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March 14, 1997 - Art Bell
03:28
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Phoenix Lights
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
It's about three minutes and ten seconds.
It comes out of Luke Air Force Base within hours of the event over Phoenix.
Here we go.
Let me set the tape and I'll put a time here.
For the record, it's 0320 hours on Friday, the 14th of March, 97.
I'm talking with a gentleman who's just calling from Phoenix.
Okay, sir, go ahead.
That's right.
The Luke Air Force Base is actually in Luke Field.
I got off shifts about 30 minutes ago.
At 8.15, I'm ready alert at Luke Air Force Base, which is the two F1 teams that we keep on ready alert.
They're part of the Air Force 1 and Air Force 2 protection group.
We protect them when they come west of the Iraqi whenever the president or any dignitaries on board.
They were launched because all hell broke loose, basically.
Apparently, we got a call from Prescott Valley Airport, a small airport north of us, I'm sorry, Northwest, and reporting an object that had a near miss with a small assessment aircraft.
The call came up once a radio, approximately 8.32, from my understanding, that they encountered something over the sky over Phoenix, Arizona, over the area of 7th Avenue and Indian School Road.
They don't know what it was.
The description that one of the pilots stated that they had a visual on it.
They've got a gun camera film of it.
They have no radar tape of it.
It scared the hell out of them.
I've never seen this gun talking about it.
Yeah, command pilot of this particular flight.
He'll never talk.
He's a real professional.
Never seen this man.
I've never seen this man scared.
Are you familiar with the term white noise, flanking out radar?
My understanding is that's what they got, was strictly white noise.
His statement was that they followed this aircraft.
It went on a straight line course heading towards Vector Harbor Airport, which is one of our main airports here, and it entered the pattern, Sky Harbor Airport, across the pattern of the outbound runways.
The outbound runways at that time, the wind was coming in from the west.
They encountered going in originally two 737s and a DC-10 taking off from Sky Harbor.
We have an American West Hub here, so we've got a lot of space for it.
This aircraft says it was, his understanding was that it was at approximately 18,000 feet, descending to 10,005.
When it got to Angel 10, 10,5, it completely went dark.
He doesn't know if it was one aircraft or several aircraft.
He saw five distinct lights in a triangular pattern.
The first three lights were in a tight triangular formation.
One of the new lights was covered at about, he said that it was about 200 yards, and then the other light was at about 400 yards, also on the east side of the triangle, if you will.
His leak is that this might have been more than one aircraft.
He could not describe the aircraft.
All he could say is that there were lights.
There were no sort of lights.
It was a light.
He said it as light as a star, not like the North Star.
Right now, Mars and Jupiter are very bright in the sky, but this was not very bright.
And they dimmed.
And when they dimmed, you realize landing lights generally do not have that capability.
They then went, and they dimmed in unison.
After dimming, they went completely dark.
The aircraft then passed into the pattern.
They came back on, followed the straight line of 7th Avenue, which cuts right through Phoenix.
And they kept on going, they turned into the pattern.
They came back on approximately, and this follows the straight line of 7th Avenue, which cuts right through Phoenix.
And they kept on going, they came back on they passed a mountain called South Mountain.
You're scared to death.
I'm not sure what it was through the Atlantic basis.
We had a complete lockdown.
The facility was closed.
The facility was closed.
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