Two items from a recent tv show - amazing veteran Loch Ness Monster hunter Steve Feltham, direct from the shores of the Loch. And a 2023 update on the Phoenix Lights from leading experiencer and researcher Dr Lynne Kitei...
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is definitely Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you very much for bearing with me over these last couple of weeks and couple of months.
Hope everything is okay with you.
Wonderful news here.
I don't want to jinx it by talking about it, but the sun is still beating down over London.
Gentle breeze here, not a cloud in the sky.
It's June, and as they say, I'm loving it.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his work.
And thank you very much for all of your communications recently, both through my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and also through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you for the kind things that you say and for just being there for me.
Two things from my recent TV show on this edition of The Unexplained to preserve them here for posterity.
Number one, direct from the shores of Loch Ness, leading Loch Ness monster expert, the daddy of them all, his name is Steve Feltam, and he's lived on the shores of Loch Ness, as you will hear, for 30 years or so.
What he doesn't know about the phenomenon is just not worth knowing.
He doesn't do a lot of interviews, so I was really, really grateful and pleased that he did one with me.
So it's not the longest conversation in the world.
We always have time constraints on TV, which I'm sure you know drive me absolutely nuts, but you know, you have to live with it.
So Steve Felton first about the Loch Ness Monster and then an update in 2023 about the 1997 Phoenix Lights mass UAP sighting.
Dr. Lynn Keitai is here.
She's been on the show before, hasn't been on for a number of years, so we're going to hear from Dr. Lynn Keitai as the second item from my recent TV show.
I think that's all I've got to say.
Apart from the fact that when you get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right.
First up then, Loch Ness Monster update, including the impact of AI on the Loch Ness Monster.
Yes, there is an impact, and you'll find out what it is.
This is Steve Felton.
Hi there.
Hi, good to see you, Howard.
How do you describe yourself then, Steve?
Because, you know, the newspapers give you all kinds of, you know, perky little names, but how would you describe yourself?
Nessie Hunter, I suppose.
Full-time Nessie Hunter.
World champion at not being able to find Nessie.
But you are still looking, and you moved up to Loch Ness, well, very close to Loch Ness, in the 1990s to do this, didn't you?
To the shore of Loch Ness.
I'm about 12 feet from the water right now.
I moved in 1991, full-time, age 28, to follow my passion and try and solve this mystery.
And that's what I've been doing for the last 32 years now, watching and waiting, collating other people's information.
You're actually there on the scene, actually on the shores of the loch.
Here comes the van.
You were saying?
This is the van.
This is the mobile home that I live in that I've been living in for 32 years.
How fantastic is that?
So I'm literally on the beach.
When the water comes up as high as it can do in the winter, it comes to my door.
So if anybody was going to see Nessie, you would, because you're there.
You would think so.
I would think so.
Yeah, that was what I thought in 1991 when I arrived full time.
I thought, yep, it shouldn't take long to get this mystery solved.
And sure enough, in the first year, I did get a glimpse of something for five seconds, something shot through the bay at Fort Augustus, like a torpedo.
And that gave me the false impression that it wouldn't be long before I'd get the next glimpse of it.
And the next time I saw it, I would take a photograph of it.
And I'm currently still waiting for that second glimpse.
So talk to me a bit.
And there you are living in a camper van, right?
And we can see that in the background.
What's your state of readiness?
Do you have like, you know, cameras at the ready, night vision?
Oh, my God, you do.
How fab is that?
So you're always, you are like a coiled spring constantly.
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
That's to hand.
I'm outside most of the time with binoculars, looking down the link where I am at Dawes on Dawes Beach.
Loch Ness stretches away for 23 miles in front of me to Fort Augustus.
So I've got the whole view looking right away down this tunnel of the Loch.
And yeah, but I realized I'm only really looking at the first mile.
After that, you know, it's a bit out of my range, really.
I've spent three decades of my life trying to be a good broadcaster and consistently failed, but I keep doing it.
Something's driving me.
You failed to find Nessie and you've been doing it for a similar length of time.
What is it that drives you?
