Speaker 1: The night sky, near that massive canvas above us. It's
usually pretty predictable. We understand the physics, the stars, the satellites,
the planes with their blinking lights, right, there's.
Speaker 2: A certain rhythm to it exactly.
Speaker 1: But what if you're out there one evening, You've got
your camera pointed up at the sky, and you walk
onto this one single bright light it's just hovering completely still.
Speaker 2: Which is already unusual.
Speaker 1: Aircraft don't really do that, not commercial ones anyway, And
as you're watching, trying to make sense of it, it
does something that just it seems to defy physics. It
starts to blink, then it sort of stretches, and then
the key moment, Yeah, the key moment. It doesn't fly away,
it doesn't disappear, It just splits right in two.
Speaker 2: And that single action, that perceived impossibility of one solid
thing becoming two, that's where these UAP mysteries really get
their staying power.
Speaker 1: It's the moment that challenges everything you think you know.
Speaker 2: It really is, and when you have visual evidence, you're
at this fork in the road. Is this proof of
something truly non human, some incredible technology, or is the
explanation a lot more down to Earth just hidden by
a trick of perception or optics.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is where we take the
source material, untangle all the fascinating details, and figure out
exactly what you the learner, need to know. And today
we are diving deep into a phenomenon that has, i
mean really haunted the American Southwest for decades, the Phoenix Lights.
Speaker 2: And our entire analysis today is going to be grounded
in one key source. We're working from detailed excerpts of
the history YouTube video when a UFO split before vanishing.
As far the proof is out there, it's.
Speaker 1: A great source because it does something really interesting. It
puts two very different events side by side.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You have the world famous massive sighting from nineteen
ninety seven and then this much more recent focus video
incident from two thousand and four. They share the same
famous name, but as we'll see, they seem to be
dramatically different things.
Speaker 1: So that's our mission for you today. We're going to
dissect the evidence for both the legendary V shaped craft
of ninety seven and this bizarre splitting object from four.
Speaker 2: And we're going to weigh the scientific skepticism from astronomers
and analysts against the deeply held conviction of the witnesses
who were there.
Speaker 1: We want to get to the bottom of why these
incidents after all this time and all this analysis still
challenged those easy conventional explanations.
Speaker 2: And we also have to look at the institutional response,
because the way the original nineteen ninety seven event was
handled it really colored how every single sighting after that
was perceived in that region.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's start with the more recent event, the
one that's really the centerpiece of that history video. We're
in Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 2: The day is October twelfth, two thousand and four, and
the time is around seven point four five pm, so
it's dark, perfect for skywatching.
Speaker 1: And the key thing here is how this was filmed.
This wasn't just some random person.
Speaker 2: With a phone, No, not at all. The witness, a
local resident named Jeff Woolwine, was actively hunting for this.
He went out there with his camera with a specific purpose.
Speaker 1: And his motivation is so important to the story, isn't it.
He wasn't just a casual observer, right.
Speaker 2: He actually claimed that he'd been seeing these Phoenix lights
ever since I was a kid.
Speaker 1: Wow, So for him this was personal very personal.
Speaker 2: He was on what he called a quest to find
out what is really going on here. He was determined
to finally get some kind of definitive proof, and.
Speaker 1: That determination, well, it paid off with some really compelling footage.
Speaker 2: It really did. The source describes what he captured and
it starts with a bright, steady, white light just hovering, and.
Speaker 1: They describe the shape as.
Speaker 2: Oblong, which is a critical first detail. You know, an
oblong shape already tells you it's probably not a single
point source like a star. It's suggest something with weird structure,
or yeah, maybe it's more than one light source blending together.
Speaker 1: That his behavior starts to change, begins to blink.
Speaker 2: And that's where you start running through the possibilities. Blinking
could be navigation lights on a.
Speaker 1: Plane, but planes don't just hover silently exactly.
Speaker 2: Or the blinking could be something else, atmospheric shimmer, maybe
a flame sputtering. You have to keep all the options open.
Speaker 1: But it's what happens after the blinking that makes this
footage so famous.
Speaker 2: This is the mind boggling moment. The thing that he
saw as one single object starts to divide. It's a slow,
deliberate looking separation.
Speaker 1: It goes from being one oblong light to two completely
separate distinct lights.
Speaker 2: That slow, clean split is what makes this video so unique.
I mean, think about it. If it were two planes,
they would have to be flying an absolutely perfect formation
to look like one object to begin with.
