So we’re moving back to aliens. Well, not aliens. We never left. Not aliens. UFOs or UAPs. I hate that they changed it to UAP. Unidentified aerial phenomenon. It does make more sense, though, especially in the age of drones. It makes more sense because it’s easier to disguise it. It’s an aerial phenomena instead of an object that’s flying. It’s a drone, sure. It was unnecessary. I thought it was an unnecessary change. So we’re going to not use UAP anymore. We’re going back to UFO.

They used UAP because UFO is synonymous with us. It’s like conspiracy theory. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you might as well just be a truther. But don’t you think they’re kind of separate groups? The UFOers and then conspiratorial people. They’re like cousins. I think there’s levels. You got two of them on here. Me and Jorge are like die-hard UFOers, and Eric is trying to make his point early. He’s already trying to discredit us, and this is like black propaganda right now.

I actually stumbled upon this, and it wasn’t on our schedule. I started watching a couple documentaries. If you listened to our UFO stuff in the past, I was always complaining about there’s no real good video. It’s like a ’98 Nokia photo. It’s like 40p, not even 480p. So I kind of stumbled on this, and it’s actually decent video. So this is the story of the Phoenix Lights. After looking into it more, I would say at the very beginning, this is probably one of the better cases that exist for it being a UFO.

Eric texted before the recording saying he’s kind of on the fence on this one. Because a lot of it is always just like, oh, you’re in the woods, drunk as fuck, and then you take a photo and it’s a blurry whatever. Or the TikTok, and I get the TikTok because it’s from a good source, but it’s not super clear because it was in thermal imaging. So this story is not just one person who filmed it. This is hundreds, if not thousands of people. It wasn’t like us eating cold hot dogs in the woods. It’s multiple.

So on the evening of March 13th, 1997, a mass of Arizonians looked up and reported that the sky was doing something it wasn’t supposed to be doing. This event was later nicknamed the Phoenix Lights. But it’s best understood not as one single sighting, but a two-act night. There was an earlier V or boomerang-like formation of lights moving south, often reported around 8:30 p.m., and a later event an hour and a half later in which a row of bright lights appeared to hover southwest of the Phoenix metro area, and then blinked out one by one.

The way they appeared was one by one, and it was just sudden. It wasn’t like they were flying and then they stopped. There was no motion. They were stationary. There’s a video on this. You guys can look it up on YouTube. So in June of 1997, a CNN report, and then in July of ’97, an Associated Press wire story, the official Davis-Monthan Air Force Base press release described something called Operation Snowbird. Who comes up with the names of the operations? So they came out saying that it was an operation. Of course they did. It was a bit of flares coming off. Oh, flares that don’t move and they stay in the same spot and then they hover. Hovering flares.

So what we’re going to do is take some of the witnesses and what they said, and then we’ll go through the story. There are nights in the desert when the sky feels close, like ink black overhead. The stars are sharp enough to look nailed in one place. In the urban valley, a different kind of glow rises, streetlights and stadium lights washing the lower air in amber. On March 13th, those familiar elements, darkness above, city glare below, created the backdrop for something that thousands would later describe with the same word, which was silent. Meaning everything went silent. Weird. That’s interesting.

The first major act that most sources converge upon is an apparent formation of lights seen moving from north to south over Arizona. It was widely described as a V-shape, about five lights. Some say six. Ducks fly together, baby. Mighty Ducks. So it’s a V-shape and most people say five lights. Some say six and some say seven. They’re bright and yellow-white, moving slowly and without noticeable sound. The V-shape is a thing, like a military formation. But Eric’s saying if it was one craft, dude, they’re too far apart. It would be like the largest ship moving slow as hell crawling across the sky.

Even at this earliest stage, the case begins to split. The V was not always described as merely five points of light. Some witnesses say the lights were embedded in something vast, like one big giant craft. They’re moving together, but the winking out of them in sequential order is kind of weird. Like why would they be like okay, turn the lights off one at a time, boys? Some witnesses said the lights were embedded in something vast, an object that blocked stars and felt close enough to judge in human terms, a couple blocks away between lights.

That’s an interesting thing to say, like it’s blocking the view of normal astral phenomena. Obviously there is a fair amount of light pollution, but around it is desert, so it should be better than most cities. It’s like when we went to Lake Shasta in California. You can see the stars. It’s insane. You’re seeing galaxies. Because there’s not a lot of light polluting, so there’s no glow of the city light hanging in the air. Like Montana, the Big Sky State. They call it that for a reason. It’s amazing, really.

So those impressions, connection, structure, and proximity, are where the Phoenix Lights becomes less like a light in the distant event and more like an encounter. That is why the Lay family became central to this. They didn’t just report lights, they reported closeness and scale. They worked with investigators to turn their recollections into computer images. So John Hook’s CNN report describes how Tim Lay used digital photos of the landscape with computer drawings to reconstruct what his family believed they saw. He went deep. He wasn’t playing around.

