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Have extraterrestrials ever visited Earth?

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Not long ago in Phoenix, Arizona, some say they looked up and saw this.

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Was there a UFO over Phoenix?

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Come on, be an aircraft or something.

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Late at night when you look into the sky, what do you see?

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No!

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No!

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UFOs have fascinated human beings for years.

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We've all seen movies about aliens, but could it actually happen in real life?

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For some people, the answer is clear.

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In a universe of infinite size, to assume where the only intelligent life is, well, stupid.

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But so far there's no proof. Or is there?

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There are people who say there was a UFO event in 1997, one that's never been explained.

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It was the night of the 19th in Phoenix, Arizona, a totally normal night.

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That was about to get extremely strange.

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At some time between 8.15 and 8.45 p.m., a sighting was reported.

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A V-shaped object was near the town of Pauldin.

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Then, witnesses say it moved southeast, passing over Phoenix at about 8.30 p.m.

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Just after 8.45 p.m., it disappeared.

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Hundreds of people said they saw it, but this is the only videotape that exists.

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A retired pilot named Terry Proctor captured the video from the front yard of his house

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in the town of Scottsdale, just north of Phoenix.

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At about 8.28 that evening, I was outside with my video camera

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and happened to look up, right about up in there,

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and a station of lights moving from north to south.

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To supplement Terry's video evidence, Tim Lee created this computer illustration.

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This is what Tim says flew over his home in north-central Phoenix.

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The right arm of the object went directly over this house, over the property,

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and the left arm of that was probably about two and a half blocks over in that direction.

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You could see that between the lights on each arm was solid.

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There was no stars. You could not see any stars between each light.

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Soon, witnesses say the object headed northwest and disappeared.

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But the show wasn't nearly over.

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Around 10 p.m. a second strange light pattern appeared.

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This one in the skies over Phoenix.

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And this time, at least four people in the area recorded the sighting on video.

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Chuck Rarejinn was one of them.

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It was around 9.55, 10 o'clock.

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I went out to turn off our watering system,

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and as I walked out the back porch, the city lights were underneath,

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and there were these nine lights suspended in the sky.

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Across town, Mike Kirsten saw the same thing.

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I just got done watching television about 10 o'clock,

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and I went out in my patio in our home faces southwest across the city of Phoenix.

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Mike noticed an amber light hovering above one of the nearby mountain peaks.

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He ran inside and grabbed his video camera.

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Figure this one out. Here's a devil.

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Suddenly, as he was recording, more lights appeared.

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One by one, they lit up, forming an arc.

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Mike wondered, was someone, or something, trying to send a message?

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Steve Blonder thought so. He was actually the lights to appear that night.

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Why?

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Because during each of the previous four nights, he had seen mysterious lights hovering in the sky.

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Individual, orange, amber-type lights every single night, around 10 after 9.

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Steve was so sure the lights would appear, he called in Bill Hamilton and Tom King.

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Two local UFO investigators.

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They jumped at the chance to document a UFO sighting in progress.

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As they watched the sky, one of Steve's neighbors shouted.

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There's another one!

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I had no idea what it was.

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Did anyone know? Bill Griner thinks so.

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30 miles to the northwest, Bill was driving his truck near Luke Air Force Base.

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He says that the military was verited in those unidentified lights in the sky.

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Bill says he watched three jets take off, and as soon as they were in the air...

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All three jets made an abrupt turn and headed for the closest object to the base, which was in the southwest.

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And as soon as the jets got to the object, it shot straight up and disappeared right in front of me.

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Soon the phones at the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Washington were ringing off the hook.

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National UFO Reporting Center, good afternoon.

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The center is a privately run organization.

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They gather information on UFO sightings and then make their reports available to the public.

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Peter Davenport runs the center.

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We certainly took more than a hundred reports all told about this incident.

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I think clearly that something very unusual had taken place over approximately two dozen cities in Arizona.

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Unusual? Definitely.

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Extraterrestrial? The public demanded an investigation.

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The authorities refused to investigate. Did they have something to hide?

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Come on, be an aircraft or something.

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Find out next on Truth or Scare.

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So far, we know some very mysterious lights appeared in the Arizona sky in 1997.

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Twice. Hundreds of eyewitnesses came forward.

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A few of them even made homemade video tapes. And all of them had questions.

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The first place many people turned was to the local TV news.

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12 news. Blair Meeks.

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Phone calls start happening. Boom. What are these strange lights? What are these strange lights? We're seeing lights over here. We're seeing lights over there.