For me, it's the amount, because I'm here full-time and I'm known to be here, people come and report things to me that I wouldn't hear of if I was anywhere else in the world on an almost daily basis throughout the summer.
And it might be something they saw yesterday, 10 days ago, a year ago, 60 years ago.
And so I can sift through what they're telling me and pick out the good, the bad, and try.
You've got a sense for it now because you've been doing it for so long.
Absolutely.
Now, the visitor center there is opening again for the season on the 10th of June.
Fine dates for the Gemini people, the 10th of June.
Does that make your life easier or more difficult?
I think it's going to do us all a power of good.
I think it's going to give us a right boost of public perception.
I think what they say about the exhibition is that it's going to put the mystery back into the subject, put the romance back into it, open up the possibilities, give a voice to the eyewitnesses as well.
That's important.
Without the eyewitnesses, we haven't got a mystery, really.
So true enough.
If people go to the visitor center and they want to meet you, come along and talk to them.
You're the real deal.
Are you happy to meet people who come up?
It's part of what I do.
I mean, through the summer here on Dawes Beach, every day, 300, 400 people a day come by and 99% of them say, have you seen it yet?
And yeah.
So yeah, I'm meeting people all the time.
I'm known to be here.
People come and they ask me questions, tell me what they've seen and we go from there really and the community's accepted you last question sadly we haven't got nearly enough time so I'd love now that I've got you on the show I wish I had more time with you but I hope we can do more of this in the future last question and artificial intelligence they've been saying in the papers the last week or two that AI is not going to be a good thing for Loch Ness monster hunting because we're not going to be able to tell genuine pictures from fakes what do you think absolutely I
see a time where I look at photographs and I can see boat wakes.
You can see, even if it's a hoax, a deliberate hoax, in the past it's been bits of Photoshop or other ways of faking pictures.
But with the new deep fakes that will come along, I'm not going to be able to tell what...
You can now, you can just about at the moment still, but with this subject, we're at the dawn of flight.
And soon enough, the only things I'm really going to be able to trust is what I see with my own eye, really.
I think it's a little worrying.
It's another aspect of AI.
I've loved having this conversation with you and I want to talk more at some point.
I'd love to meet you at some point, Steve, if you could bear the experience.
If you found, say tonight, you know, we stopped doing this and you see somebody splash in the water, you get the photograph that proves that Nessie exists.
Do you then retire?
I figure solving this one gives me the credibility to go and find all the other ones in Lake Monsters, Lake Monsters around the world.
Yeah, I mean, there are several, aren't there, all over the world?
There's one in China, I think.
I believe so, yeah.
Yeah.
And there's Lake Champlain in the United States?
No, I mean, you could go and you could take the camper van if they'll let you export it anywhere.
Thank you very much, Steve.
You are an amazing man.
I didn't know that you lived in a camper van by the side of the lake and that's my bad research, my bad for not knowing that.
That is.
Yeah, that is.
But you're obviously happy doing it.
I am very happy doing it.
Thank you.
Steve, thank you so much for giving me your time tonight.
Steve Felton, ace Loch Ness Monster investigator, doesn't do many interviews, so I'm delighted that he spoke with me.
Steve, thank you for giving me your time last Sunday.
Okay, Dr. Lynn Kitai, leading proponent, exponent of the Phoenix Lights events in 1997.
She is talking about it still 26 years, is it later, and is always totally committed and totally interesting about this amazing mass phenomenon witnessed, they say, by upwards of 10,000 people and reports are still coming in.
So let's hear from Dr. Lynn Kitai.
Dr. Lynn, thank you for coming on.
It's such a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you for having me and letting me share the inside story of the Phoenix Lights, because there's so much myths and disinformation out there, as you know.
Indeed.
I watched a video presentation of yours.
It was you giving a lecture, which you did brilliantly, but the one thing that came out of it was, and the one thing that will come out of this conversation is, so many people don't really understand what this was all about.
They bandy the term about, but they don't have any idea.
I think I need to give you a biography before we say anything here.
The biography describes you as physician, international health educator, award-winning author and documentarian, director of the Phoenix Lights Network, key witness to this historic and still unexplained event in 1997.