The emotional hinge in that telling comes when the lights stop being over there and start coming toward them. Tim Lay is quoted describing the moment the formation approaches home. He says, when it finally got here, we started to get really antsy. Understandable. Is that the guy from the video that we saw, or some other guy? I’m not sure what video. I think the one we saw was the second occurrence. There were two incidents, both on the same night, one prior and then one later. The one that we saw was the second occurrence. I saw another video, and it was clearly six lights. That was a darker, late at night type of thing. And then there was another one that was right around sunset time, at dusk. The crepuscule. How the hell did you just pull that one out of the hat?

Lay’s next statement is a detail whose simplicity is one reason it stayed memorable. The object, whatever it was, went directly overhead in full complete silence. So this is the witness saying this thing went over his house and everything was quiet. Just as an aside, I think probably in part of this recording a plane flew by at 20,000 feet and you could hear it. It’s loud. Just imagine if it was a military plane. There would be some sort of sound. Stealth bombers, they’re not stealth for sound. They’re stealth for radar because of the shape. The stealth part of it is not to be detected by radar.

So the silence part matters because it shapes the perception. People can tolerate odd lights maybe if a jet engine follows, because the brain puts the world back into its familiar categories. A plane flies over, you hear the sound, you see a light, there’s a trail. The only aerial propulsion that isn’t going to make a sound is if you’re on one of those little gliders, the little hang ones. And even the fan makes sound. But again, that’s moving. These lights were not moving. I think they were just moving hella slow, like almost just hovering, but moving very slowly. In the video they looked completely stationary.

So a set of bright points moving like aircraft without sound would make me uneasy. It’s also moving slower, because I’m with my daughter outside and you see a plane going by, within 30 seconds it’s already passed. Like these are sitting over a city and they’re not passed. A 5-minute video and they’re not passed. For those listening on the audio, we’re going to put the video up. You hear that plane right now? That plane is 15,000 feet in the air at least, and we can hear it. So this is one of the points that’s extremely unresolved. How is this possible? This is where it doesn’t sit well with anybody. There’s no known propulsion that is silent. We do light, fuel, fire, burn, explosion. There’s no silent propulsion.

The other part of it is scale. Tim Lay is quoted saying that when the right side of what looked like a giant V-shaped craft passed over him, the left side was a couple blocks away. He could see it. Do you imagine seeing that? How far is a couple blocks? Let’s say three. If you do a city block, we’re talking probably around 700, 800 feet minimum. It’s Phoenix suburb, not a New York City block. Around 300 feet is the average city block. So we’re talking like 900 to 1,000 feet. That’s a fifth of a mile. Almost 1,000 feet is a fifth of a mile.

To put it into perspective, a passenger plane wing to wing is probably 200 feet. This would be four times the size of a 747. The Boeing 747 has a wingspan of approximately 211 to 225 feet. So it’s like five Boeings side by side, which is massive. He’s using the visual of the right side passing over him and guesstimating where the left side is, a couple blocks away. The wingspan of a B-52 Stratofortress, the military’s largest plane, is 185 feet. The ones they drop tanks out of. So still five to six times bigger if this witness statement is right. That thing is like flying Megatron. It’s insane.

His wife, Bobby Lay, described something different than fear though. She said, it didn’t seem threatening. It was like you’re just awestruck. Until they drop a bomb or start beaming people up. But her point is that the silence is odd. Take a 747, and then everything is going to be five to six times that, going over your house, and you hear nothing. That would freak me out. It’s a little bit slower than going what, 400 miles per hour? It must be slower because a plane going over is so much faster. As I’m saying, it’s crawling. Besides the sound, the next thing is how can it be going so slow?

Because anything that we have flying, it’s aerodynamics. In order to create lift, you have to be going a certain speed, otherwise you go down, or it’ll stall. You have the wing, and the way the wing is shaped, the air is forcing what creates the lift. As you reduce speed, you reduce lift. There’s a lot more science behind it than me being like, oh, more speed equals more lift, but it’s a basic concept. Three high school diplomas, which equate to literally none of it. But we got ChatGPT now. We leveled up.

I was talking to somebody the other day about if you went back 100 years, just the ’20s or ’30s. We still had technology, microwaves, the fridge was coming out, the ice box. But if you showed them ChatGPT, just show them a phone, they’d be like, what is this? This is supernatural. What sorcery is this? You’d go straight to Guantanamo. You’d be put in the loony bin. You’d be lobotomized. Obviously if you take it back, there’s no infrastructure to support the internet, so it wouldn’t work. They’d be like, you’re crazy. Where’s the wifi? I’m at 5%. You don’t get service, buddy.

There was a comedian who said, if you got sent back in time knowing everything you know now, would you be good? He’s like, no, I can’t build anything. I can’t make a phone. I have no clue what to do. I would just die. Build the house. What do you mean? How many dollars will it cost me? They’re like, dollars? I’d die of scurvy. They’re like, you want Tinder, babe? You ever heard of a clippers?

