Post by uforn on Aug 11, 2011 13:52:15 GMT 1
UFO sighting? Kingman light show defied logic, photographer says
Pictures remind local historian of March 1997 event over Phoenix
Michael Baca took this picture of lights moving in a methodical manner over Kingman Thursday night. More Photos in queue.
KINGMAN - A sighting in the skies over Kingman Thursday night is drawing comparisons to the Phoenix Lights.
For more than an hour beginning sometime around 8 p.m., a Kingman man said he photographed a series of lights that danced their way from the east near the Kingman Airport to the southern horizon, creating oval and rectangular formations as they crossed the sky.
"They weren't zooming around," said 20-year-old Michael Baca, who noticed the lights while driving down Airway Avenue with his cousin. "They were very methodical in their movement.
Baca followed the lights out to the desert, where he said multiple other residents had already gathered to get a better look at the them.
"I'm a college student and I try to be logical about things," Baca said, "But I don't know what this was."
Baca photographed multiple stills and video of the lights using an I-phone 4. Those photos were forwarded to local historian Rob Chilcoat of the Kingman Army Airfield Museum, who said the pictures immediately reminded him of a phenomenon viewed and photographed by hundreds of people on March 13, 1997.
"These weren't stars and they weren't aircraft," Chilcoat said. "When I saw the pictures, the first thing I thought of was the Phoenix Lights."
The Phoenix Lights were first spotted in Henderson, Nev., and passed over Prescott before settling over the Phoenix area for more than two hours. The lights were at first in a triangular formation before breaking up and becoming a series of stationary lights that appeared to hover over the area.
The government dismissed some of the sightings as being flares from four A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range at Luke Air force Base. They said the flares appeared to hover over the city because of the rising heat from them.
Others who witnessed the lights weren't so sure. Even then Arizona Governor Fife Symington III, himself a pilot, said the lights were unlike anything he had ever seen. Even a decade later, the phenomena continues to spur intense debate as to where the lights really came from.
Chilcoat said these sorts of sightings, like the one in Kingman Thursday night, tend to take place either near military installations or near smaller airports like Kingman's, which doesn't have an air traffic controller on duty who would oversee or otherwise impede the air activity.
Chilcoat said the Kingman lights could have come from an F-22 or F-35 but he said he would expect those aircraft to create audible jet noise. Baca said whatever he photographed Thursday night was completely silent.
Baca reported his sighting to the National UFO Reporting Center in Washington state. The center has been contacted to see how many other reports they received about the lights in Kingman. Local law enforcement was also checking to see if they received any 911 calls about the mysterious lights.
Source:
www.kingmandailyminer.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=797&ArticleID=46095