And that is not all of it, is it, Dr. Lynn?
There is much more to this story.
In fact, the poster behind me is for our internationally acclaimed an award-winning documentary.
And I actually shot this.
It's a true picture, 35 millimeter, one month after 9-11.
There's a whole story to that one.
But if anybody's near their computer and can get on the Phoenix Lights Network website, just Google Phoenix Lights Network.
or come up first and go to the photo page.
You'll see my unique collection.
One of the reasons that I felt compelled as a scientist to look at the data as credibly as possible as a physician to let people know they're not crazy.
Even though most anomalies can be explained, only a small percentage cannot.
Just because we don't have the technology yet to definitively define what these things are, it doesn't mean they're not real.
So we might be looking on the AM dial for an FM frequency.
So it's time we get this topic out in the open.
We address it.
We accept it.
And we study it.
And I'm actually, I have a study right now.
If you get on the website, you'll see on the page that comes up first, the landing page, is a triangle.
And right underneath, we want to get the data, quantitate the most credible data.
And again, being as scientific as I can.
And also, as a physician, letting people share.
It's really important to share when you have an experience like this.
Even though most can be explained, when someone does have a paranormal experience, it's real to them.
And it's cathartic and healing to share.
And I've had so many people tell me.
We have over 1,000 people worldwide who have shared either that they saw the Phoenix Lights.
And if anybody saw them on March 13, 1997, we'd love to hear from you.
Or have heard about it.
And it affected them at a very deep level.
The findings are astounding.
And as far as an experiencer myself, I know how it feels that it's important.
Even though I stayed anonymous for seven years after the mass sighting came forward in 2005.
And as an educator of vital health issues for now over 50 years, how could I not share this vital issue, Howard?
So that's one of the main reasons I came forward.
And I haven't looked back since.
And we have to say that people kindly send me videos of things that they've seen from their bedroom window that appear to be flashing lights in the sky that may morph and mutate into something else and then move off at great speed.
a lot but this instance and incident which is something that happened in the very dawning era of the internet So the internet for most people was something that was dial-up, was slow, or they didn't have it.
We didn't have the instant global communication that we have now.
So the way that this story came out is very different.
But we have to say, crucially, that this is the one UFO, UAP sighting, whatever you want to call it, that was witnessed, it is claimed, by an estimated 10,000 people.
At least, at least.
And there's so much missing disinformation out there.
You've probably seen Howard on the internet or the media talk about one or two events for a couple of hours.
No, no, no, no, no.
Not only was I seeing them for two years prior and two months before, and you'll see it on the photo page on the Phoenix Lights Network website, captured the same over mile-wide phenomena head-on, turning into a V-shape as I was shooting it on 35 millimeters.
They're in the negative.
And it was so unnerving and different and massive and awesome that I found air traffic controllers the next morning when I searched around for if anybody else saw them.
We saw the same thing at the same time over class B restricted airspace.
There is so much to the story, a thousand feet altitude, the entire thing they said turned actually against the wind as a unit and then elevated slowly and moved behind South Mountain just south of the airport.
They ruled out every conventional aircraft, balloons, Chinese lanterns, even skydivers and flares, skydivers and lights.
And on the morning after the mass sighting, because I caught the signature video that night.
Let's roll a little bit of the video so that we can see it as we talk, Lynn.
So let's just do this now, if we can.
All right.
Now, this is a video that you shot using the technology of the time, right?
No.
No.
All right.
You explained to me, what is this?
I don't know.
Okay.
To be honest, I would have been happy to send you the, All right.
Well, let's drop.
Let's just say to the people doing the video here, please can we take that down?
And my apologies to you, Lynn.
No, that's okay.
I mean, look, if you look on YouTube, you know, any day of the week, you can see this stuff.
And it is a kind of triangular formation like this, isn't it?
But it is on a scale that is, and it's not just you reporting that.
It is so many of the witnesses, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of people.
Not only that, Howard.
Not only that.
Not only that, but that's the other misconception or, you know, I mean, people just don't know that not only there were at least 10,000 people outside on a very clear night looking up at the sky at the Hailbop Comet when they also caught a glimpse of one to eight miles wide.