At almost the same time, other witnesses were recording something that looked much less like a monolithic craft and more like separate objects spaced in formation. That’s what it looked like to me. I thought it was separate. Phoenix New Times notes explicitly that videotape showed the V-shape clearly and that reports varied widely depending on the altitude and speed and the location of the witness. The one we watched was pretty far away. It was basically in the hills looking down on the city. But if you’re down in the city it might look a lot different. I would like to see a straight up view if that’s available. There has to be, because there were thousands of people.

Just so we’re all clear on the non-conspiratorial side, all of this is being put together from memory, night vision, fear, distance, 1997 camcorders. In all the episodes that we’ve done, we know that witnesses are unfortunately the most unreliable. Yeah, but there’s video. And when there’s thousands of witnesses, that’s what makes it. Like everyone’s crazy? Granted, there are probably some people who are trying to get their five minutes of fame, just like D.B. Cooper, everyone piling it on. I guarantee all the people didn’t actually see it, but I bet a bunch of them did.

He is one of the cooler ones to go on your deathbed of. On my deathbed I’m going to say I’m D.B. Cooper, and my daughter will be like, who the hell is D.B. Cooper? Is there a second one not as cool as that? In my opinion either that or the Zodiac killer. Oh god, but then you’re horrible. That’s dark. D.B. Cooper’s cool. He’s like a legend, like Robin Hood. Or the shooter on the grassy knoll. I don’t know if my age permits me to do that one. I was an embryo. Reincarnated.

A little known hinge point in the ’97 record is that at least one key witness did not rely on naked eye impressions. He used a telescope. My guy. He just had one on deck. You know those guys who have a telescope on their patio. He’s like, I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. I want to be that guy. Well, you have to believe in aliens first, Eric. And we got to move out of Florida. They are not coming here. There’s very little activity over here. Steer clear of the Florida humidity. The atmosphere was just water, 100% humidity. You see that penis-shaped landmass? Just steer clear of that. Skip Louisiana while we’re at it. Just go north. No offense, Louisiana. It’s humid as hell.

So Scottsdale resident Mitch Stanley is presented as a potentially decisive witness because he observed the lights through a 10-inch telescope and claimed they resolved into an actual aircraft. The story is unusually specific about the optical context. The telescope gathered, quote, 1,500 times as much light as the human eye. How did he make that determination? If you’re really into telescopes, you’ll have the specs. My father-in-law is super into it and he takes time lapses of galaxies. He’s like, yeah man, I had this thing pointed at it for like six hours. The eyepiece used that night provided 60 times the resolving power of naked eye vision. He has a Hubble telescope in his backyard?

His account is strikingly precise because it’s unromantic and specific. The lights were moving slowly enough that he attempted to capture them in the scope. He succeeded, and when his mother asked what they were, he answered with a single word. Shut up, Mom. Planes. I would have preferred craft. The funny part about this witness story is the mom. Stanley, what are you doing, Stanley? Stanley, you’re 46. Why are you still living here? Or he’s 13 and you’re like, he’s still incredible. What are you doing, Stanley? Planes. Meatloaf, Mom. It’s also the name Stanley. This guy is definitely living at home.

He also said the telescope made apparent what the naked eye couldn’t. Lights that looked singular split into two, and the lights that sat on the undersides of squarish wings. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a UFO. He’s just saying it’s a craft. It’s some sort of craft. Well, we use the word plane. Like a UAP. Listen, Horhay, that’s inaccurate. But this is where the Phoenix Lights becomes extremely difficult. If Stanley is correct, at least some of the widely reported V is compatible with conventional aircraft seen at high altitude, bright points flying in formation, potentially perceived as a solid object by observers who cannot resolve the dark space in between them. And he was saying that they were separate, not one.

So in short, the lights, if you looked closer under a scope, were actually two lights, as opposed to a big bright one light. That evidence could state that, say there were five lights, in reality it could have been multiple planes, five individual with one light each. Let’s say you had a plane smaller than the one we’re talking about. Everybody thought it was one light, and on a scope it’s actually two. Each one of those could have been a plane in itself, in formation. That’s what I’ve thought. Especially because in the video we saw, the lights go out individually. No plane has individual light switches. If we’re talking alien craft, they’re not individual light switches. It seems unnecessary.

The connected craft claim and the separate aircraft claim are both present early, and they do not cleanly resolve by later official explanations because, A, telescopic detail is rare in the record, there’s only one, and B, the most famous later video evidence is of different lights around 10 later, the hour and a half later. This is the second incident. What makes the telescopic witness little known is not that it’s hidden. It’s right there in the investigation, but popular retellings often leap over it and go directly to, people saw a mile-wide craft. Because if you’re the media, you’re going to go with the most sensational thing. Even when you look up the images, there’s an actual triangle with the lights, and it looks like a UFO, and that’s what they published.

