Page 2

Later that same afternoon, Symington suddenly called a press conference and told viewers

that he had found the source behind the Phoenix Lights. His chief-of-staff, Jay Heiler, was

escorted in by public safety police officers while handcuffed, wearing a large rubber mask

and dressed as a space alien. The Governor presented the costumed extraterrestrial as the

"guilty party." While laughter filled the room, he joked that "this just goes to show that you

guys are entirely too serious."

"It was an insult to the intelligence of the witnesses," Barwood recalls. "The message to

Arizona citizens was that reporting this was stupid."

"If I had to do it all over again I probably would have handled it differently," Symington

explains. He says that the state of Arizona was "on the brink of hysteria" about the UFO

sighting when he called the press conference, and the frenzy was building. "I wanted them to

lighten up and calm down, so I introduced a little levity. But I never felt that the overall

situation was a matter of ridicule," he says.

The former Governor, a cousin of the late Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, states that the

incident remains open and unsolved, and should be officially investigated. The US

Government has never acknowledged that something was in the sky that night.

Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Barwood was the only elected official to launch a public

investigation in 1997, but she received no information from any level of government. Barwood

spoke with over seven hundred witnesses, including police, pilots and former military, who

provided very similar descriptions. "The government never interviewed even one witness,"

she says.

Symington also attempted to find an explanation. He called the Commander at Luke Air

Force Base, the General in charge of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of

Public Safety in 1997. None of these officials had answers, and they were "perplexed," he

says.

In 2000, the Department of Defense maintained that it could not find any information about

the triangular object, in response to a court-ordered search requested by a U.S. District court

in Phoenix, as part of a class action suit filed by witnesses.

.

"How could they possibly not know about these huge craft flying low over major population

centers? That's inconceivable, but it's also frightening," Barwood commented.

Symington's announcement is bolstered by the fact that similar flying objects have been

documented by the governments of England and Belgium.

On March 30, 1990, the Belgian Air Force sent two F-16s armed with missiles to intercept a

black triangular UFO displaying bright lights on its underside. The object could accelerate or

dive at tremendous speeds, starting from a stationary position, as recorded on radar. It flew

at the speed of sound without making a sonic boom.