Okay, according to Peter Davenport from the National UFO Reporting Center, either these orbs, these balls of light that seemed to be attached to something.
That's what the air traffic controllers even described, but they couldn't quite see what these lights were attached to, or actual craft.
And if you go to the GAP page, GAP Geospatial Animation Project on the Phoenix Lights Network website, you'll see a 12-year study.
Two or more people had to see the same craft to be in the study, and there were 10 different craft described by two or more people seeing the same craft.
Either it was one craft that could morph into looking different with a perspective from where the person was standing or a parade.
And that's ultimately what the investigators finally concluded because it wasn't just one or two hours.
It was over a dozen hours starting at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, daylight sightings in Arizona, 5 o'clock hour.
They were seen by Native Americans in New Mexico.
The 7 o'clock hour and beyond in California.
And there's an unbelievable story, the 10 o'clock hour, two commercial airline pilots called into radar to report one of these over mile wide craft covering Las Vegas.
And these sightings continued all the way until 5.30 the next morning when a Boeing crew was coming into the airport and saw one of these massive craft covering their tarmac.
I mean, the descriptions and the technology itself, because people right above their heads, rooftop, going about 30 miles an hour.
Some people saw it take off at blink speed, totally silent, didn't even disperse the air.
Some people saw these orbs detach from the main object, go out into the environment, and then redock with it later.
Other people saw these crafts split in two and straight, just shoot straight up.
We haven't seen anything.
And tell me if you know anything that even comes close to this technology, particularly something that's eight miles wide.
The scale and the size and the variety of these reports, all of them expressed with surprise and in many cases, including your own awe.
One of the videos that I have seen, one of the representations, and I'm not sure whether it was a reconstruction or whether it was the actual thing itself, but just for we have more people who are hearing this as radio than are seeing it as television.
So for those people, and this show I think is unique on the station in that it has a lot of radio engagement because that's it, as you know, Lynn, that's the roots of it.
These lights that had a sort of triangular formation, but also were splitting off and joining up and doing all sorts of aerobatics.
Number one, they were huge, but they looked rather like the kind of hanging metal lamps that you would see in old schools in this country and in your country.
These days, smart restaurants buy them for a lot of money and they do them up and put new bulbs in them.
But they looked like enormous versions of those things hanging silently in the sky.
Not only that, but there were different shapes.
I mean, there was triangle.
There was also a disc shape.
One of the craft that people described that two people saw, more than two people saw, was actually also seen and videotaped in St. Petersburg, Russia, a month before our mass lighting.
They had a mass sighting.
People don't know this.
There is so much to this story.
February 19th, over the tarmac.
And some civilians also got video of it that are identical.
And this particular craft has, each light has three lights.
I mean, it's just, it's amazing, the varied things that people saw.
And also that we haven't seen anything that comes close to this technology.
And You would think with the precarious situation around the world, if somebody did have this technology by now, 26 years later, they would have shown it.
And I have to say, the only, there was so much to this story.
And when I finally did come forward, I had a 750-page journal.
I don't know if you know this.
I squeezed my, I actually pushed my whole accomplished medical career aside for seven years to try to find a logical source and meaning what I had witnessed and photographed.
I have yet to find it 26 years later.
What I did find was so mind-boggling and so compelling that ultimately, as an educator, as I said, I just had to share it and let people decide for themselves because there is so much more to the story.
Even as the story unfolds, there was no investigation or explanation by the government or military.
And that's astonishing, isn't it?
Because we know the amount of investigation publicly and much more secretly was done into Roswell and other happenings.
But for a thoroughgoing public investigation not to be done about this is astonishing.
For this reason, you were there at the time of the mass sighting and all of those thousands of people were also seeing something that they could not explain and recording that, whether they were doing it in video or just recording it in their heads to later tell people about it.
It is an astonishing thing.
But when you were experiencing the mass sighting, Lynn, because we didn't have the communication that we've got today, did you know it was a mass sighting?
And when did you get to know that?
When did you get to feel that?
That's very two points that you brought up that are really great.
