No certain cause has yet been identified for the mysterious lights spotted north of Deer Valley Monday night, which have sparked comparisons to the "Phoenix lights" of 11 years ago.
Valley residents reported seeing four circular red lights, similar in size, hovering in the air and forming different shapes and patterns around 8 p.m. on Monday, said Ian Gregor of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Gregor said the FAA received several accounts of the incident, including some from air traffic controllers at Sky Harbor Airport, but he added that the FAA will not investigate the issue.
"We didn't have any unusual targets or unidentified targets on our radar screens [Monday] night," he said. "It's a non-issue to us."
An official from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which monitors the skies for security threats, said they were not involved in any activities in the area the lights were seen and do not know what caused them. She did not want to be named because she wasn't authorized to speak to media.
Sgt. Chadwick Eiring, spokesman for Luke Air Force Base, said he also does not know the cause.
"We know that we did not have any aircrafts flying in the Deer Valley area during the time these lights were seen," Eiring said.
He added that he received one report that the lights were actually seen south of Deer Valley and was communicating with Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson to see if they had aircrafts in the area.
But Staff Sgt. Tim Beckham, spokesman for Davis-Monthan, said he has no knowledge of Air Force activities in that area Monday night.
In an article from The Arizona Republic, a Phoenix man said the lights could be a result of his neighbor, who he said attached flares to balloons and released them into the sky.
The sightings have drawn attention from local and national news outlets including Fox News and CNN. A Phoenix man's submitted video of the lights had been viewed by more than 33,000 people Tuesday night — the most views ever for an "iReport" video, according to CNN.
The Lyrid meteor shower peaked Tuesday morning, offering a possible explanation for the lights, but ASU planetary studies doctoral candidate James Ashley said these were two separate incidents.
"The objects looked altogether nothing like meteors" which are faster and have different flight paths, he said, adding that he had seen a video of the lights on the Internet.
Ashley added that this incident is already being compared to the "Phoenix lights" incident of March 13, 1997, when yellow and white lights similar to the ones seen last night were spotted south of Deer Valley.
But Ashley said though many believe the objects seen in 1997 were extra-terrestrial related, he believes they were actually flairs shot by planes running exercises from the Davis-Monthan base.
He said people crying alien should take remember scientist Carl Sagan, who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"The idea that Earth could be visited by life from another species is an extraordinary claim," Ashley said. "I have yet to see a single good movie of an alien spacecraft."
Reach the reporter at: daniel.newhauser@asu.edu.
