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By Leslie Kean (page 1)

Ten years after the Arizona UFO incident known as the “Phoenix Lights,” former Arizona
Republican Governor Fife Symington, III, now says that he himself was a witness to one of
the strange unidentified flying objects, even though he originally did not say so publicly.

“It was enormous and inexplicable,” he said in an exclusive interview from his home in
Phoenix. “Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too.”

On March 13, 1997, during Symington’s second term as Governor, thousands saw multiple
triangular and V-shaped craft, gliding slowly and silently across the sky for half an hour
beginning at approximately 8:15 pm. Awestruck witnesses, throughout the state, estimated
that the eerie, lighted vehicles were bigger than many football fields, up to a mile long.

Arizona Senator John McCain, a friend of Symington’s who the former Governor describes as
“open-minded,” acknowledged at a 2000 press conference that lights were seen over
Arizona. “That has never been fully explained. But I have to tell you that I do not have any
evidence whatsoever of aliens or UFOs,” he said.

The evidence for a possible UFO, which simply means something in the sky that can’t be
identified, lies in the fact that countless witnesses reported seeing low, gigantic, technological
flying machines that blocked out the stars - not merely lights. Now the former Governor
attests to that.

Symington says he saw a large triangular “craft of unknown origin” with lights, moving slowly.
“It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical,” he says.
“It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.”

The sightings of the objects that evening are sometimes confused with the row of lights that
appeared at about 10 pm, near Phoenix, and have been shown repeatedly on television
news. These later lights were probably flares. People witnessed the objects at around 8:30
because they were outside on that pleasant, cloudless night watching the Hale-Bopp Comet.

Symington was known for ridiculing the incident at a spoof press conference, so his
statement marks a dramatic turnaround. He wants to make amends to his constituents and
set the record straight.

On the morning of June 19, 1997, when pressure was building from frustrated citizens who
wanted answers, the Governor announced on television that he was ordering a full
investigation and would make “all the necessary inquiries. We’re going to get to the bottom of
this. We’re going to find out if it was a UFO,” he said in a serious tone.

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Later that same afternoon, Symington suddenly called a press conference and told viewers
that he had found the source behind the Phoenix Lights. His chief-of-staff, Jay Heiler, was
escorted in by public safety police officers while handcuffed, wearing a large rubber mask
and dressed as a space alien. The Governor presented the costumed extraterrestrial as the
“guilty party.” While laughter filled the room, he joked that “this just goes to show that you
guys are entirely too serious.”

“It was an insult to the intelligence of the witnesses,” Barwood recalls. “The message to
Arizona citizens was that reporting this was stupid.”

“If I had to do it all over again I probably would have handled it differently,” Symington
explains. He says that the state of Arizona was “on the brink of hysteria” about the UFO
sighting when he called the press conference, and the frenzy was building. “I wanted them to
lighten up and calm down, so I introduced a little levity. But I never felt that the overall
situation was a matter of ridicule,” he says.

The former Governor, a cousin of the late Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, states that the
incident remains open and unsolved, and should be officially investigated. The US
Government has never acknowledged that something was in the sky that night.

Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Barwood was the only elected official to launch a public
investigation in 1997, but she received no information from any level of government. Barwood
spoke with over seven hundred witnesses, including police, pilots and former military, who
provided very similar descriptions. “The government never interviewed even one witness,”
she says.

Symington also attempted to find an explanation. He called the Commander at Luke Air
Force Base, the General in charge of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of
Public Safety in 1997. None of these officials had answers, and they were “perplexed,” he
says.

In 2000, the Department of Defense maintained that it could not find any information about
the triangular object, in response to a court-ordered search requested by a U.S. District court
in Phoenix, as part of a class action suit filed by witnesses.
.
“How could they possibly not know about these huge craft flying low over major population
centers? That’s inconceivable, but it’s also frightening,” Barwood commented.

Symington’s announcement is bolstered by the fact that similar flying objects have been
documented by the governments of England and Belgium.

On March 30, 1990, the Belgian Air Force sent two F-16s armed with missiles to intercept a
black triangular UFO displaying bright lights on its underside. The object could accelerate or
dive at tremendous speeds, starting from a stationary position, as recorded on radar. It flew
at the speed of sound without making a sonic boom.