On the evening of 13 March 1997 a line of lights crossed Arizona, seen by thousands of people over nearly five hundred kilometres, from Nevada to the Mexican border. Nearly every account agrees: five or seven lights in a fixed formation, moving slowly and without sound, and a dark mass between them that blotted out the stars. The military attributed it to flares dropped over the Barry Goldwater range, and for the later part of the evening that fits. For the first part, around half past eight, it does not: the formation crossed the city well before the exercise. The governor of the day, Fife Symington, mocked the story at a press conference. Ten years later he said he had seen the object himself and could not identify it.

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Loring and the Nights over the Weapons Store

In late October 1975 an unidentified object appeared for several nights running over this Maine base, where nuclear weapons were stored: it hovered a few dozen metres above the weapons store, descended, and left when helicopters were sent up. The base went to heightened alert, and dozens of servicemen including the command staff saw it. Radar tracked it. The same weeks produced similar reports from several other bases along the Canadian border — Wurtsmith, Malmstrom, Minot. The documents on that series are declassified and published; they contain no explanation, and the wording in the summaries is "unidentified helicopter", though no unit ever claimed one.