by Leslie Kean
On the other hand, it is important to remember that the Belgian Air Force did just this in 1990, and other countries have done so, as well, in relationship to specific events, and no dire popular upheavals or waves of fear have disturbed these societies. Instead, people continued their regular lives with much less need than we find here in America to create alternative explanations or conspiracy theories in order to satisfy their natural human curiosity. Nonetheless, in this huge, multicultural country that sees itself as a planetary leader on many fronts, opening that door through any kind of organized official statement seems to remain entirely unappealing.
However, such government reticence must and can be overcome, or at least outflanked, according to former governor Fife Symington of Arizona, who has had unique experience—to say the least—on both sides of this complicated fence, leading to his current stance on the issue. Beginning with the landmark press conference of 2007, he and others from around the world have formed a united platform seeking a new approach. The citizens of the world, including Americans, are ready to move forward.
CHAPTER 24
Governor Fife Symington and Movement Toward Change
On March 13, 1997, a decade after the Hudson Valley UFO wave had quieted down, multiple triangular and V-shaped UFOs made a series of brazen new appearances, this time over the western United States.
It was a pleasant spring evening in Arizona, clear and still, and countless families were outside in larger than usual numbers gazing at the sky, because Comet Hale-Bopp was to be visible that night. Instead, beginning at about 8:00 p.m., they were provided with an even more astounding aerial spectacle: a series of massive, eerily silent craft gliding overhead like nothing they had ever seen before. One central object moved from the north, southeast across the state, traveling about 200 miles from Paulden to Tucson, passing near Phoenix and surrounding communities. It was on display between 8:15 and 9:30 p.m. Many hundreds—more likely thousands—saw it.
Police department phone lines were jammed and the local air force installation, Luke Air Force Base, was overwhelmed with calls. Reports of sightings from around the state flooded the lines at the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC)—the well-known repository for UFO reports cited in the FAA manual—based in Seattle, Washington. Even so, air traffic controllers apparently did not register the strange objects on radar.
Although descriptions of the array of lights differed, one overriding characteristic prevailed: the craft was massive; it was a solid object, not merely lights; and it often appeared to be very low in the sky, blocking out the stars behind it. A younger witness said he could clearly see the underside of the craft, and thought if he had thrown a stone, he could have hit it. According to eyewitness reports in the NUFORC files, which received its first report at 6:55 p.m. from Henderson, Nevada, one group of three said it blocked out most of the sky, while another family of five described looking out the automobile windows while driving at eighty miles an hour and observing the incredibly huge craft passing above their car. It was the size of multiple football fields and up to a mile long, many said. A little league game had to stop as the massive object passed over the heads of moms, dads, kids, and coaches staring in disbelief. Some people described its color as a dark gun-metal gray, and many people were awestruck by the silence of the object, given its size, especially when watching it take off in the blink of an eye.1
It was difficult to determine how many objects were present, because reports varied in terms of the number of lights, colors of lights, and movements. The speed of the craft, or crafts, varied from motionless to speeding away in an instant. Calls came rapidly into NUFORC from many communities at different locations, suggesting the likelihood that multiple objects were cruising overhead, some perhaps moving rapidly between locations. It took many months for the civilian investigators who took on the case to compile all the reports, map the trajectories, and determine that indeed several objects had been seen.
Once again, as in the Hudson Valley wave, no government officials were dispatched to investigate or respond to questions from alarmed and awestruck citizens. To put it bluntly, in 1997 the federal government failed to react to the presence of something huge and unknown invading restricted airspace over a capital city in the United States of America.
Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, responding to pressure from journalists and her constituents, was the only elected official to launch a public investigation. But she said that she too received no information from any level of government. Barwood says she spoke with over seven hundred witnesses who called her office, including police officers, pilots, and former military personnel, all providing very similar descriptions of the objects. Still, government officials seemed uninterested. “They never interviewed even one witness,” Barwood told me in a conversation a few years ago. “How could they possibly not know about these huge craft flying low over major population centers? That’s inconceivable, but it’s also frightening.”
Due to her willingness to respond to public concerns about the incident, Barwood was ruthlessly ridiculed by much of the Phoenix media, including a well-known cartoonist in Arizona’s leading newspaper, and she also suffered from disparaging comments by male political figures. “What happened to me was a lesson for other elected officials,” she told me. “If you talk about this, you will get ridiculed, chastised, pummeled with everything you can imagine, and eventually lose credibility.”
Minimal coverage was provided at the time of the incident by the media, even in Phoenix, with a few local papers and news stations making note but not following up. Three months later, on June 18, that all changed when USA Today brought the case into the national spotlight2 with a front-page story. It was further catapulted onto the network evening news when the sightings were covered, although very minimally, by ABC and NBC, and became known as the “Phoenix Lights.”