This is the moment narratively when the Phoenix Lights begin to look less like a single UFO story and more like a night of layered, almost explainable but not easily pinned down theory, all amplified by the fact that thousands were watching the same sky at the same time and talking to each other in real time. Whatever happened earlier, the night’s second act is what made the actual Phoenix Lights famous. At 10:00 p.m., up to nine bright lights were seen to appear, hover for several minutes, and then disappear southwest of Phoenix in the direction of the Sierra Estrella. It was the hovering. Maybe, play devil’s advocate, they were testing advanced drone systems.

’97, though. That’s why it would make sense if they’re testing stuff that we have now on the regular. But think about it, drones back then, we didn’t think about that. My thing is, if this was a legit military test, why are you testing it over a city, a major city too? No one’s going to film this, it’ll be totally fine. Why don’t you just do it in the desert? What if you took a wrong turn? Go towards the lights, boys. Brandon, that’s Phoenix. Why test it over a city? You have all this desert. It’s supposed to be secret technology. Test it over the base. Don’t test it over a city. People are going to ask questions. It just seems like such a breach of protocol.

The only thing I think of is it doesn’t make sense why they would do that if it was some sort of military test. Because what if one of them fails and falls down and kills a civilian? Then you’ve lost it. It’s so much more risk. And even if it doesn’t kill anybody and it’s down there, now they have it and get even more footage. Why would you risk it? You had brought up earlier that Area 51 is about 250 miles from it. That’s not that far. It’s what, five hours driving? But if you’re flying, 45 minutes away. And I only bring that up because if there was some tech that they were testing, it’s also not the nearest base. There’s a closer base. Test it in your airspace that you control, where you have a perimeter, people can’t get up to it.

The words hover and disappear are doing a lot of the heavy work in reporting. Hover suggests stationary yet still moving. Disappear suggests some sort of intention of disappearing. But both can also be illusions produced by distance and terrain. Bright lights descending slowly can appear fixed against a dark horizon. Lights falling behind a ridge line can appear to wink out. What 1998 reporting shows is that this is interpretive because the same video could be matched to mountain geography in more than one way. The one we saw was clearly above the ridge. It was definitely in the hills. And when you see it disappearing, it didn’t seem like they were going behind a ridge. They slowly wink out, with no movement either, at least not from the video.

In the video, on the left you can see a shadow of another hill, so you have perspective of where they’re at. So Mike Krzyston, standing in the yard of his Moon Valley home, captured all nine on video. He’s quoted at the moment the lights appear, bursting with excitement, and he reads it like he just won the lottery. He says, I hit pay dirt, finally. He’s been waiting for this, like a gold miner. Another videographer filming fewer lights is quoted simply, this is a major sighting and we have to record this. So there’s a lot happening. And these are just people who had cameras. In ’97, it was not that common to have cameras. I didn’t have a camera. Cameras were expensive.

I went to my niece’s birthday at my brother-in-law’s house and they had a VHS tape. I was like, oh dude, we got some artifacts here. He’s like, it’s remarkably expensive for a VHS now. It’s a collector’s item. Then I thought back to when I lived in Kentucky, we had this huge massive TV. It cost my parents like 15 grand. The TV weighed 4,000 pounds. The other day I was trying to play a CD and I’m like, where the hell am I supposed to play this CD? It’s dead technology. The Tacoma comes stacked, you got one?

Visually, the 10:00 p.m. lights are the part of the Phoenix Lights that even skeptics often admit is unnerving. Meaning, I don’t know what it is, but it’s weird. They form a rough line or arc bright enough to dominate the entire frame. They vanish sequentially. I’m saying it’s sequential. The footage has the grainy consumer camcorder texture of the ’90s, but it feels a little bit more authentic because they’re not blurry. Even my iPhone would take worse video of that right now at nighttime. The fact that it’s just pure black makes the quality look better, because you’re not having to pick up vivid color detail. It’s just light.

So now the official response from the old government. The official explanation came primarily from the US military. The US Air Force stated that the later stationary lights seen that night were illumination flares dropped during a training exercise from aircraft from Luke Air Force Base. Flares that just hover in the midair. It’s just a shitty excuse. These flares attached to parachutes can appear to hover and slowly descend, matching much of the video footage. That’s a negative, Ghost Rider. There’s no formal military explanation of the earlier V-shape. Just the flares. Authorities suggested possibilities like aircraft flying in formation, but no single event was officially confirmed.

Additionally, and you can look this up, the governor, Symington, held a humorous press conference and literally joked and had somebody come out in an alien costume. It’s like a hiding in plain sight thing. Additional statements from people in the military almost feel careless in how well they match what people later saw on video. It seemed like a joke to everybody in the government. One was quoted as saying the pilots dumped all their remaining flares at high altitude and it turned into one hell of a light show. Nothing to see here, folks. They’re flares. Also a flare doesn’t move like the video we watched. There was very little movement.