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This is video of what thousands of Arizonans saw March 13th.

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Many of you saw this row of lights.

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Local TV reporter Jim Schneebelt was trying to sort everything out.

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Some people reported seeing lights at 8.15. Other people reported seeing lights at 10.15.

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Some people saw them as stationary objects over the city. Some people saw them as moving objects coming in from the north.

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But while people swam TV and radio stations with phone calls, Luke is claimed that no one had called them with any sighting.

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Well, that's an interesting statement because I called them twice that night myself.

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This copy of his long distance bill shows that Peter did call. He says he spoke to operator number five.

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Very nice, very accommodating young woman who admitted to me that her switchboard that night, the 13th of March, had been, to use her term,

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paralyzed by calls to the switchboard about the object that had flown over Arizona earlier that night.

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If the Air Force did receive these calls, no one knows why they would deny it.

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Dozens of eyewitnesses and concerned citizens asked for some kind of government investigation.

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But for two months, nothing happened.

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Then on May 6th, 1997, at a Phoenix City Council meeting, Councilwoman Frances Barwood asked why.

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I said, can we find out why nobody's investigating? Can we look at? And there was this silence.

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People are starting to ask more questions. Thanks.

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Thank you.

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No one on the city council thought that an investigation was necessary. But Frances wouldn't give up.

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She kept pushing the city, trying to get officials to take the eyewitness reports seriously.

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Just when things seemed hopeless, Frances's hard work finally paid off.

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5th, Silvington, the governor of Arizona, announced that the state would conduct an official investigation into the events of March 13th, 1997.

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On June 19th, Governor Silvington announced that a police investigation had found the source of the lights.

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And the governor even hinted that they had captured a suspect.

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Now I'll ask Officer Stein and his colleagues to escort the accused into the room so that we may all look upon the guilty party.

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Don't get him too close to me, please.

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Now this just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious.

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Governor Silvington's investigation had all been a joke. Eyewitnesses like Sandra Hickman were not amused.

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I saw it. Other parents saw it. Teachers saw it. A lot of people in the valley saw it. But they won't give us an answer.

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The witnesses were tired of being ignored. With nowhere else to turn, they started searching for answers...on their own.

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A high-tech analysis of the lights brings up even more dramatic questions about just where they came from.

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Next, Untruth or Scare.

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The witnesses were shocked.

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Hundreds of witnesses had seen the strange hovering lights in March of 1997.

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Now Phoenix was burning with curiosity.

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Was this a bona fide sighting of extraterrestrials?

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Maybe there was another explanation.

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For some reason, the governor's office considered the sighting a joke. There was no official investigation.

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But the people wanted answers. And since the government wasn't talking, they came here.

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Village Labs is a computer special effects company run by Jim DeLotoso and Michael Tanner.

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The work they do for TV and movies, they also help investigate UFO sightings.

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Village Labs agreed to study the reports and videotapes.

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We're a lab. We're just like a police lab. We're just like a medical lab where professional investigators send us their evidence.

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Thanks for coming to the Phoenix Lights briefing number four.

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In town meetings like this, Jim and Michael listen to people describe what they'd seen that night.

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Everyone had seen the lights, but different people had different explanations.

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It took a long time for him to fly. 30 miles an hour. This thing didn't appear to fly. It appeared to float.

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Michael Tanner got to know the witnesses one-on-one.

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We have truck drivers. We have doctors. We have lawyers. We have retired military. And they're all genuine.

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You could see pretty much right through it. And that's when we first saw it.

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And then eventually it just started coming out closer so we could see a better view of it.

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The investigators did interviews with more than a hundred witnesses.

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Then they put all their data together to make a timeline of the evening.

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Michael believes the two sightings were related.

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If the lights did come from a UFO, it could have arrived around eight and left at 10.30.

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Next, Jim turned to the physical evidence. The videotapes that were made the night of the phenomenon.

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He took a tape of the 10 o'clock sighting into the lab.

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So the landmarks that we have are the hill that's in the foreground of my art.

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They loaded parts of the video into their computer to analyze the lights.

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Jim's research shows that a candle flame, a light bulb, and a street light all have different optical characteristics.

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In fact, even if some lights seem to look the same, they're actually very different from each other.

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If you know how to look at them.

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Jim examined the lights from airplanes and other sources in the city using the special software.

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His analysis shows that each type of light makes its own kind of frequency wave.

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Match the wave and you can tell what made the light.

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According to Jim's analysis, the mysterious lights over Phoenix weren't like anything he'd seen before.