Speaker 1: Almost impossibly perfect. And if it was one craft breaking apart, well,
the physics of that are just staggering. It immediately puts
it in the unidentified box.
Speaker 2: And the sequence ends in a very particular way. It's
not just a pure blank split. There's a final phase.
Speaker 1: The disappearance. How did that unfold?
Speaker 2: Well, shortly after they clearly separate into two objects, they
started to fade out. They didn't zoom off into space,
they didn't crash, They just and sequentially too one went
out and then a little bit later the other one
went out. The source uses the phrase sequentially vanish.
Speaker 1: That's a huge clue, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It's an essential clue. It suggests that whatever was powering
these lights had a limited life span and that one
of them ran out of juice just a little bit
before the other one. And that points us towards some
very specific and very mundane explanations that will definitely get
into later.
Speaker 1: Before we get to the explanations, though, let's talk about
the witness. You can hear Jeff Woolwine's reaction in the video,
and his awe is just it's palpable.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, He says, it's amazing, you know, because you're
out there and you're watching and these things just magically
appear in the sky. His level of subjective certainty is
at one hundred percent, and.
Speaker 1: That certainty immediately leads him to dismiss any normal.
Speaker 2: Explanation right away. He just says, there's no airplanes gropping
these things out. There's no explanation on why these things here.
Speaker 1: And that really highlights a core dynamic in so many
of these sightings, doesn't it. The experience feels so profound,
so impossible, that it just overrides any kind of rational
weight and see analysis.
Speaker 2: He saw something he believed was impossible, so any simple
answer is rejected before is even considered.
Speaker 1: That initial gut level conclusion of no explanation is what
gives these mysteries so much traction. He'd been hunting for
this for years, and the moment he captures it, he's
already decided it's extraordinary.
Speaker 2: And what's really interesting is that Jeff Woolwine himself specifically
says he thinks he's captured a resurgence of the famous
nineteen ninety seven event, So he's.
Speaker 1: Directly connecting his two thousand and four video to that
original massive sighting.
Speaker 2: He is. But to really figure out if that link
makes any sense, we need to go back and understand
the sheer scale and context of that first mystery.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's transition. Let's go back to the event
that basically put the term Phoenix lights on the map
for good.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the night of March thirteenth, nineteen ninety seven.
This wasn't just some local news story. This became a
national sensation.
Speaker 1: It was a real turning point in modern UAP history, right, Yeah,
mostly because of the number of people who saw.
Speaker 2: It, the sheer volume of witnesses. We are not talking
about one person with a camera. We're talking thousands of
people potentially across a huge populated area, all reporting these
incredibly strange lights over Arizona.
Speaker 1: And the thing everyone remembers, the image that's burned into
the public consciousness is that V shaped formation.
Speaker 2: The V shape and the descriptions of its size are
what really set it apart from anything like the two
thousand and four sighting.
Speaker 1: The estimates are just they're mind blowing. Some witnesses claimed
it was a single colossal object the size of more
than ten Boeing seven forty sevens.
Speaker 2: Can you even imagine that? I mean, just trying to
picture the wingspan of ten jumbo jets side by side,
flying silently over your head.
Speaker 1: It's overwhelming. And the testimony was so consistent on that point,
the V shape, the enormous size, and the silent low movement.
Speaker 2: But it's important to remember, and the source material points
us out the V shape wasn't the only thing people
saw that night.
Speaker 1: Which is a crucial detail for anyone trying to pieces
all together right.
Speaker 2: The famous V shaped sighting was actually later in the evening.
At the same time, there were other reports floating around
individual lights moving strangely, photos of light clusters. It was
a really complex, multi layered night, which suggests.
Speaker 1: You might be dealing with more than one phenomenon happening
at the same.
Speaker 2: Time, and that complicates any single, unified explanation, which leads
to this major geographical point that the source brings up.
It says Phoenix lights is actually a bit of a misnomer.
Speaker 1: Okay, that feels like a huge piece of the puzzle.
What does that mean.
Speaker 2: It means that if you look at the timeline, the
very first sightings that night in nineteen ninety seven, they
didn't even happen over Phoenix.
Speaker 1: Where were they.
Speaker 2: They happened hours earlier near Henderson, Nevada. That's almost three
hundred miles away from Phoenix.
Speaker 1: Three hundred miles. Okay, that is a fundamental distinction. Talking
about two potentially separate events on.