So say they were flares. So all the lights stay at the same altitude, even though they came out at different timings, and then all the flares go out in sequential order at the same altitude. Sure. That checks out. Now, we’ve all seen flares, even just on video going off in the sky. You see them falling or climbing depending on where you shoot it from. There’s no movement. It’s called gravity. It just goes down. So in a later document released in 2009, 12 years later, it explained Operation Snowbird, and it says Operation Snowbird provides support for visiting flying units from US installations and allied partners who need to train in Southern Arizona’s weather and ranges, which is an environment ideal for combat training. So that explains literally nothing. A bunch of words. Professional word salad. They always give you supposed answers when no one’s asking about it.

Here is one explanation of the flare as a plausibility when you look at how bright these devices are designed to be. The parachute flare fact sheet states that the LUU-2D/B produces about 1.8 million candle power. What are all those letters? That’s the SKU number of the flare. So it produces about 1.8 million candle power of visual illumination for four to five minutes. Isn’t it funny, just the same amount of time. It’s also interesting how we still base everything off ancient things like candle power and horsepower. What is horsepower? It’s how many candles would create this much light. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

So the Phoenix Lights case is painful because it seems to have missed one of the few opportunities for hard, later, auditable data, FAA radar tapes. In March of ’98, an investigation explains the technical misunderstanding at the heart of many radar saw nothing claims. The FAA was called by many witnesses, and they asked if there was anything showing up on radar, and they said no. So that part is confusing. But would the FAA really just tell you? If I called the FAA right now and asked, are you seeing anything overhead, they’d say we see nothing. Would they give you this information? Sean calls, he’s like, I’m just having a couple Miller Lights, here’s my location, I’m in East Tampa, can you just look up what you got on radar?

That is strange, especially if you go back to thousands of witnesses and thousands of people got it on video. It’s not what a flare does. So air traffic controller Bill Grava, who was on duty at Sky Harbor and a witness later to the 10:00 p.m. lights, said that a formation traveling at high altitude over Phoenix would have been monitored by FAA radar operators in Albuquerque, not at Sky Harbor. He also stated that if five planes in a V passed over Phoenix at 8:30, they would appear as an asterisk on Sky Harbor consoles, nothing that would necessarily raise eyebrows. But the fact that people called in and they said no, we saw nothing. Are they required to tell people? The FAA is a federal agency. Especially after 2001, it was probably, shut the hell up.

Luke Air Force Base, the nearby Air Force Base, is noted to have a more powerful radar, but Luke’s Captain Stacy Cotton told reporters that radar operators were asked if they saw anything unusual and they answered no. Which makes it even more sketchy. We have a cover up. It’s so blatant. Other reports, and I quote, whether the 8:30 V formation did register on FAA radar monitored in Albuquerque will apparently never be known, because despite intense UFO investigator activity afterwards, no one bothered to make a formal request to log the FAA radar tapes in the days immediately following March 13th.

Can I just do a formal request to log the data? Can I make a formal request to audit the Pentagon? Well, guess what, they keep failing, so it doesn’t matter. They hold on to it for about 14 days and then they burn it, and there was no formal request. Did someone make a formal request to keep the original Apollo technology before they burnt it? No one made a request, so why would we keep it? How is there not a formal request when, if this happened right now around here, it’s all over the news? Thousands of witnesses. People believe, why is it the citizens’ job? Why is it the everyday taxpayer’s job to submit formal requests to look into sketchy stuff? Isn’t it your job? That’s a good point, but I would think the journalists would put in some sort of request.

So a couple contradictory official communications. Reports that Davis-Monthan Air Force Base spokesperson Lieutenant Keith Sheppard told news organizations including the New Times that the base had no planes in the air at the time of 8:30 and 10:00 p.m. Later Captain Eileen Benz heard from National Guard helicopter pilots that they had spotted A-10s heading for Tucson around 10:00 p.m. That’s not an A-10, bro. So what’s an A-10? An A-10 Warthog. Is that a fighter jet? The A-10 Warthog is one of the most badass pieces of military ingenuity ever created. They’re discontinued, they don’t make them anymore, but they still use them. They take a giant Vulcan cannon and build a plane around it. They shoot shells that are this big and they can shoot like 4,000 a minute.

It’s like when you hear that brrrt. And they’ve got the engines above it. The A-10 Warthog is a death machine. It’s literally a giant gun with wings. They build the cannon, the gun that it’s built on, and then they build the plane around it. It’s got the two engines on the top. It’s badass. That thing is a monster. The most meaningful later development came not from new footage or new data but from a late personal admission by the state’s most visible public figure. The governor. On July 13th, 2007, on a little program called Larry King Live, he aired a program titled Are UFOs Real. In it, former governor Fife Symington described himself as a witness to the Phoenix Lights and explained why he had mocked the issue with that weird press conference and bringing out the alien person in the costume.

