Talk:Phoenix Lights

Poor Objectivity

I find it very strange that Wikipedia is stating the government's explanation as a fact. Thousands of people saw this happen and were very unsatisfied by the official explanations, which evolved over time, yet this page confidently puts out the government message? Why also is there no picture of the actual lights from the video? Just a cartoon drawing? I'm not asking anyone to decide if they believe the official explanation, but I find it to be wholly ridiculous. About the formation, they say it's A-10s, but about the brightness, they say it's flares. It can't be both. Flares don't fly in formation or burn for hours. Planes don't have lights that bright, and if they were close, you'd hear them. We all know the government had a policy to deny all UFO stories until at least around the mid 2010s, so we should be skeptical if what they said then doesn't make sense. This page shouldn't be used to try to "solve" anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvKLeaPWPyw ~2026-44559-75 (talk) 07:26, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Thousands of people saw this happen and were very unsatisfied by the official explanations Interesting. Do you have any reliable sources (see WP:RS) to support that claim? If so, please share those sources here. We all know the government had a policy to deny all UFO stories (emphasis mine) Also interesting. Do you have any reliable sources to support that claim? If so, please share those sources here. Lastly, per WP:RSPYT, YouTube is not a reliable source for this material. JoJo Anthrax (talk) 16:45, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

"the government had a policy" Which government? Dimadick (talk) 18:47, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Had you bothered to read the article by McGaha and Nickell referenced in the entry https://skepticalinquirer.org/2015/03/alien-lights-at-phoenix-stephenville-and-elsewhere-a-postmortem/ you would find your answers. Skeptic2 (talk) 23:26, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

We need not get down into the dirt and wrestle about why no one reported seeing military aircraft flying in v- formation, despite documentation confirming that training flights were scheduled to fly in v-formation, but instead reported huge silent v-shaped alien spacecraft, or aircraft chasing alien spacecraft. So called eyewitnesses and anecdotes are notoriously unreliable. - LuckyLouie (talk) 13:12, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

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So to preface, I'm going to only address the chevron-formation sightings at the moment:

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(and not the arc-formation sighting over Phoenix proper, which probably did comprise flares).

Though I disagree with some of your points, I do agree that the objectivity of the article is just a tad too skewed towards treating only one hypothesis as nigh unassailable fact.

What I think happened: Robert Sheaffer seems to have a (mildly frustrating) tendency sometimes to word his favored hypotheses as fact. Though his basic endorsement of McGaha and Nickell's conclusions wasn't necessarily misplaced in principle, the problem is that there are a lot of constraints on the eyewitness reports, including perceived low altitude, near silence, and high apparent magnitude of the lights. If you move A-10s (which are notoriously loud) to a high enough altitude for them to have a better chance of seeming nearly silent, it not only potentially breaks the illusion of a low-flying formation, it also significantly reduces the apparent magnitude of the individual lights. The fact that so many witnesses also described a visible superstructure may not be something that can be easily handwaved away as a Gestalt effect either. Howwwwwwwever, there is a potentially cleaner skeptical hypothesis floating around out there...

... to wit, that it may have been a black project based on (or inspired by) the JP Aerospace airships, among which a very, very large V-shaped balloon was actually being developed roughly around the time. Though the timeline is a little shaky, it doesn't take too much of a leap in logic to assume an idea or implementation could have dated back to (or before) the late nineties. This is a hypothesis that has gained some traction in the intervening years. (though sadly not yet on the skeptical go-tos like Skeptoid or Skeptical Inquirer). At least for the time being, I feel the best prescription would be to just move from using unattributed Wikivoice in the lead to instead attribution, with something like "Investigators concluded that..." as a segue into the A-10 hypothesis. Three words would solve most of the objectivity issues, futureproof the article, hold the door open for an edit that addresses the aforementioned alternate skeptical hypothesis, and wouldn't give undue weight to non-terrestrial speculation. Huge secondary side benefit of potentially mitigating Talk Page objections to boot.

In an interview with a defense tech news platform, JP Aerospace's John Powell, while emphatically denying that his company was directly involved, could not dismiss the possibility of the involvement of competitors or government programs having built off their tech:

Here I must tread a little delicately. We have built several airships and other vehicles for various DOD agencies. None of our programs were classified. However, after completion and delivery, our vehicles entered into programs of which I have no knowledge.
We were testing vehicles at the time of the Phoenix lights incident, however, I can absolutely say that JPA was not, nor [was] our equipment, involved.
There have been times where our vehicles have been sighted and confused for UFOs or other mysterious things. I have also seen images of great vee-shaped objects in the sky that I can say for sure were not mine, but I could note perhaps the tech of a competitor. This is all speculation.

— John Powell, founder of JP Aerospace

And like I said, the hypothesis has been gradually gaining traction since the incident. In fact, there is a skeptic by the name of Ben McGee who also threw some support behind it in an interview with NBC News:

I would be shocked if the government wasn't using something similar, and that's a possible explanation for the Phoenix sighting.

— Ben McGee, geoscientist

The ultimate irony is... that after 80 years of investigators explaining anomalous phenomena as balloons often when other skeptical explanations would have made more sense, that in one of the most spectacular examples where a balloon hypothesis would tick most of the right boxes, no fewer than three investigators ostensibly defaulted to airplanes because an astronomer saw some that night. I would have liked to have seen the investigators better separate correlation from causation here; after all, military planes flying in V-formations are super common, yet V-shaped UFOs are ridiculously underrepresented in reports. A V-shaped balloon like the one described above would reintroduce low altitude, near silence, a physical superstructure, and the possibility of sufficiently luminous lights back into the equation. If you ask me, the fact that there is a competing -- and compelling -- skeptical hypothesis gaining traction with (probably good enough) WP:RS means that the article may be due for a minor refactoring to make it a little less all-in on the previous hypothesis.

P.S. Hey, at least we had Operação Prato, JoJo and Louie... Angilas (talk) 10:27, 17 August 2026 (UTC)