Why would any pilot risk everything, believing that they could successfully pull off such an elaborate hoax, get away with it, go home, watch the 10'oclock news and have a nice laugh? Nobody ever got caught and nobody ever came forward to say "we did it." Private pilots would never take such a risk, commercial pilots would never risk their flying careers, and airline pilots are constantly monitored by ATC. They would never attempt such a thing especially with a plane loaded with passengers. Obviously this witness concocted the entire story to get his mug on the six o'clock news!

HELICOPTERS IN FORMATION: All helicopters make noise. This theory doesn't fit with the thousands of witness reports claiming that the craft was totally silent and most people are smart enough to tell what a helicopter looks like. For these reasons and all of the reasons described in the Cessna theory, this simply doesn't fly!

STEALTH B2 BOMBER FLYOVER: Thousands of witnesses claim that they saw an enormous V-shaped craft over a mile wide, semi-transparent, with an array of large luminous lights attached. The stealth bomber is tiny by comparison. What is most significant is that every witness reported that the enormous craft was totally silent. This kills the stealth bomber theory. Stealth means that the aircraft is radar evasive, not sound evasive. It is anything but quiet. The military would never violate Class B airspace by entering without an ATC clearance and air traffic controllers would never vector an aircraft across the final approach course of a busy airport, especially at a dangerously low altitude! We interviewed a witness for the Phoenix Lights Documentary who says that she saw a stealth bomber fly over her house during the World Series, but it didn't look anything like what she saw fly directly over her head on March 13th.

MILITARY HOAX: The military would never intentionally stage a UFO hoax. The last thing they want to deal with is placating public concerns. Why would military pilots attempt to stage such a hoax and seriously risk losing their coveted flying privilages they worked so hard to obtain? The upper military brass would not take such an action lightly and the consequences are far too severe to justify an elaborate hoax just for laughs.

It is interesting to note that in one case, a witness who called in to Luke Air Force Base to report strange lights was told that the phones were ringing off the hook. The woman who answered the phone admitted that she did not have any information at that time and suggested the witness call back the next day. Upon calling the next day, the same witness reported that a different person answered, and with a hostile attitude, denied that there were any reports at all. Other witnesses reported the same indifferent, hostile attitude and complete denial of any unusual activity.

As a final note, the government and military never denied the 8pm event took place and they never claimed that the 8pm event was flares. What they officially reported to the public was the following statement: "At no time was there ever a threat to our national security," which means that whatever flew over Phoenix on March 13th 1997, was considered a "friendly." There is a great likelihood that flares were dropped around 10pm, possibly as a diversionary tactic to confuse the facts and that many (not all) reported sightings at that time were of the flare drop.

ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENON: The skies over Phoenix were perfectly clear and there is no known atmospheric phenomenon that could have manifested or looked anything like what witnesses saw. Auroras generally only appear near the Earth's north and south poles. You are not likely to see them in the Arizona skies.

BALL LIGHTNING: We interviewed Robert Golka for the Phoenix Lights Documentary. He never made it into the final cut as we were desperate to reduce the running time down from 3+ hours to a nominal 75 minutes. He is one of the world's foremost experts on ball lightning and famous for building the world's largest Tesla coil at Wendover Air Force Base in 1973. He is one of the few people on the planet to create ball lightning in a lab environment. According to his expert testimony, ball lightning is a rare phenomenon that can occur near the ground and at higher altitudes and has on very rare occasions been observed by passengers in aircraft. Ball lightning requires a source with strong electromagnetic fields such as that present in storm clouds. It can burst out from high electromagnetic fields present in the Earth as well. The night the Phoenix Lights event occurred was totally clear with no storm clouds present. In his opinion ball lightning could not occur on such a clear night and would never manifest into an array of lights and travel low and slow, in formation, across the state of Arizona. The phenomenon does not match witness accounts.