NBC Reporter: “If There Was Twitter In 1997, The Phoenix Lights Would Have Been Trending For Weeks”

Who would have ever thought we'd see a global pandemic (allegedly) that would shut down the economy of the United States for over two months?

Who thought that on the heels of that we'd see national riots again shutting down (or burning down) major U.S. cities?

What comes next?

Well, this is an election year so anything is possible!

I refer you to chart above.

Am I saying I believe aliens exist?

No.

Am I saying we might start to see someone pushing that narrative?

Yes.  

If you think that's insane or not possible, then you simply don't know your history.

We'll delve more into that in Part 2 of this series, but for now I want to tell you about the Phoenix Lights.

Ever heard of them?

If not, get ready to be challenged.

Because this is not one hillbilly (no offense to hillbillies) in his backyard thinking he saw a space ship.

No, this was in the night sky above Phoenix and seen by hundreds if not thousands of people.

It remains unexplained to this day and many still believe they witnessed something not of this earth.

Take a look:

Local Fox10 has more:

Next week will be the 23rd anniversary of the Phoenix Lights, considered to be one of the most widely reported UFO sightings of all time.

More than 20 years after it happened, people are still asking "what was it?"

"This year is the 23rd anniversary of what is now hailed as the most witnessed, most documented, most important anomalous sighting in modern history, if not all of history," says Dr. Lynne Kitei, Phoenix Lights Researcher.

Kitei has been following the Phoenix Lights for over twenty years now, trying to figure out what she, and many others, say they witnessed on the night of March 13, 1997. Many discounted the lights as flares or some military operation, but for Kitei, she says none of those make sense to her and she believes we were visited by something otherworldly.

"It was very, very real to the people who had the experience."

She's since published multiple books on the subject, even producing a documentary about the Phoenix Lights.

Kitei will be showing the documentary next week and leading a panel discussion. This year they'll focus on the media and how the Phoenix Lights were reported.

"I've done about 25,000 interviews in my broadcasting career and the Phoenix Lights just enthralled me," said former radio host Preston Westmoreland.

Westmoreland covered the Phoenix Lights at the time and although he didn't see them personally, he also believes it was a UFO.

"You're entitled to your own opinion, but the burden of proof seems to be on the people who've seen it."

And from Vice:

23 years ago today, the people of Arizona witnessed one of the most infamous UFO incidents in history.

A new documentary series by filmmaker Seth Breedlove takes an in depth look into the so-called “Phoenix Lights.” On the Trail of UFOs doesn’t try to prove that the incident was aliens or flares, but instead expertly explores the cultural ramifications of the event on the UFO community.

“As an event, the Phoenix Lights is important simply because it gained so much media attention, was witnessed by so many people, and today, can still not be precisely explained away,” Breedlove told Motherboard. “Every year more witnesses come forward; from airline pilots to military personnel to ordinary people living from places as far removed as downtown Phoenix to Las Vegas.”

On March 13th, 1997, hundreds of Arizonans called their local law enforcement and a popular UFO reporting hotline to report a series of strange lights moving over their cities and towns. The Phoenix Lights case remains one of the largest UFO sightings in history, and continues to be an established fixture of contemporary UFO discourse.

At roughly 7:00 pm, people in northwestern Arizona began reporting a large craft passing overhead. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, the first call they received came in at 8:16pm from a retired police officer in Paulden, Arizona, a town about two hours north of Phoenix. He reported seeing a series of reddish lights arranged in a V-formation.

Over the next couple days, calls continued to pour in regarding the sighting of multiple lights in the sky, some arranged in the shape of a boomerang, and others as odd moving lights with tails and “fireballs.” Ron Regehr, a veteran UFO researcher with the Mutual UFO Network and a former engineer with Boeing and Northrop Grumman, told Motherboard in an interview that he was part of the team that helped in developing the Defense Support Program Satellites (DSP), a series of infrared sensing tactical satellites that detect the launch of missiles, space launches, and nuclear detonations.

Regehr explained that he generated regular reports about what the DSP detected every 60 days. According to Regehr, he received a phone call from a colleague that the DSP picked up an object over South Eastern Nevada. It traveled in that direction until its signal became too weak, and it was lost over Tucson, Arizona.

Regehr told Motherboard that the event was “significant in that so many people witnessed the event and the extent authorities went to to denounce their experience. But, so many people were polarized that it took on an almost immediate ‘cult like’ life of its own. 23 years later folks are still talking about it!”

The world did not notice the event until USA Today picked up the story in June of that year. Arizona’s governor even held a press conference where he brought in his chief of staff dressed in an alien costume, telling the press that they were “too serious” about the UFO stuff. The military eventually took responsibility for the strange lights explaining that the two events were a series of jets flying in close formation and some military flares.

On the Trail of UFOs follows podcaster and author Shannon LeGro into the murky and weird UFO world. While it explores several other cases, the series spends its time analyzing the UFO community and the people who claim to have encounters with the anomalous. Breedlove’s previous documentary work includes Terror in the Skies (2019), The Bray Road Beast (2018), and The Mothman of Point Pleasant (2017). Much like his previous work, Breedlove’s focus is on the individuals caught up in the event, and how it altered their lives instead of trying to ascertain whether aliens or monsters are real. As for the Phoenix Lights, Breedlove points out that “it’s a culturally important event because it illustrates how at-risk witnesses were of being ridiculed if they came forward.”