He said a June media frenzy sparked by an article led him to believe a little levity wouldn’t hurt anybody, so he staged the spoof press conference. Then he pivoted to the part that electrified the Phoenix Lights story for a new generation, and he said, I acknowledge that I saw a craft. A little levity wouldn’t hurt anybody. Okay, I saw a ship. There was definitely aliens. He described being in the Sunnyslope area around 8:00 p.m., going outside to look west, and seeing a delta-shaped, wedge-shaped object moving silently over the valley. A delta shape, a triangle. In the Greek alphabet delta is a triangle. The object moving silently over the valley, and he said, it was dramatically large with enormous lights. When asked if it was an airplane, he answered no, emphasizing it could not be high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation. And flares fall towards the ground by definition.

Later in the program, he went even further, and he said, it was enormous, and he thought it was from another world. We have a former governor finally coming clean. He was governor at the time. Of course it got swept under the rug. That’s a pretty big admission. Homie’s like, okay, I mean I was having a brandy. And it’s from one of the leaders of the time. To put it into perspective, it would be like Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani comes out a decade later and says, you know, I think 9/11 was an inside job. He was the mayor of the city. And then a decade later he comes out and tells his real opinion. It’s different, obviously. Is this guy still alive? Did he snuff himself out? Did he get hit by a bus? I don’t have anything that says otherwise.

This all leads me, especially with what’s happening now, how recently they’re more and more leaning towards, yeah, it’s real. It just makes me think of Project Blue Beam. It’s going to eventually, especially with us at war now, it’s going to be like, oh, we need to come together. Human race, one world government, boys. The alien scourge is on our doorstep. It’s upon us. We did an episode on it, go back to Project Blue Beam. It was one of our earlier ones. I think it was in the 30s. I’m going to go 36. I’m going to go 47.

The Phoenix Lights’ modern legacy also includes copycats or return events. In April of 2008, mysterious lights again drew attention over Phoenix. Unlike ’97, that later episode quickly resolved into a hoax narrative. Live Science reported that the lights were created by a hoaxer using helium balloons and flares, with a neighbor saying he watched the launch, and the flares were lit at 8:00 p.m. By a hoaxer. By the way, it’s episode 54. You’re both wrong. The hoaxer thing, with helium balloons and flares, he made this perfect symmetry. The Phoenix Lights incident persists into the present in part because it sits at the crossroads of technology, of flares, aircraft, radar, perception, distance and scale illusions, and mistrust of the official statements of the government. They also probably did have drones, testing some sort of drones back then. A little bit, we don’t know. As always, it’s the perfect mixture of all of it. I mistrust everything.

But what I found interesting in this story is, unlike many UFO stories, they were seen by enough people that the event became woven into the community. Thousands of people saw this. You can’t get past that. I saw it was close to 10,000. At a certain point you can make 10 people out to be crazy, but you can’t make 10,000 people out to be crazy. It actually goes back to our concept of coincidence. It’s not a coincidence that all three of us saw something right now. It’d be different if Sean was toasted out of his ass, and we went to the bathroom and he’s like, whoa, you guys see that, and we’re like, no. It’s much like my UFO stories that I told before, because my dad was in a car in front of me, and he saw it too. That’s what made me be like, oh shit, I’m not crazy. My dad’s not a conspiracy theorist. He listens to the show because he loves me.

This happened way before the show, before the podcast even existed. I forget which episode we talked about it, it was the UFO one. I’ll give a quick recant. Around here there’s a really large bridge. It goes a couple hundred feet in the air. It’s called the Skyway Bridge. It’s one of the most vertical, terrifying bridges. Especially because it gets so windy, and you make one false move, you’re dead. It connects St. Pete and Sarasota. Well, it’s how you get to Sarasota. It just goes straight up. It’s huge. Cruise liners go underneath it with ease because it’s so tall.

So this was my parents at the time, they had a wedding rental business, nice tables and chairs and stuff. We did an event, and I was driving, my dad was driving a U-Haul with all the stuff in it. He was actually behind me, and I was driving his car. It was probably like 1:00 a.m., 1:30 a.m. It was very late. I’m in the car with my brother, and my brother’s chatting my ear off. I call my dad, and we’re talking about something, and all of a sudden the signal just dies, literally goes out, and I look at my phone, it’s like no signal. And I’m like, okay, weird. And then all of a sudden there’s this, I kid you not, it’s like a green orb. There’s that green orb over the top of the Skyway. So we’re 250, 300 feet in the air, and it’s just there.

