Fife Symington
Fife Symington III is an American Republican politician who was Governor of Arizona from 1991 to 1997. Ten years after the 1997 Phoenix Lights case, he said publicly that he himself had seen a huge object of unknown origin.
Fife Symington III is an American Republican politician who was Governor of the state of Arizona from 1991 to 1997. In UFO literature, he is linked to the phenomenon of March 13, 1997, known as the Phoenix Lights. As governor, he first mocked the case, then ten years later declared that he himself had seen something unusual.
What he claims
Symington, who was an air force officer in his youth, said in interviews in 2007, and then at a press conference in Washington, that on the evening of the phenomenon, around 8 o'clock, he saw a huge, triangle-shaped object in the sky that, in his view, could not have been a conventional aircraft. By contrast, in June 1997 he still treated the case as a joke: at a press conference, he presented his chief of staff dressed as an extraterrestrial. He later said that with this he had wanted to calm the public's unease.
Official and skeptical positions
The Phoenix Lights actually consisted of two separate events. According to the official explanation, the row of lights seen over Phoenix at around 10 p.m. was caused by parachute flares dropped during an exercise by aircraft of the Maryland Air National Guard. Skeptics explain the earlier V- or triangle-shaped formation of lights, seen statewide at around 8 o'clock, as aircraft flying in formation. In their view, the witnesses' impressions may have been distorted by the darkness, the distance and mutually reinforcing reports. Symington saw the first event, so the flare explanation does not apply to his sighting. Official bodies and skeptics do not accept his claim as evidence, but UFO researchers often cite it, since he came forward with his own sighting as a former military officer and high-ranking public figure.
Other
Before his political career, Symington worked as a businessman. In 1997 he was convicted of bank fraud, and as a result he resigned from the governorship. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1999, and then in January 2001 President Bill Clinton granted him a pardon.