First of all, it's really important for your audience to know there has not been one, not one credible report of harm, threat, or abduction associated with the mass sighting.
As you mentioned, people are just in awe and in wonder and curious.
I mean, that in itself, which we're finding out in our own scientific study, is, I mean, it is mind-boggling how this one event really touched people at a very deep personal level, touched each person at a personal level and woke people up to the fact that we're not alone in this universe.
But to answer your question again, there is so much to this story.
I mean, what was the second question that you asked?
I asked you about the fact that we didn't have the communication ability and how it filtered through to you.
And the second part of it was what you did, I guess what you did about it.
I mean, it was implied in that question, but didn't want to know what you did about it.
That's a great question, too, because, you know, I had been seeing them for two months before and photographing them.
And my husband was getting a little annoyed with me.
Each person comes from a different background, different upbringing, different belief systems.
Some people can't deal with this topic.
Some people don't want to.
But that's okay.
Everyone in their own time.
But the data is there now.
And I was just curious what it might have been.
I was looking for a logical explanation.
I started showing, this is how far away I was.
A friend of a friend had a neighbor who had a friend who knew the past president of MUFON, Mutual UFO Network, which I had never heard of before.
And I called him up.
I said, look, I have a picture from 95, a close sighting that I would love somebody to tell me what it is because we had a very close sighting two years before.
This is when it started for me and my husband, right outside our bedroom window.
And I got 35 millimeter photographs.
All my 35 millimeter photographs have been analyzed and authenticated by military and university optical experts.
No one can tell me what they are.
And they can't be denied.
They're in the negative, as you said.
I mean, now we have digital and all that.
It can be faked.
Most of us, when strange things happen, though, and I'm sorry just to jump in with this question, this just sprung into my mind here.
Most of us don't have the, certainly in that era where, you know, I've got a camera, I can take a picture of anything right now.
But, you know, back then, that wasn't the case.
You know, we were using film cameras, many of us.
You seem to be incredibly well prepared for this.
Well, that's why, because in 95, I saw them up close and personal.
And I collect sunsets.
We have beautiful sunsets here in Arizona.
And we live mountainside, very high on the mountain and have a panoramic view.
You'll see in the first picture on the photo page of the Phoenix Lights Network website, the topography.
And we have a panoramic view.
We know what train lights, plane lights, and car lights and street lights and house lights look like.
These are very, very different.
And I had my camera handy when we had this closed sighting and I happened to run for it and take pictures of these orbs in a pyramid formation.
Like I said, there's so much more to this story while they were cloaking.
I mean, that experience itself set me off.
I knew I had no interest or knowledge in this topic.
And then two years later, I had my camera handy and took pictures of this over mile-wide phenomenon head-on turning into a V. At that point, I got a tripod and I kept it handy in case they came back.
We're going to have to be prepared for this one.
On the night of the mass, the time of the mass sighting, right?
It was something that was over a period of time, we know.
How did you get to know that it was happening again?
It had happened to you before.
How did you know that it was happening then?
Who alerted you?
Actually, and I was getting to that, the state director, the past state director from MUFON referred me to a field investigator for the following Wednesday.
There are a lot of serendipities.
I don't believe in coincidence anymore because he called on Tuesday to postpone because the then state director's mom had passed on Saturday.
The funeral was Wednesday morning.
He said, could you, you know, reschedule?
I said, the only window of opportunity I had for another two, three weeks was Friday morning at 10 o'clock.
He said, fine.
I knock on his door.
He opens the door.
The first thing he says to me is, did you see the man sighting last night?
And I was taken aback.
I said, well, I saw something very similar to what I told him about two months ago.
In fact, it looked like the same exact phenomenon in the same exact location at a distance near the airport.
And I called The air traffic controllers that morning, the morning after, and they confirmed that it was over a thousand feet altitude, the same exact phenomena.
And I said, actually, I got video of it because when it turned, it turned from six to three.
And he says NBC was coming to interview him in a half an hour.
I said, Whoa, I said, I used to do health reporting for NBC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 76.
I started a health program that was syndicated that was showing in Phoenix when we moved here at CBS in the early 80s and 1980.