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The unknown lights don't match. We can't get a match between the unknown and knowns that we have stored.

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Some say the mystery is solved. Others are not so convinced. Is the truth still out there?

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Find out next on Truth or Scare.

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Lights seen above Phoenix had set off a wide-ranging investigation.

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Witnesses testified about what they'd seen and UFO investigators were called in to examine the evidence.

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Everyone involved in the case came up with their own theory to explain what they saw that night.

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The mystery remained.

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Isn't that weird? Look at that.

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Skeptics said that there was a simple explanation. Military planes from nearby Luke Air Force Base.

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Others theorized it could have been some kind of hoax or even unusual weather phenomena.

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Then on June 25, 1997, a local TV station came up with a very convincing theory to explain the lights.

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Well, it's a possible explanation into those mystery lights that appeared over the valley in March.

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But some of you aren't buying it. 12 News has video that might explain what was going on.

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Let's start with pictures that were taken on March 13. Many of you saw this row of lights as they hovered above the valley horizon.

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Now, take a close look at these pictures that we shot just last night. These are flares that the Air Force was dropping near Hilo Bend.

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Illuminers are used to light up battlefields during night combat.

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They're attached to parachutes and dropped out of planes from a high altitude.

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Flares like these can stay lit for as long as five minutes.

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If flares were the explanation, then where did they come from?

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At first, Air Force officials denied that any of their planes were in the area that night.

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But after the news report came out, they changed their story.

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Now they claim they were conducting night maneuvers near Phoenix and using illumination flares.

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Our unit was flying March 13, 1997 as part of Operation Snowbird and we were conducting night training.

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That particular night, our aircraft flew to the North TAC range and that's where they deployed the flares for the training mission that evening.

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Since witnesses saw the lights in the sky to the southwest, the flare explanation would make sense.

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But some people still believe very different phenomena that they saw that night.

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Something that can't be explained way as military flares.

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While they look similar, they don't look the same as flares. Flares flicker. Flares illuminate what's around them and these lights over Phoenix didn't do that.

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There was another crucial problem with the flare theory.

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The Maryland Air National Guard stated that after they released the flares, they fell behind the mountain range to the southwest of Phoenix.

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But that's not what many witnesses reported seeing. They say the lights were in front of the mountains. So how could they have been flares?

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Dr. Leonoid Rudin might be able to settle the debate. His company is Cognitech, where they specialize in image processing.

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Dr. Rudin analyzed the same images that Jim DeLito so had studied. By comparing it to a video taken during the day, he came to a very different conclusion.

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He lines up the two images so that they are right on top of each other and then combines them into one tape.

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Now he can look at the night video and day video at the same time. After studying the moment that the lights disappeared, Dr. Rudin believes they fell behind the mountains.

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Therefore, the only conclusion we have is that those lights are behind the mountains, not in front of the mountains.

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What do you think it was? It's true. The 10 o'clock event looks a lot like flares.

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But remember, there was another sighting that night. About two hours earlier, those lights can't be explained so easily.

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A number of witnesses reported seeing a huge V-shaped formation passing over them between 815 and 845.

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Only one person captured it on video tape. But there are plenty of theories about what it was.

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Could be anything from a stealth aircraft or a black project. Could even be a military weapon that's actually creating like a hologram image.

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And that's why the description varies on the shape and makeup of the object.

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But if it was a secret military plane, they probably wouldn't have flown it over a huge city.

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Jim DeLitozzo thinks the first event was something more mysterious and that the air guard was investigating it themselves.

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But what probably happened is that unknown aircraft of unknown origin penetrated into military airspace. This has happened before.

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When the military released the flares, the unidentified visitors would have left the area, probably at top speed.

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Maybe they'll be back.

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Or maybe we'll be in the dark forever.

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Whether they're man-made, whether they're from another galaxy, whether they're flares, I don't know.

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At this point, they are truly UFOs, unidentified flying objects.

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The two separate UFO events that were seen that night over Phoenix were never completely explained.

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Around 10pm, the Maryland air guard says it dropped flares that landed behind the mountains.

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But some believe this doesn't fully explain that V formation moving so quickly across the sky.

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According to some, there may be things still left to investigate.

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Until then, we may never know exactly what crossed the skies of Phoenix.

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The first event was a mysterious event that was not fully explained.

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The first event was a mysterious event that was not fully explained.

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The first event was a mysterious event that was not fully explained.

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The first event was a mysterious event that was not fully explained.

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The first event was a mysterious event that was not fully explained.

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Thanks for watching!