March 13, 1997 was when thousands of people reported mysterious lights over Arizona. The strangeness started in Henderson, Nevada when it was reported that a V-shaped object “the size of a 747” with six lights on its leading edge was moving from the northwest to the southeast. Over the course of the next hour, sightings were reported throughout Arizona, as far south as Tucson which is a distance of nearly 400 miles.
It has been 24 years but people still talk about those lights. I wrote earlier about those strange lights which the Central Intelligence Agency had in their files (which they supposedly had titled their X-files) of thousands of declassified documents that were posted online a few years ago. The photographs, witness accounts, research and newspaper articles are some of the largest official UFO collections ever to be made available to the public. “The Phoenix Lights” reports were of several mysterious vessels. Two commercial airline pilots even reported that one of these mile-wide crafts was hovering and covering Las Vegas.
This happened on March 13 but it didn’t become general knowledge until June 18, 1997, when USA TODAY did a story on the front page with the headline, “Skies, phone lines light up Ariz.”
The lights were reported to have reappeared in 2007 and 2008, but they explained – as they had been in 1997 – as military flares dropped by fighter aircraft at Luke Air Force Base. The 2008 event was explained as flares attached to helium balloons that were released by a civilian as a hoax.
“The object then seemed to pass over their heads and went through a V opening in the peaks of the mountain range towards Squaw Peak Mountain and toward the direction of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Witnesses in Glendale, a suburb northwest of Phoenix, saw the object pass overhead at an altitude high enough to become obscured by the thin clouds; this was at approximately between 20:30 and 20:45 MST. When the triangular formation entered the Phoenix area, Bill Greiner, a cement driver hauling a load down a mountain north of Phoenix, stated that the lights hovered over the area for more than two hours.”
The actor Kurt Russell says that he saw the lights over Phoenix on March 13, 1997. He is a licensed pilot and reported the lights to the control tower at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and may have been the first person to officially log the sighting. He was flying into Phoenix with his son and was about to land when he saw six lights over the airport.
They were “Absolutely uniform V-shape,” Russell has said but when he reported them to the tower, they responded that instruments didn’t show anything like that in the sky. “Okay,” Russell replied, “I’m going to declare it’s unidentified, it’s flying and it’s six objects.”
“Causality is the way we explain the link between two successive events.
Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic
and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far
has been unable to reduce to a common principle.”
― C.G. Jung, The Portable Jung
A friend loaned me the book There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Livesyears ago because I had been talking to her about synchronicity. Carl Jung coined the term to describe coincidences that are related by meaningfulness rather than by cause and effect. ” Jung introduced the idea of synchronicity to get away from the “magic and superstition” which surrounds some unpredictable and startling events that appear to be connected.
I would think that all of us have had some otherwise-unrelated events occur to us for which we assumed some significance beyond the ordinary. The common example is when you happen to remember a person you have not thought about or seen for many years, and at that moment your telephone rings and it is that very person. What is the statistical probability that this can happen? Very small; very unlikely. For some people, the explanation moves to the paranormal.
I was looking at an almanac page online on March 13th and came upon a story from 3/13/1997 about when thousands of people reported mysterious lights over Arizona. Around 8 p.m., a man in Henderson, Nevada, saw a V-shaped object “the size of a 747,” with six lights on its leading edge. The lights moved diagonally from northwest to southeast. Other people sighted seeing the same thing over the next hour throughout Arizona. They were seen as far south as Tucson nearly 400 miles away.
A rendering of the object seen created by witness Tim Ley that appeared in USA Today.
I remember those “Phoenix Lights” being covered by the media in 1997. Having grown up in the late 1950s and 1960s, I heard many tales of UFOs.
A repeat of the lights occurred February 6, 2007, and was recorded by the local Fox News television station. But, as was the case with almost every UFO appearance in my youth, it was explained away by officials. In this case, the military and FAA said that it was flares dropped by F-16 aircraft training at Luke Air Force Base.
Reading that account made me think of my own one and only possible “close encounter.” That phrase entered the mainstream with the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
My own encounter would be of the first kind – seeing a UFO fairly close (within 150 meters).
My sighting was in the summer of 1993 in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. UFO sightings in the Pinelands seem to be fairly common. I saw what I would describe as a ship that was (as I later discovered) a lenticular saucer. It was motionless over a lake in the early morning (about 3 am). It had no sound or flashing lights, but a thin red-lit ring encircled it. I had no camera. No one else was there with me. I watched it for about a minute and then it lifted vertically a few feet, tilted at an angle, and took off rapidly, vanishing from sight in a few seconds.
An encounter with a UFO that leaves evidence behind, such as scorch marks on the ground or indents, etc., is said to be of the second kind. Spielberg’s film deals with the third kind – an encounter with visible occupants of a UFO. The fourth kind involves the person being taken and experimented on inside the alien craft. The fifth kind involves direct communication between aliens and humans, as portrayed in the 2016 film, Arrival.
I don’t know what I saw. I never read any news reports about it. I never reported it.
After I read that almanac entry on the Phoenix Lights, I looked at another almanac website for more information and that site that told me that on March 13 in 1855, Percival Lowell was born. Who was he? Born to a wealthy family, he graduated from Harvard, but he passed on working in the family business and instead did a lot of traveling and travel writing. In the 1890s, he read that astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had discovered what appeared to be canals on Mars. Lowell was fascinated by that idea and put his fortune into studying the Red Planet.
He believed that the canals offered proof of intelligent life. He built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Astronomers and scientists were skeptical of his view of intelligent life on Mars, but the general public was intrigued by his view. Lowell’s writing and observations had an impact, not as much on science as on the infant literary genre that became known as science fiction.
These two coincidences on March 13 led me to check out that date on Wikipedia. The event that caught my attention on yet another March 13, in 1781, was that the English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus. Well, “discover” may be too strong because John Flamsteed had observed it in 1690, but thought it was a star. Herschel was the first to figure out that it was a planet and not a star.
He observed the planet’s very slow movement and determined that meant it was very far from the Sun – farther than Saturn, which was the farthest known planet. He named it after Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky. Since then, astronomers have discovered 27 moons orbiting the blue-green ice giant. The moons have literary names, mostly characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Uranus is an odd planet in that its axis is tilted so far that it appears to be lying on its side with its ringed moons circling the planet vertically.
Was it a coincidence that I found these three stories that day? Is there some synchronicity that these three events occurred on the same calendar date? Is there a connection among these three March Thirteenths?
Though I believe in synchronicity, they seem to be coincidental. I found connections because I was looking for connections. But I am open-minded about the idea. I do believe in coincidences, and I do sometimes believe that things occur which stretch my belief in coincidences.
“Coincidences give you opportunities to look more deeply into your existence.”
– Doug Dillon
“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
– Albert Einstein
“I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope
that there’s a pattern to my life, and if there’s a pattern,
then maybe I’m moving toward some kind of destiny where it’s all explained.”
– Jonathan Ames
Weekends in Paradelle 