Speaker 2: The same night, or even more than two, and they
were all geographically and you know, temporarily distinct, but they
all got swept under this one single banner, the Phoenix Lights.
Speaker 1: And the implication for the investigation there's just massive.
Speaker 2: It's huge. If investigators are told to look into the
Phoenix Lights as a single event, but they're actually dealing
with multiple different things happening three hundred miles apart, any
explanation they come up with is going to seem incomplete
or confusing.
Speaker 1: Which is the perfect recipe for public distrust.
Speaker 2: And distrust became the name of the game because so
many people saw this. The military was eventually well, they
were forced to investigate and give some kind of official response.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't a quick response either, was it No?
Speaker 2: And that delay is a major point of contention. The
government took several months before they said anything officially.
Speaker 1: What did they say?
Speaker 2: Finally the US military came out and confessed. They said
they had been running operations over the area that night.
The specific name they gave was Op Snowbird.
Speaker 1: Snowbird, so what exactly was Operation Snowbird?
Speaker 2: The official story was that a whole bunch of a
ten aircraft were in the sky.
Speaker 1: That night, A ten war hogs the ground.
Speaker 2: Attack planes, that's them, and they were supposedly testing different
models of flares.
Speaker 1: Okay, flares. For the learner listening, we should probably clarify
what kind of flares we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Good point. There are generally two types. You've got small
hot countermeasures designed to fool heat seeking missiles. They'd burn
out and fall really fast.
Speaker 1: But then you have the other kind.
Speaker 2: Right illumination flares. These are much bigger. They're often dropped
with a parachute, They burn incredibly brightly, and they can
just hang in the air, drifting slowly for several minutes.
Speaker 1: Given the descriptions of hovering lights in ninety seven. The
illumination flares seem like the more likely candidate for a
mundane explanation.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Imagine a formation of a tens dropping a series
of those large, slow drifting flares from a distance that
I'd absolutely look like a line of connected lights. The
wind could even make them drift into a V shape.
Speaker 1: But that official story, you know, coming out months late
and involving a complicated military exercise, it just poured gasoline
on the fire of the cover up.
Speaker 2: Theories that delay was fatal to their credibility. The source
says several people believed that this was a cover up
and that the military was essentially trying to hide the
fact that something else was operating over Phoenix.
Speaker 1: That night, and the local political reaction didn't help either.
Speaker 2: Not at all. We have to remember the governor at
the time, Fife Semington. He initially held a press conference
where he literally mocked the whole thing. He brought out
his aid in an alien costume.
Speaker 1: I remember that it was just bizarre.
Speaker 2: And then years later he completely reversed his position and
admitted that he himself had seen the massive V shaped
object that night and believed it was otherworldly.
Speaker 1: So you have this initial mockery, then months of silence
from the government, and then a complex technical explanation about flares.
It's the perfect storm for distrust.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is, and it created the psychological framework where
any future sighting, no matter how unrelated, like the two
thousand and four footage, is automatically seen through that lens.
It's seen as a resurgence or more proof of an
ongoing cover up.
Speaker 1: So let's bring it back to two thousand and four.
We have Jeff Woolwine who believes his video of a
splitting light is a resurgence of that ninety seven event.
Speaker 2: He's operating under that exact framework we just talked about.
He's assuming the giant vcraft and his splitting light are connected.
Speaker 1: This is where the source brings in some objective analysis
from Rich Hoffman of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.
Speaker 2: And Hoffman's job is to basically ignore the label Phoenix
lights and just compare the raw data from the two events.
Speaker 1: And what's his verdict When he puts some side by side.
Speaker 2: His conclusion is pretty stark. He says there is no
comparison there.
Speaker 1: So a direct contradiction to what the witness believed.
Speaker 2: Completely He points to the fundamental structural differences. The nineteen
ninety seven lights were described as this single massive, cohesive
triangular structure one craft or one tight formation. The key
word he uses is structure.
Speaker 1: Whereas the two thousand and four event was just two
lights or one light that became two exactly.
Speaker 2: Hoffman points out the two thousand and four footage as
clearly two separate light sources or one source that acts
dynamically stretching and dividing. That's a world away from a
silent stadium sized V shape.
Speaker 1: So for you listening, the big takeaway here is that
just because two weird things happen in the same city
seven years apart, doesn't mean they're related, not at all.
