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I was living in the Phoenix area at the time, plus I know about the area flight paths. San Diego officially complained to the USAF a while back about supersonic flights, which the USAF denied, so San Diego just told them that they didn’t care about the aircraft, but to please take it further off the coast. This stopped the sonic booms.

Sky Harbor airport is very protective of its airspace, which is why about everybody below commercial airline altitude has to take the helicopter corridor up the Verde River to Flagstaff. This includes the National Guard and Reserve, and even when they were making Boeing Apache “black helicopters” at a plant in Mesa.

You can see the aerial view over the Verde in the movie “Blue Thunder”. This gave me no end of amusement, because supposedly the bad guy is throwing a Vietnamese soldier out of a helicopter during the war, but in the background you can see saguaro cactus. I had flown over the Verde many times and recognized the terrain.

Well, anyway, any and all test aircraft and helicopters heading to San Diego from Nevada have to take that route, or it would get the Californians in a snit, and create no end of airspace problems. But this takes them right over Phoenix, considerably North of Sky Harbor, which is fine with them as its runways go East-West.

So it was no surprise this is where the “UFO” showed up. In this case, there were people on the ground filming it from their backyards, and it was obviously an aircraft, though quiet and able to hover. But it had some problem in that it could not horizontally fly, and so was slowly drifting with the breeze. Again, about a half hour before sundown, on a clear day, about 200 feet up, over a hilly suburb of high end houses.

Eventually it drifted out over West Phoenix into the desert and was not seen again. So much for the “Phoenix Lights”.

But then the disinformation campaign hit with both barrels. It was almost fun to watch. They intimidated all the media, a Phoenix city councilman and ex-governor Symington, who actually lived in that neighborhood, to STFU, then launched a media campaign.

The idea was to take all sides to the argument, and let nobody speak who wasn’t part of the campaign. So they brought in some supposed “UFO experts” to sound silly in the head, then got sensible sounding denials from those who dismissed everything. “Nobody saw anything, and it was just a weather balloon, and radar detected nothing, so these are UFO alien kooks talking.”

By creating a cacophony, they figured to drown out anyone who watched it for half an hour. It was all heavily laced with cynicism, sarcasm, criticism, and even a touch of anger at those who insisted they had seen something. One guy with a videotape they tore apart because he had been an alcoholic years before, so obviously he was just a drunk. Ignoring that his video camera was likely not drunk.

But since they wouldn’t show what his video camera had recorded, it was sort of a moot point. About a year or two later, somebody actually did float a balloon with some flares on it, which looked like a balloon with some flares on it. This gave them one last dig, in that “It was obviously just like ‘The Phoenix Lights’.”

Uh, no. The bottom line is that the USAF is supposed to do stuff like this, and they are supposed to keep it secret. So what’s the big deal?, that they are making secret aircraft and keeping them secret from the public?

It’s not E.T. It’s just the guys who may someday bomb Tehran.

Thanks for your substantive responses.

BTW, I ran the Verde river with a college friend about 1968. Loved it. Dad et al live in Cottonwood.

I’ve talked at length with some serious researchers into the “Phoenix lights.”

Sorry, but your explanation may fit a part of the event but not the main event.

The craft larger than a mile long traveled from at least up around Kingman down to Tucson . . . rather slowly.

The airline pilot flying his private plane ABOVE and a bit to the side of the large UFO said he could have landed HIS AIRLINER ON TOP OF THE UFO.

The MD, I think on South mountain filming it in color 35mm movie film supported the size estimates.

etc. etc.

I would not argue that we have our fleet of such as my relative asserted(s).

More than 10,000 witnesses saw the large craft. THEY knew it was not flares etc.