Man behind famous ‘Phoenix Lights’ footage still mystified, 25 years later

PHOENIX (KGUN) — It’s been more than 25 years since one of Arizona’s strangest mysteries: the ‘Phoenix Lights.’

With sightings reported as far as Southern Nevada—then from northern Arizona down to the Tucson area—many still wonder what caused the strange aerial phenomenon.

Mike Krzyston was one of thousands across the state who will never forget the night of March 13, 1997.

He says he did not see the first event that night. Many describe as a boomerang or ‘V’-shaped object flying silently through the night sky, sometime after 8 p.m.

However, Krzyston did capture the second phenomenon on camera from the backyard of his home, atop Moon Mountain in north Phoenix: Floating orbs of light appearing one by one and spreading out in a curved formation, seemingly hovering over the city, then disappearing in a different order.

KGUN 9 visited Krzyston his home to see the footage, asking about the life-changing night.

“I went outside and I saw this light,” Krzyston recalls. “It was as far East as it’s ever been. I’ve never seen it this far to the East.”

Krzyston says before, he’d seen floating lights to the West of his home. He believed those were flares from the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, southwest of the city.

But Krzyston believes the lights on March 13, 1997 looked brighter and closer, hovering over the city itself.

Officially, the U.S. government says that night people saw military flares dropped from 15,000 feet by Maryland National Guard, who reportedly took off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson before conducting a training exercise over Phoenix.

Krzyston doesn’t buy that explanation.

“If these were flares… How do you drop flares over this distance and they stay in a perfect line?” he questioned. “They come down, supposedly, on parachutes, and they fall at different rates.”

Krzyston took still photos of similar lights, seemingly over the same area—spread out and in a line—he says weeks after the infamous night of March 13.

His video footage has since attracted global attention.

Krzyston's camera captures a single light before several more appear and seem to bend into formation.

“Hey Sue! Take a look at this!” he yells to his wife at one point.

Once Krzyston realizes the lights seem different than the ones he had spotted on previous nights, his excitement turns to bewilderment.

“I hit pay dirt, finally,” he says, before asking no one in particular, “What do we got here?”

Two years after that night, Krzyston says someone from the government paid him a visit and saw his footage.

“He says, ‘Well, looks like you really got something here,’” Krzyston says of the first encounter. He says the man then left, before returning months later with the same explanation the public received.

“[He] came back with a book about this thick, with computations. And he says, ‘What you saw that night were planes 80 miles away dropping flares.’”

That hasn’t stopped film crews and UFO enthusiasts from asking questions and contacting Krzyston.

“It’s been on all the major networks. It’s been around the world,” he shares. “I’ve had production companies come from Japan. As far as Japan.”

But even the man behind this compelling footage is still not convinced what happened that night. Krzyston does not believe there is enough evidence to definitively point to one theory. He says we may never truly know.

“It’s just what people want to believe,” he ends. “Some people believe it’s a UFO. Some people believe it’s military. I don’t know what it was. It was orange lights to me.”