Air Traffic
Controllers Who Saw UFO Muzzled by FAA
Tue Apr 22, 2008
By Ray Stern
Air traffic controllers in the main tower of Phoenix Sky Harbor
International Airport saw last night's bizarre spectacle of red lights
flying across North Valley skies, but the Federal Aviation
Administration won't let them talk to the media.
Ian Gregor, FAA regional spokesman, says the agency's policy won't allow
controllers to comment even if they want to relate their experience.
Gregor confirmed that "several" air traffic controllers in the tower saw
the staggered formation of mysterious lights moving in the sky,
apparently over North Phoenix. He says he heard that second-hand, though
-- the tower's manager told him about it.
The controllers didn't consider the source of the lights to be a hazard,
because nothing was popping up on radar, Gregor says.
Several media outlets are displaying photographs of the lights taken by
Valley residents, which seems to confirm that something was up there.
Heck, the Republic even quoted no less an eminent source than one of its
own reporters, Anne Ryman, as having eyewitnessed the event. Photos and
videos can be seen today on www.azcentral.com.
The lights have defied quick explanation. Even the Sky Harbor lookouts
had "no idea" what the darned things were, Gregor says.
Yet it seems clear air traffic controllers could offer a professional
description of the UFOs, since they are, presumably, experts at spotting
distant aircraft. Their guesses at the altitude, distance, speed and
physical nature (if any) of the UFOs would carry more weight than those
of the average skywatcher.
Gregor won't budge, though. "This has nothing to do with the FAA," he
says.
New Times has filed a formal request with the FAA for radar records of
any unidentified aircraft in the area from the agency's Albuquerque and
Phoenix-area radar centers, just in case anything was missed.
The sky was clear last night, so the lights apparently weren't
reflections from a source on the ground. Aircraft would have shown up on
radar. Military stealth aircraft would be unlikely to be covered in
brilliant red lights. So would alien spacecraft, in this writer's humble
opinion. You take the time to fly thousands, if not millions, of light
years across space to Earth, only to put on a relatively boring air
show? What hosers, these aliens! They can't even seem to give us a
missing man formation, much less the secret to a long-lasting
technological civilization.
These new lights may be more mysterious than the V-shaped formation over
Phoenix that caused a stir in 1997. After that sighting, the military
confirmed there were aircraft dropping flares near the Phoenix area, and
New Times reported that a local guy named Mitch Stanley looked at the
source of the lights with his telescope and saw -- airplanes. His
description of squared-off wings gibed with a type of ground-attack
airplane called an A-10 Warthog, the same type the military said had
been in the area that night. I didn't see the famed Phoenix Lights, but
it makes sense to me that if they might have been A-10s, they probably
were.
I'd like a rational explanation for these new lights, and soon --
because the media abhors a vacuum. And there are plently of people who
will come out the woodwork to fill that vacuum with all sorts of
ungrounded nonsense.
Paradise Valley resident Lynn Kitei, who has made a career out of the
1997 lights, is a case study in how much bull can be packed into a few
unidentified lights: "Kitei's research goes far beyond UFOs," says a
2006 East Valley Tribune article. "She said she believes ghosts, UFOs
and other unexplained phenomena are all connected."
Still, even skeptics like me can't shake their curiousity about things
like this. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, incredible claims require
incredibly good evidence. So far, there's just no telling whether these
lights represented actual aircraft, reflections, weather-related
phenomena, Satan, incorporeal alien life or mass hysteria (sorry, Anne).
Stay tuned.
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