"I'm 41 years old. I've seen a lot of things in the sky. This is nothing I've seen before," said Christina Hermann, a witness who captured a video of the UFO.
Others debated the nature of the lights. Many agreed it was a UFO but not necessarily an extraterrestrial craft, according to 12News. But some insisted that it must have been an extraterrestrial craft because it appeared unlike any known man-made aircraft.
Dr. Sky, astronomer, TV personality and radio talk show host, agreed that the mysterious object could be described as a UFO because no one was able to say with certainty what it really was. Although he suggested it could have been an aircraft flying over the East Valley or landing, he thought it looked rather strange for a man-made airplane.
"Anything that you, or people, saw that we call a UFO is simply accurate, solely because we were not able to identify it," he said. "With the air traffic patterns in the Valley, what we see are a lot of stacked aircraft that are coming into Sky Harbor."
But Dr. Sky insisted that even if the UFO was not an extraterrestrial craft, there have been multiple verified reports of alien UFOs visiting our planet, such as the famous 1947 UFO crash incident in Roswell, New Mexico.
"Firmly I believe that we already know about alien visitation," he said. "We're going to continue to search for what we saw in the skies of Arizona."
But some residents were skeptical of the claims that the UFO could be an extraterrestrial craft. Skeptics argued that the lights could have come from parachuters. But in apparent contradiction, the famous Phoenix Skyhawks, a group that conducts regular parachute jumps over the Phoenix area, told the local station KPHO that they were not aware of any parachute jumps on Tuesday night.
But others suggested that the lights may have come from USAF jets and helicopters conducting training or flight tests.
For many residents of Phoenix, the latest sighting was reminiscent of the Phoenix Lights incident, the biggest single mass UFO sighting on the North American continent that happened on March 13, 1997.
Thousands of witnesses spread over a 300-mile area, as far as Tucson, reported sighting a formation of five lights that sailed across the evening sky. Most of the reported sightings occurred between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.
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