And then I did a program there for NBC on health reporting.
And I said, someone might recognize me.
I don't know what we're dealing with.
Is it a hoax?
Is it military or whatever?
But it's not about me.
It's never been about me.
It's about the data.
And I said, make a copy of the video, share it with whoever.
I'm out of here.
And I left that afternoon.
Now, unbeknownst to me, I mean, to me, it was just another night the night before.
And I happened to get video of it.
But by four o'clock, when the first news came, when you know how we have breaking news now, every news station was showing my video.
It was really exciting.
I have to tell you, Howard.
I mean, just so people could see what we saw.
And by nine o'clock, you started showing this other video.
There were a couple of other videos.
One is an arrowhead, which you were showing earlier, of five lights.
And if you just look at that video, those lights are attached to something or have a force field holding them in rock solid formation.
That video and my video were shot before 10 o'clock.
After 10 o'clock, there were two boomerang-shaped, huge boomerang-shaped videos.
One of them has become very famous and also has been under attack since 97 for being flares, because that's the only explanation they ever came up with.
And this is interesting.
I'm leaving a lot out, but it wasn't until months later, June 18th, a front page USA Today article came out, opening our sighting for the first time to people worldwide, including UK.
And we were deluged by media from all over the world who had not heard about our sighting.
And once they talked to the witnesses, their reports were so detailed and so heartfelt that they too, I mean, everybody was asking for an investigation.
For the first time, and we're going to have to park this for just a second to take some commercials, Lynn.
You'll be aware of that phenomenon.
For the first time, we have a commonality between people.
In other words, the sense in a new era without the internet for most people, but the sense that we've all experienced something, but we don't know what the hell it was.
Let's get back to the story of the Phoenix lights, and Dr. Lynn Kitai is with us.
Lynn, there is, you rightly say, so much to talk about this.
At what stage did you become aware?
Because I can see, you know, now that we can see each other for the first time, your enthusiasm for it is palpable.
It's radiating itself to me.
Can you tell?
Totally.
But at what stage did you start to believe that you were experiencing something profound?
Because you clearly did.
Actually, in 95, when we had our closed sighting, I mean, that in itself, and I hope people will pick up the book.
It's available in UK on Amazon, The Phoenix Lights, a Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone.
It's in its fourth print now because the story keeps unfolding.
I didn't want to write another book.
The first book was 750-page journal that I squeezed the best into 230 pages so that people could see because there's so many people that have experienced something unusual.
And I was such a healthy skeptic.
I was looking for any logical explanation how the story unfolded for me itself.
But again, it's not about me.
It's about the data.
But certainly the closed sighting itself, because there were three orbs and a pyramid formation, one on top and two closely underneath, just yards from our home.
And both my husband and I saw it.
It's a private gated mountainside home.
There is no way it was military or nestled in the mountains or anybody should even be there.
But I got pictures.
I captured pictures as they were cloaking.
It seemed like they were going into another dimension.
They disappeared.
You say that they were cloaking, but are you sure they weren't just going behind clouds?
No, because they were right in front of our face.
Okay.
No clouds of that kind of level.
I mean, you know, if you, well, we don't have time to get into the whole thing, but they actually started to shrink very, very slowly, mechanically, as if there was an intelligence behind them.
And I got out on our balcony and shot a picture of the two lower orbs after the top one disappeared.
And first of all, it felt like time had stopped.
It was just bizarre, that you couldn't hear a thing.
It was just uncanny.
And as intently as I was watching these orbs, these two lower orbs, it just felt like there was an intelligence there.
It just did.
And going through my mind, I was thinking, who are you?
What are you?
Do you know that I'm here?
I'd love to meet you.
And did you feel it was communicating with you specifically?
Well, I have to say that it just felt like something was there watching.
And many people felt the same way during the mass sighting.
Not only did people feel like something was watching them, but they had telepathic messages as well.
I mean, the story is just fascinating.
And we're quantifying it.
We are absolutely verifying that in our study that we're doing, the Phoenix Light study.
But in the meantime, I watched as the second, the bottom orb was shrinking, just like the top one did, something told me to take a picture and I did.