By the time the USA Today story broke, pressure had been mounting within the state of Arizona and public reaction was intensified by this new level of national media attention. Frustrated citizens wanted answers. The next day, on June 19, Republican Governor Fife Symington announced on morning television that he was ordering a full investigation and would make “all the necessary inquiries. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. We’re going to find out if it was a UFO.”3
Later that afternoon, he called a press conference, telling people that he would reveal the source behind the Phoenix Lights. With an excited media covering it live, and citizens glued to their sets awaiting the news, Symington shocked some, angered others, and amused many more when he presented his “explanation.” His six-foot-four Chief of Staff, Jay Heiler, handcuffed and wearing an alien outfit featuring a large, gray rubber mask with huge black eyes that fitted over his entire head, was escorted to the podium by public safety police officers. The governor presented the Halloween-costumed extraterrestrial as the “guilty party.” While laughter filled the room, he joked that “this just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious,” and the mask was removed before the cameras.4
Symington also announced that he’d made inquiries with the commander at Luke Air Force Base, the general in charge of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety, but had not learned anything at that point. This important statement was overshadowed by reactions to what he now calls his “spoof” press conference.
As one might expect, Councilwoman Barwood’s office was bombarded by calls from outraged people, and the governor received his share of complaints as well. Unable to get anywhere on her own, Barwood approached Arizona’s Senator John McCain and asked him to conduct an investigation. McCain asked the Department of the Air Force to investigate, and as he explained in an October 1997 letter to a constituent, “The Air Force informed my office in July the Department no longer conducts investigations into UFOs.” McCain went on to explain that local military installations, however, did “make an effort to resolve the issue” by checking records from that night, and he w
as informed that the National Guard had dropped high-intensity magnesium flares southwest of Phoenix between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m., which could be seen for 150 miles.5
Indeed, television news and documentaries about the Phoenix Lights repeatedly feature a video taken at around 10:00 p.m. by an amateur photographer, as if it represented actual footage of the UFO. The now-infamous video has been subjected to detailed analysis by at least two qualified professionals, and both determined that the brilliant lights shown hanging in a row over the mountain ridge and then dropping out of sight, were, in fact, flares.6 Since the amateur video was taken at 10:00 p.m., at the same time that the National Guard states it was dropping LUU2 flares as part of a training exercise known as “Operation Snowbird,” and the photo analysis confirms that the lights in this film were almost certainly flares, the questionable later video is not the evidence many people had wished for. This fact seems to be overlooked by the media, hungry for something visual when they report on the story.
The time of the flare drops is extremely important. The most widely viewed sightings of unidentified objects across Arizona that evening began at approximately 8:15, although some objects were viewed earlier in daylight. Clearly, the UFO flyovers were a separate event occurring independently of the later flares.
It is interesting that in his letter, Senator McCain, a longtime friend of Governor Symington, informed his inquiring constituent that he was still exploring other possible explanations. In a 2000 press conference, McCain acknowledged that an incident in which mysterious lights were seen over Arizona had actually occurred. “That has never been fully explained,” he said, “but I have to tell you that I do not have any evidence whatsoever of aliens or UFOs.”7 That same year, a class action suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix by witnesses demanding an explanation from the federal government. In response to a court-ordered request for a search for this information, the Department of Defense maintained that it could not find any information about the triangular objects. It provided details of this search process to U.S. District Court judge Stephen M. McNamee. On March 30, 2000, three years after the sightings, McNamee concluded that “a reasonable search was conducted,” even though no information was obtained, and he dismissed the case.
We have no way of gauging how thorough this search really was. And the claim of the DoD seems open to question, especially in light of a prior British inquiry about the triangular craft observed over the Royal Air Force base at Cosford.8 As reported by Nick Pope, this object was seen by over a hundred witnesses in England in 1993, including police officers and military personnel. At the time, the MoD sent a discreet letter to the U.S. Embassy that was “disseminated to all ‘interested Agencies’ in the U.S.” to find out whether the Cosford object could have been attributable to some secret U.S. prototype such as the Aurora. In response, the American officials said that they had been having their own sightings of these large, triangular-shaped UFOs and wanted to know if the RAF might itself have such a craft! This remarkable reply amounts to an acknowledgment by American officials—which probably they did not expect would be made public—that in 1993 they were aware of the existence of unexplained objects operating over the U.S.A. with the extraordinary capabilities attributed to the Cosford UFOs. Perhaps they were alluding to the Hudson Valley wave of the 1980s, although other sightings had occurred since. Importantly, these officials recognized the similarity between the Cosford object and the ones seen here, and were sufficiently perplexed to express their hope that the American UFOs may have been secret British aircraft flying without authorization, an extremely unlikely proposition given our close relationship with the UK. After this exchange, the British MoD laid the Cosford incident to rest. “None of the usual explanations put forward to explain UFO sightings seem applicable,” the MoD stated. The evidence showed that “an unidentified object (or objects) of unknown origin was operating over the UK” (emphasis added). U.S. officials had inadvertently acknowledged, privately and secretly, of course, that this was true in the United States as well, by letting on that our UFOs behaved the same way as those in Britain.
