[narrator reads text]
At 6:55 p.m. police in this small desert city
receive reports of a massive,
V-shaped unidentified flying object
in the night sky.
Over the next three hours,
the craft is witnessed by thousands of people
as it journeys southeast into the state of Arizona.
Because most of the sightings were reported
by the residents of Phoenix,
the incident is known as the Phoenix Lights.
For me, it was just another night.
I was at home. I was upstairs in our bedroom.
And I'm lying in bed, I see three lights pop up.
I grab my video camera.
I run outside on the balcony.
And I did capture video of formations of these lights
or actual crafts arranged in a V or triangle.
We're talking a mile to eight miles wide.
Gliding silently.
Some at a distance, but most at rooftop level.
Some people said they could have thrown a rock at it.
It was that close.
[man]
And here they are, looking up,
and seeing this immense UFO.
Flying at fairly low altitude quite slowly.
This was a sighting on almost unprecedented scale.
[narrator]
reportedly hovered above Phoenix for three hours
before it finally disappeared over the horizon.
The Phoenix Lights incident
made headlines across the country.
Many eyewitnesses were convinced that
what they saw was not a man-made airplane,
but rather, an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Lots of people saw this.
You have a lot of general consistency
with how this was reported.
But you had skeptics saying,
"The thing that people saw going around the state
was actually just aircraft."
And then a spokesperson from the National Guard
made an announcement and said,
"Yeah, those lights that people saw over the city,
that was actually flares that we dropped
by A-10 Warthog aircraft."
Not if you talk to the witnesses.
There were a number of witnesses
who were quite adamant that this was extraterrestrial.
And one of the witnesses, it turns out,
was actually the governor of the state, Fife Symington.
As a pilot and a former Air Force officer,
I can definitively say
that this craft did not resemble any man-made object
that I'd ever seen.
[Kitei]
what's really exciting is that
more and more credible people have come forward.
All I knew is that it was so beyond anything
I ever imagined being here on this Earth.
To date, the Phoenix Lights phenomenon
has never been recreated...
or explained.
[narrator]
is one of the most extraordinary UFO encounters
in history,
it is just one of many mysterious sightings
that have taken place in the state of Arizona.
According to the National UFO Reporting Center,
there have been approximately 5,000 UFO reports in Arizona,
going all the way back to the 1940s.
On July 7, 1947,
William A. Rose, an amateur photographer,
saw an elliptical metallic object.
He managed to capture two excellent photographs
of this object at very low altitude.
And he sent them into the
which published them on the front page.
And if you look at these photographs,
you can see that they show
a very solid-looking metallic gray object at low altitude.
These photographs have never been debunked.
So, this is a very important case.
[Dolan]
that occurred in Kingman, Arizona
in May of 1953.
This was, apparently, the recovery of it,
a virtually intact, downed flying saucer.
The witnesses came out
and this is quite a significant case.
And then, probably the most famous
of the many UFO sightings Arizona has had
is the Travis Walton abduction experience
from 1975
that took place in November of that year
and made national news.
And so, Arizona has its own long history
of anomalous activity, for sure.