My brother looks over, he’s like, what is that? Just stationary, motionless. From where we are, it’s probably maybe 75 feet, 100 feet off of the bridge. Not moving. And then it moves, but it moves so fast. It’s like 50 feet away and then it goes back the other way 50 feet away, and it does that like five or six times, and then it just vanishes. But it’s zipping. It moves like 50 feet instantly. It was like pew pew pew pew. And then about a minute later I finally had signal return, and I call my dad, and as soon as the phone answers, I’m about to talk, and he’s like, did you see that? And I was like, did you see that? And then we spent like two hours trying to logic it out, like what could it have been? We’re like, could it have been a drone? And I’m like, no, because it moves so fast. It literally just appeared in a different spot. And to this day my dad’s like, that was a UFO. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The thing is, my dad is not a believer in that stuff, and he was like, I can’t explain that shit. That was my story. It’s wild. Even if you’re a skeptic, you’re like, I still believe that story. The fact that the phones went out, and then it’s there, and the way it moved, so fast. I know drones are crazy, but it was too fast. When was this? This was right before COVID, so I think it was 2017 or 2018.

All right, you guys ready for the conspiracies and the theories? So here are some of the theories of what happened, and possibly we can unpack this and figure out what the hell happened in Phoenix. There’s only one true answer. So the theory of the flares is bullshit. The best primary support for the flare explanation is the Associated Press report quoting Captain Drew Sollins. He said A-10s from Maryland Air National Guard were flying over the Goldwater Range. They dropped high-intensity flares from 15,000 feet. The flares descended by parachute, and pilots dumped remaining flares to create what was called one hell of a light show. Get the hell out. On this episode alone you’ve heard 12 planes go by. And an A-10 Warthog, you hear that thing. I’ve been to an NFL game and heard them fly over. They’re loud as hell. Get out.

So flares do not explain the strongest claims, which were overhead silent passage, perceived structure connecting lights, and reports from far northwestern Arizona noted by the AP story itself. That means it’s a lie. Even the parachute flares, you would hear something. But also it was over the city, so where did the flares land? Where did the parachutes land? Where’s the evidence of the parachutes? Did they scoop them up? And the video doesn’t show anything falling. In the videos they literally look stationary. And even if there were, say they were split into two, that would be like 14 parachutes at a minimum. But they happened to let them fall and they’re all in a line in a V formation. Perfect V formation from an A-10 Warthog going a trillion miles an hour. Sure, 100%.

So the next one is aircraft in formation in a V. The strongest support is the telescope witness Mitch Stanley, who said the lights split into two under magnification and sat on squarish wings. So he’s saying there’s aircraft. Now, that leads into the next one, which is secret military aircraft or a black project, and they kind of go hand in hand. It’s totally possible. There’s the gray theories if you follow any of the UFO stuff. The UAP guy, he’s been saying the story for 40 years. He’s a propulsion engineer. Bob Lazar. So if you follow Bob Lazar and how he said he was recruited at Area 51 to reverse engineer propulsion systems, it could definitely be some sort of military op.

But there’s a couple things on that. If it’s true and they were doing that, they’re using technology that doesn’t exist on this planet at all, 0% exists, and this is in ’97. That we know of. Nothing has been produced that does that. Our most advanced aircraft on the planet, the B-2 bomber, the single most advanced thing, was built 25 years ago and it cost $2 billion to build, the single most advanced piece of aeronautical engineering ever created. You’re telling me the military industrial complex wouldn’t be pumping that out? Well, maybe that’s why the Pentagon keeps failing audits. Maybe they’re doing something on the low. But it’s not from here. It’s not from our planet if that’s the case.

Before this happened I wouldn’t necessarily be on board with this, but when the Venezuela thing happened, do you remember the reports that came out? Even Trump was saying, yeah, we were doing some things on them. We went into Venezuela a couple months ago and just annihilated, and extracted Maduro. And they were using weaponry that was disabling people without, some sort of tech. Sonic tech. And from one of the witnesses, satellite tech and all this. One of the witnesses that was there was like, we were unable to do anything. It was some sort of sound amplification that rendered them useless. And at that moment I was like, holy shit, that means we have tech that we have no idea about. And that was probably on a small scale, to be frank.

There is definitely the ability, whether it be utilizing some sort of microwave or some sort of sound wave. There’s a whole thing about frequency that is a whole science. If you think about it, our body is composed of atoms. Here we go, scientist. It’s actually interesting, like you’re vibrating. There is no such thing in the physical realm of a static. Statics don’t exist. You look at your house, anything that you view as a static non-moving entity, it’s in motion because atoms are vibrating. Everything is in motion. We talked about this on the pyramids episode too, like did they have some sort of vibration technology that was able to move objects that are so heavy that you don’t have technology to move?

If you look at a microwave, what a microwave does is cause water molecules to vibrate, and it creates the heat and steam, heating your food remarkably fast because it’s vibrating all the water molecules in it. So if you could vibrate the hell out of a thing in front of you, it’s going to be incapacitated. So the point of all that is, I could imagine that the tech the government has, especially with our military budget, it’s probably wild. Things we can’t even fathom. Like the interview of the Venezuela guys. They’re not talking. They ain’t got nothing to say. So I definitely couldn’t put that one in the no pile. Definitely in the hopper for sure.

