Strange Lights Over Arizona: What We See When We Look to the Sky
I’ve always believed in aliens. I’m not sure if that puts me in the tin-foil-hat group, but I’ve got extra tin-foil if it helps. Personally, I’m not sure I buy the UFO or abduction theory though. My idea of aliens are things like waterbears or tiny organisms that got to this planet on a meteor or something.
Others don’t always agree with me though, and sometimes stories are passed between neighbors in backyards and border towns.
"Did you see that?"
Arizona has never been a quiet place, not really.
Its silence speaks louder than you’d think while the mountains remember.
Its skies carry more than weather, and now, once again, the strange lights have returned.
The Incident That Brought the Skies Back into Focus
On a clear evening in early May 2025, a U.S. F-16 flying near the Yuma Proving Grounds reported a collision…not with another aircraft, but with something it couldn’t identify.
The jet limped back to base with visible damage. There was no crash and no confirmed enemy contact. Just…something.
Unidentified, unseen, and unexplained.
And so the public did what it always does when the silence is broken, it looked up for answers.
We don’t call them UFOs anymore, in case you were wondering. In the clinical coldness of government documentation, they’re now UAPs: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Because "UFO" sounds too much like fantasy and was too sci-fi for the government to feel good about putting it all into their notes.
Too Phoenix Lights 1997, that moment when thousands of Arizonans watched a V-shaped craft float silently above their homes and were told it was flares.
But language doesn’t stop belief and acronyms don’t soothe awe. Arizona remembers, no matter what you want to call the giant flying unknown things.
Arizona is a strange place in case I didn’t mention that yet. My husband and I are going back in January to Scottsdale for a fitness adventure. Arizona is too vast to fully patrol and it sits next to military testing zones, along cross-border drone routes, and under skies with more secrets than clouds.
This makes it both perfectly logical and perfectly eerie when residents report floating lights or pulsing spheres, metallic humming, or bizarre instantaneous movement. And now, throw in a damaged fighter jet, those musings grow louder.
Fear Meets Policy
President Trump responded the only way a sledgehammer knows how…by increasing military presence along the Mexican border and invoking the Alien Enemy Act of 1798.
Yes, 1798.
The same law used during wartime to detain suspected enemies, this time, aimed at drone smugglers, but invoked in the same breath as alien incursions.
Because in today’s political theater, UAPs are no longer just sci-fi…they’re strategy.
A secret FBI office, long rumored to study anomalous aerial sightings, has reportedly been shut down.
Of course there was no press release and no explanation, but Congressman Tim Burchett isn’t staying silent.
He’s demanding transparency, claiming:
"There are credible reports of massive underwater craft. And we’re not getting the full story.”
So now, the conversation stretches even further…from the sky to the sea. What we once called "aliens" may now be submarine intelligence, or ancient technology, or something else entirely. Something beneath. Or something that the government has been working on that they’re hiding from the general public, which, let’s be honest, would be par for the course.
(Read how quantum physics might suggest death itself is an illusion!)
The Psychology of Seeing What We Need to See
Skeptics say that in times of political unrest, climate anxiety, and collective fatigue, our minds look up and invent patterns.
UFOs are the modern day angels and lights in the sky when the world below feels like it’s crumbling are something to distract our minds. Researchers say belief in the supernatural fulfills emotional needs, like the need to feel watched in a good way, or the hope that someone out there knows more than we do. Most of us want to have some kind of sense that we’re part of something bigger than inflation and bills and 24-hour news cycles that never stop showing horror.
And maybe they’re right and we are just seeing things or letting mass hysteria do its thing. There’s also the possibility that we’re not making it up though. Maybe they are just really good at hiding, or are hiding in plain sight like those tardigrades I mentioned earlier.
Want to keep your own eye on the sky?
Grab a this beautiful telescope.
Every culture has had its watchers who look up at the sky in wonder. Hell, even every large family today has one, and in mine, it’s me. The Navajo tell stories of sky beings, while the Mayans tracked stars with mathematical devotion that bordered on obsession.
Today, people share TikToks with shimmering orbs that hover, then vanish.
The format changes and so does how we spread the news, but the wonder remains.
What makes Arizona different is how loud the silence becomes there, how the stars feel closer and more like companions than far off goals. The desert stretches so wide it feels like a landing pad.
Why Arizona?
Arizona has proximity to test ranges and low light pollution, which alone increases those UAPs. There’s also a high number of amateur skywatchers here because of the wide desert plains with unobstructed skies.
In short: it’s the perfect place to witness the impossible.
Or at least believe you did.
Maybe what we’re seeing above Arizona isn’t alien or extraterrestrial at all, but the strange lights (the flashes, the orbs, the silent streaks through the dark) are coming not from out there, but from in here.
Because lately, the sun has been loud.
We’re in the midst of an intense period of solar activity: flares, plasma bursts, and coronal mass ejections are battering the atmosphere with radiation and magnetic storms.
They interfere with satellites and cause auroras to shimmer in skies that haven’t known color in centuries.
And they light up the upper atmosphere with impossible-seeming forms.
Forms like: sprites , blue jets and ELVES are seen more and more. Yeah, I know they sound like folklore, but they’re real.
They’re rare, but they used to be more rare, as they’ve started increasing.
So maybe these “UAPs” are part of something bigger…a climate of energy we’re only beginning to understand.
A surge in the planet’s electric skin, fed by a furious sun could be playing with our perception of lights in the area.
I dug deeper into this theory in my post about solar storms and sun flares, because sometimes what feels alien is just nature wearing a new face. The closure of the FBI’s quiet UAP desk has only thrown fuel on the fire. Why shut it down now?
Is it done or did it find something it wasn’t supposed to?
We could really never know, but across Arizona, people are sitting in their trucks, necks craned upward, watching.
And some of them are seeing the unusual.
Related Reads You Might Enjoy:
The Tiny Living Robots That Can Reproduce: Welcome to the World of Xenobots
NASA Found a “Spider Web” on Mars, and It Might Be Hiding Clues to Alien Life
The Shattered Planet That Lives On: What Vesta Tells Us About Cosmic Ruins
Are Black Holes Actually Tunnels? The Mind-Bending Theory That’s Changing Space Science
The Boötes Void: Where the Universe Forgot to SpeakQuantum Biology Explained Simply: What Happens When Life Breaks the Rules
