balloons. Yet, the sightings that remain the most well-known are the original 1997 incident and whatever was behind it all, the Phoenix Lights have continued to have a place among the greatest, most extensively seen and documented UFO sightings ever, and remain mostly a mystery.
There can be no doubt that mass sightings such as what we’ve looked at here are the most spectacular type of UFO sightings there is. What were these people seeing, and how can we explain it rationally when so many people are seeing the same thing, often very traditionally reliable witnesses? Are these cases of misidentifying Venus or other aerial or atmospheric phenomena? Is it flares or balloons, or whatever official report it is, they want you to believe? How can you tell hundreds of people that they did not see what they think they did? If these are extraterrestrial in nature, then why would they want to be so widely seen in these cases? Whatever the answers may be, mass UFO sightings are among the most exciting and well-documented in the field.