The next one is extraterrestrials. Whether it was them there or it’s us using extraterrestrial technology. The old ET. Bros coming down, checking it out. There’s so many witnesses that are so convinced that it’s that, that it’s aliens. The thing is the silence. I can’t get past that. Both the no motion and the silence, just hovering there. That’s why I think it’s aliens, alien technology. Well, I’m saying it’s either aliens or it’s us finally being able to reverse engineer alien technology. Maybe they landed in the ’50s, like we had gone over, remember, Roswell, Area 51, and then it took us this long for whatever reason, doing experiments, actual testing.

Even today, look at Elon Musk and all that, it’s still propulsion in the same sense that we think of propulsion. You’re igniting some sort of fuel that’s propelling you, that’s propulsion. You burn something to make you move forward. Even right now, this is the most advanced stuff we have. I think the only reason that makes sense that it’s aliens and not the US government using alien tech is, why would it be over a city? Why the hell would it be over a city? It’s so unnecessary. If it’s a test, why do it over a city where you’re going to have people videoing you and causing all this attention? Do it over your own base. Thousands of people. So it doesn’t make sense.

But if it’s aliens, is it just a reconnaissance situation? I don’t know. We’ve talked about this a bunch. It could be lost, or it could be like a zoo. Imagine they’re like, oh, look at the apes, let’s go look at them, they’re driving cars, idiots. Look at them, they’re going to work. They’re still measuring horsepower and candle light. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be ominous or dark, like they’re coming here to take over. Maybe they got lost. They’re like, where the hell are we? This is not Park Place. I was watching something the other day, what if they’re explorers, like Magellan? Just exploration. Why wouldn’t they? They’re the first to circumnavigate the Milky Way.

But why is it always over there close to Area 51 in the desert and Phoenix? Why not New York? Why not South Dakota? What if it’s true, what if it’s recon to find their lost stuff? Like the Titanic, let’s go back to the ocean, they’re like, where’s our stuff, we just want it back. And maybe time is not the same for them. If something happened in Roswell in the ’50s, to them it could have been like yesterday. That’s an interesting one, I like that. We’re still trying to go down to the Titanic and look at it. Why would species not be the same? Like, hey, my cousin was on that ship, I’m trying to find him, let’s take a looky-loo. Maybe it’s a bunch of rich aliens, elitists, like the submersible, the Bezos of the aliens just trying to go up to space. The Elon Musk of the aliens. I can afford this, we’re doing a rescue mission.

So that’s really the story. At the end of this it’s kind of like, what do you think happened in Phoenix in 1997? Give me a summation of what you think happened that night. Because we have the 8:30 incident and then the 10:00 incident. We have the V, we have the government saying flares. Was the V also in the first one? I think they were both similar. The one in the video looks doesn’t look like a V, it looks like a boomerang. Like definitely lined up. And they’re all the same altitude, and they’re moving together. It’s not slightly. The video I saw looked like no movement. But that was also kind of far away. If something’s coming towards you, objects in the mirror may appear closer. But it was a six-minute video, and we fast-forwarded the hell out of it. I think it’s just homies taking a look.

Honestly, I think it’s extraterrestrials. They just happened to happen across and they’re like, let’s check it out, okay, whatever, shit’s going on, all right, Bob one, bail out, okay. And then beep beep beep, in order, like okay, let’s get the hell out of here. They came back, they’re like, okay, they’re doing stuff, cool, off. It’s kind of like Sean’s real incident with the one orb. But from the videos it seems like it’s not one big triangle, not one big ship, definitely multiple. It looked like multiple to me. And why are they here? I don’t know. I really like Eric’s explorer idea. Maybe they’re on vacation, a galactic road trip, like adventurers, like Leif Erikson, he’s like, screw it, we’re going to see what’s over there. Why not?

If you really want to think about extraterrestrials, why wouldn’t it be the same? We’ve never been to East Earth. West Earth. Whatever. If we had the same technology, we would be doing the same thing. We’re trying to explore. But it’s only weird it’s not us. What the hell are they here for? What are they doing on our planet? Only we can go to other planets. So half of me does say that it is experimental tech by the government. About half of me. But why over the city? Like 49%. Training drills gone wrong. But the other half of me does think this is one of the better cases of the possibility of it.

That’s awesome, because then that opens up the door for Eric to get on board with me and Sean about the pyramids. Whoa, whoa. Was it really four times, Eric? We covered the pyramids thoroughly before this episode, before we got you on board. Even if it’s 50%. I would say 50%. Exactly 50, or 55? You guys got to watch the video. Honestly, go to YouTube, go look at the video. I’d say 50/50. Oh my god, this guy. Can’t get it through to him. There’s no evidence. How much more evidence do you want? 10,000? I want to shake their hand. Howdy, buddy. I want to shake their hand.