And that was the only one that turned out at the time.
But for me, it was confirmation that, and just look at it.
I mean, it's there in the picture in 95.
And when they were analyzed years later, a year after the mass sighting, it was noticed by Navy optical physicist Dr. Bruce McAbee that the same exact formation at a distance that I would capture two months before the mass sighting and during the mass sighting and subsequently was in the same spot in the distance in those pictures disappearing in 95.
So they were there in 95.
I mean, there is so much to this story.
This story was so big, Lynn.
Why did it go away?
Because, as you said, NBC, CBS, ABC, all of the networks covered this thing.
CNN, they all ran with it.
The newspapers ran with it.
And then it went away.
It was so big.
It's very surprising that it did go away.
Well, it really hasn't gone away.
But for those months before the USA Today article, there wasn't a whisper outside of Arizona.
And overnight, it went viral.
And like you mentioned earlier, we didn't have social media then.
And yet, it went viral.
Every national morning show throughout the United States, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings were covering the Phoenix Lights.
And by that afternoon, the day after, after nothing for months, we get a public announcement that then Governor Fyfe Simington was holding an unscheduled press conference for that afternoon to reveal the culprit.
This was June 19th of the Phoenix Lights, the Lights Over Phoenix.
And he comes marching out one of his aides in a giant alien head costume and made a mockery of it.
And that did put a lid on it for a bit.
Okay.
And it wasn't until a month later, because they had to come up with something.
They could blow off people's stories, that it was a mirage, that it was a black object, whatever, you know, whatever.
Weather balloons.
Pardon me?
Weather balloons.
Right.
Weather balloons or swamp gas.
But they couldn't blow off the videos.
And whoever came up with this was brilliant, I have to say, because in video, it doesn't do the orbs justice, the lights justice.
They're much smaller.
They're white.
They flicker, even though if you really study the formations, they're very compelling.
Okay.
But I had a 35 millimeter.
Nobody knew that I did.
But three years later.
Okay.
Well, actually, a month after Symington came, you know, had the press conference, suddenly I get a call because I called every military base.
I really tried to do my homework and find out what was going on.
And I got higher ups at the military that had no idea.
They were just as curious as we were.
They wanted to meet with me because they knew I had taken pictures, but I didn't know them any details.
Did you have those meetings?
No, I would not.
Are you kidding?
But I did get a call from one of the heads of PR at the Air National Guard a month later, July 24th, saying, oh, I think we know what those lights were back in March, Dr. Lynn.
And I said, I was thrilled.
I was looking for any logical expansion.
Do you believe that no one ever looked at the log for visiting Air National Guard?
And the Maryland Air National Guard was in town sending off military illumination flares in Operation Snowbird, which I later found out meant diversionary tactical maneuvers.
So they may have been sending off flares to divert attention away from the true unknowns.
But that's not what over 10,000 people saw.
But she said that must be what some people saw.
So I said, well, wait a minute.
When was the Maryland Air National Guard in town?
She said March 1st to the 15th.
I said, were they in town in January?
She said, oh, no.
I said, are you sure?
She said, absolutely not.
I said, well, my husband and I both witnessed and photographed the same exact phenomenon two months before the mass sighting that I captured during the mass sighting, confirmed the next morning by both those times in January and the morning after the mass sighting by air traffic controllers at Sky Harbor International Airport.
As hovering over 1,000 feet altitude.
They had no idea what it was and turned against the wind and raised slowly and moved behind South Mountain.
She said, you never told me that because I never gave them details.
I said, besides the fact, you're trying to tell me that flares.
And by then I had educated myself to anything logical, including military flares, traverse the entire state in a rock solid, equidiscently spaced mile wide B for hours.
And she says, I have a call coming in.
I'll get back to you.
Well, I'm still waiting.
Flares are not going to behave like that.
Now, look, I was doing some searching today to see what the contemporary situation is about this, you know, beyond 1997.
And you and I talked a few years ago about this being a repeating phenomenon, not just something that happened then, something that appears, you know, from time to time in that location.
And I found a report on one website that claimed a sighting this month, May 2023, of something over Phoenix like that.
