[troutman]

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...hoenix-lights/

Ever heard of the Phoenix Lights? 10 years ago, on March 13, 1997, a string of mysterious lights were seen hovering over Phoenix, Arizona. They were witnessed by a lot of people– Phoenix is a big town. For once, a UFO sighting was well-documented with lots of witnesses spaced out geographically, and with actual imagery and footage.

This was big news. When I saw them, my first thought was, "Hey airplanes!" But I am a foolish NASA stooge planted by the CIA to brainwash the sheeple and keep under wraps THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL TIME.

Or, maybe, they were, y’know, airplanes.

In fact, they were. Kinda. There was a practice flight going on at a nearby military air base. The squadron flying was dropping flares. The flares had little parachutes on them, so from a distance you’d see — GASP — a line of lights moving very slowly.

I saw a TV show where they proved beyond a doubt that’s what these things were. Video footage shot at night showed the lights disappearing one by one. Were they warping away, entering another dimension, or teleporting to some distant star?

No, they were falling behind a nearby mountain range.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhAQrR8Jhkk

http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0307/debunking.html

http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/19/ufo.lights/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights

Skeptics agree with the USAF explanation that the lights were simply slow falling, long burning flares dropped by an A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise over Luke Air Force Base. Proponents of the spacecraft theory stated that the lights were over the city and not beyond the mountain where the Luke AFB was located. However, detailed analysis of the falling flares shows that they were actually beyond the mountain, as investigators discovered the lights vanished in line with the outline of the mountain. An investigation by Luke AFB itself also came to this conclusion and declared the case solved.

A video illustrating this was broadcast on a special on Fox Television stations about a year after the event. A copy of the original video was used in coordination with a video shot in the daytime from the exact same location. The two videos were merged into one on a frame by frame basis, so that the landmarks were always perfectly aligned. This allowed analysis of the lights regarding their apparent height above the mountain, and it was easily seen that the lights vanished in line with the outline of the mountain.