It seems inconceivable that just a few years later, in 1997, U.S. officials somewhere would not have taken serious note of the similar UFO sightings in Arizona. Obviously, officials at the DoD responding to the 2000 court-ordered search were not the same ones who had made the inquiry to the MoD about the Cosford triangle. Likely, they would not have known anything about this earlier exchange. However, the British inquiry about the Cosford UFO was sent to “all interested agencies,” which must have included some department within the DoD. Unfortunately, we do not have any way of determining the thoroughness of the DoD search, nor do we know from where the intriguing question about our own mysterious triangles, posed to the UK, originated within our government.
In 2000, during the court litigation, did the DoD make inquiries to authorities in other government departments as part of an effort to do everything possible to obtain information about these objects? Wouldn’t it make sense that the DoD might even approach the UK in such a circumstance, as it had done before, to find out if that country had had similar occurrences? This is not what they were asked to do by the court, and we have to assume that this level of search and widespread communication did not occur. Still, it’s hard to fathom how the DoD staff required to find out about the 1997 objects could have come up with absolutely nothing to address the concerns raised by the citizens of Arizona, and not have been concerned about public reaction to the incident.
If indeed the DoD did not have any information about the 1997 unidentified objects of unknown origin operating over the United States, anywhere within the department, this in itself is a remarkable state of affairs. Were officials there alarmed by the information provided by witness affidavits through the court, and did they want to find out more? Some might consider such disregard of a massive, intruding object hovering over an American state to be grossly irresponsible, especially by those in charge of defending our country. Others might consider it so inexplicable that they would speculate whether DoD personnel were instructed by emissaries from the “controllers” of UFO information within a secret black program to keep quiet. Perhaps things have changed since 9/11, for it now seems hard to imagine that such an apparently advanced technological object, stealthily evading radar detection, could travel silently over a capital city and escape notice by federal authorities. Nonetheless, to this day, U.S. officials continue to keep the lid on the Phoenix Lights and other American sightings of mysterious giant triangles that have occurred since.
The case simmered for the next seven years until former Arizona governor Fife Symington brought it into the limelight in 2007, at the time of the tenth anniversary of the Phoenix Lights. He unexpectedly made a dramatic surprise announcement: that he, himself—despite his spoof press conference while governor—had actually witnessed what he called a “craft of unknown origin” along with his fellow citizens on that same March evening, but had decided not to make this public. In addition, he stated that the case remained unsolved, that it should be officially investigated, and that UFO incidents in general need to be taken seriously by the U.S. government.
On that unforgettable March evening in 1997, Symington had already arrived home and was watching the news when he received some calls about the sighting. He jumped into his car, and without his usual security detail, which had just left, he drove to a park near Squaw Peak, outside Phoenix, and amazingly enough, saw something highly unusual, brightly lit, overhead. “It was dramatic,” he said in our first interview. “And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.”
A Harvard graduate and decorated Air Force veteran of Vietnam, Symington is a great-grandson of Henry Clay Frick, the coal and steel magnate, and a cousin of the late Stuart Symington, Democratic Senator from Missouri. He served as the Republican governor of Arizona beginning in 1991, and was reelected in 1994. A longtime pilot, he frequently flies h
is twin-engine Beechcraft Baron plane between his two homes in Phoenix and Santa Barbara, California.
Symington was first nudged into coming forward in late 2006, when my colleague James Fox, an accomplished documentary filmmaker, sent him a copy of his UFO documentary Out of the Blue, which includes coverage of the Phoenix Lights. Fox was adding new material to the acclaimed film for a second release. He had never spoken to the former governor and decided to approach him to see if he could find out why Symington had staged the infamous spoof press conference. Fox had interviewed numerous witnesses who did not think Symington’s spoof was funny, and were still rather upset by what, to them, was the governor’s mockery and ridicule. He assumed that, given this behavior, the conservative governor did not take UFOs seriously, and he had no expectation that Symington would agree to an interview.
When he received Out of the Blue, Symington watched it and apparently found it fascinating, but at first was hesitant to reply. Eventually he came around. At that point, Symington says, he decided that when he met with the filmmaker, he would tell him the whole story. “I was sick and tired of people being ridiculed for reporting legitimate sightings,” he later explained to me, and he decided that it was time to take a stand. Still, James Fox had no idea what was in store when he first met the former governor in Santa Barbara, and started his cameras rolling.
The two men seemed to hit it off right away. At one point during the filmed interview, Fox pulled out his cassette tape recorder. While the camera held a close-up of Symington’s face, capturing his subtle change in expressions, Fox played for Symington a personal message he had recorded from one of the governor’s former constituents, Stacey Roads. Roads and her teenage daughter were witnesses to the Arizona UFO, and she began by describing exactly where they were when she saw the craft. “A massive triangle came over I-10 and over my car. It was so large that if I’d opened a newspaper and laid on my back I couldn’t have blocked out the entire object. It was traveling very slow without any noise,” she said on the tape. The recording continued as Fox asked Roads whether she had a question she would like to ask the governor, and she replied: “Is this still a matter of ridicule to him, after he came out on TV with his alien, making us all look a little foolish? We’ve all been unwavering on our descriptions and a lot of evidence has come out since then. Does he still feel this is a matter of ridicule or has he taken a new stance?”