Do you know anything about that?
There are constant reports.
And like I said, most anomalies can be explained.
A lot of people are mistaking the Starlink satellites for the Phoenix lights or other objects for the Phoenix lights.
But they are appearing worldwide.
And other countries are much more open to these phenomena as being otherworldly, which is interesting because not only three years after the mass sighting, a former vice mayor of Phoenix, Councilwoman Frances Barwood, was the only one that asked for an investigation.
She was plastered by the media.
There was so much ridicule and snickering at the time and in the 90s.
But she was running for secretary of state in 2000 and asking for a reenactment and answers to the Phoenix lights, which was brilliant.
Right before the third anniversary.
People don't know this unless they read my book.
They had a public announcement that three international guards were coming into town.
to show everyone the Phoenix lights and talk about a joke.
I mean, Simington tried to make a joke of it in 97, but this was really a joke.
They had their shot and they failed miserably.
If you go to the news page, it's packed with information.
But there is one box there that says AZ family.
You can see what they tried to do.
They tried to make a triangle.
It was upside down.
It fell apart immediately.
It had huge shock trails.
Just what flares do.
So to this day, the Phoenix lights have never been reenacted or explained, but they continue to appear.
And this is another really two really cool things I think your audience would really enjoy hearing.
Number one, right after the 10th anniversary, our former governor, who mocked the sighting in 97, came forward and disclosed that he actually witnessed one of these over mile wide craft.
And as an awarded military pilot, it definitely wasn't flares.
And in his own word, he used the word otherworldly, just as other countries are using worldwide.
Another interesting aside was, is when i called them the air traffic controllers the morning after the mass sighting, they reported that there were two pilots that called into the tower to report lights.
Number one was a commercial pilot departure, said, What the hell are these lights over me?
And we're talking right over the camera back.
And the other was a private pilot, never said the name, but that private pilot came forward in 2017, shortly after the military and government admitted the Pentagon was studying, $22 million study by Harry Reed, studying these phenomena.
And that person, that private pilot, was none other than actor Kurt Russell.
That's a pretty good, pretty cool.
And he was actually reporting them while I was filming them.
That's pretty damn cool, as they say.
Now, we've got 90 seconds, sadly, because you know what it's like television, no time for anything.
But this is crucial.
When you read and hear all of the stuff, we had Steve Bassett on just before you, and I'm sure you know, Steve, when you read all of the stuff that's appearing now about hearings in Washington, disclosure is coming, whistleblowers are there, witnesses are, you know, they're giving their testimony and evidence in private.
How does that make you, Phoenix Lights experiencer Lynn Ketai, feel?
It was, as you can read in my book, it was rough.
It was rough.
Just getting answers, getting stonewalled, you know, talking to witnesses and hearing their heartfelt, detailed descriptions and knowing that something unbelievable and indescribable, mind-boggling happened here.
And yet they were just blowing it off for so long.
And now, finally, we are getting to the truth.
And that's what we're doing.
Do you feel vindicated?
Absolutely.
I mean, I just share the facts and people can decide for themselves.
But when you look at the data, it speaks for itself.
And your website, what is it?
It's www.thephoenixlights.net.
If people just Google Phoenix Lights Network, it'll usually come up first.
And it is packed with information to explore and consider.
And as well on Facebook, Phoenix Lights Network Facebook page.
And we have the documentary, which is streaming on not only on Amazon, but if you have Tubi, I don't know if you have Tubi there.
It's free on Tubi right now.
And as well, because I'm an educator on vital health issues and have curriculum in the classroom, I actually have a graphic novel activities coloring book, The Phoenix Lights, UFOs, and Crop Circle, Adventures of Sue, FO Field Observer.
Lynn, we're out of time.
I love your enthusiasm.
Whatever brand of coffee you're drinking, I want some of that.
Thank you very, very much indeed.
The Phoenix Lights.
I think Lynn Keitai is probably the most enthusiastic person I have ever spoken with on this show.
Dr. Lynn Keetai on the Phoenix Lights, and before that, the remarkable Steve Felton, direct from the shores of Loch Ness.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained in the summertime.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.