Speaker 2: And applying that famous phoenix lights label to the two
thousand and four sighting actually hurts the investigation because it
forces a comparison that doesn't fit the evidence.
Speaker 1: So if we accept Hoffman's analysis that they're unrelated, then
the nineteen ninety seven event, with all its history, kind
of stops mattering for the two thousand and four footage,
right It lets.
Speaker 2: Us look at the two thousand and four video on
its own terms, And.
Speaker 1: If we do that, we're left with that one core mystery,
that mind boggling moment. How do you explain an object
that appears into and then one by one just vanishes.
Speaker 2: And that's where the scientific analysis gets really interesting. The
witness is sure he saw one object split. The challenge
for science to show that what he actually saw was
an illusion, a trick of perspective.
Speaker 1: To tackle that, the source brings in a really key expert,
Marke D'Antonio. He's an astronomer but also a video effects designer,
which is.
Speaker 2: The perfect combination of skills for this. He understands the
sky and he understands how cameras can lie to you.
Speaker 1: So what's his take on the split?
Speaker 2: He offers what is probably the most elegant and plausible explanation.
His whole analysis is based on a simple idea from optics.
The object looked like one single light because it was
actually two lights and one was directly behind the other
from the camera's perspective.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down. It's like seeing the headlights
of a car from miles and miles.
Speaker 2: Away exactly at a great distance, they just blur into
a single point of.
Speaker 1: Light, and d'antonio's VFX background is key here.
Speaker 2: It's crucial. He knows how a camera lens, its focal lengths,
its resolution, how all those things can merge two distinct
light sources into what looks like one single, oblong light.
Speaker 1: So the split wasn't a physical event.
Speaker 2: No. He says that as the two objects slowly move apart,
maybe just by a tiny amount, the image of the
light gets more and more elongated, until finally the camera
can resolve them as two separate points.
Speaker 1: That makes so much sense. It wasn't a division, it
was a revelation. It was just the objects shifting their
position relative to the camera.
Speaker 2: It's an illusion created by geometry and distance. And if
we accept that it was two objects all along, the
next question is what were they?
Speaker 1: And we have to remember the time period two thousand
and four. Today, everyone would just shout drones, right, But.
Speaker 2: As D'Antonio points out, back in two thousand and four,
it was not very likely that they were drones. The
consumer drone market basically didn't.
Speaker 1: Exist, so unless they were military.
Speaker 2: That's the only real possibility. And the main military drone
in use at the time is the Predator.
Speaker 1: So could it have been to predator drones?
Speaker 2: It's unlikely a predator drone isn't some little quad copter.
It's the size of a small airplane. It has a
big wingspan, it makes noise, and it has to fly
like a plane. It can't just hover silently, and it
would have standard aviation lights right, high intensity strobes, position lights.
It would look like an aircraft. The objects in the
video just seem to be silently drifting before they separate.
It doesn't fit the profile of a predator drone at all.
Speaker 1: So if it's not military drones, we're looking for something smaller, lighter,
maybe even unguided.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to d'antonio's number one candidate, which is
wonderfully beautifully mundane.
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 2: A launch of two sky lanterns.
Speaker 1: Chinese lanterns, the little paper hot air balloons exactly.
Speaker 2: And this hypothesis is so powerful because it checks almost
every single box.
Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through it. How does it fit?
Speaker 2: First, the silent hovering their balloons, They just drift on
the air currents, no engine noise. The split is blamed
by the perspective theory. Two lanterns launched together, one happens
to drift in front of the other for a while.
Speaker 1: Okay, but what about the color. Jeff Woolwine said it
was a bright white light. Sky lanterns I've seen usually
have a more orange fiery glow.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, and it's where d'antonio's optics knowledge
comes in again. At night, from a distance and with
a camera that's probably struggling in low light, a flame
can easily get over exposed.
Speaker 1: Meaning it blooms on the camera sensor.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the camera sensor gets overwhelmed by the light and
just renders it as bright white, even if the actual
flame is orange or red, So the color discrepancy isn't
really a problem.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, that's a really important detail. But the final
piece of the puzzle, the vanishing act.
Speaker 2: This is the real giveaway, the ultimate clue. The lights
in the video fade out one after the other, sequentially, sequentially,
and that is exactly how sky lanterns work. The little
flame packet at the bottom has a limited amount of fuel.
When the fuel runs out, the flame the light vanishes.
Speaker 1: And since there are two separate lanterns, their fuel won't
run out at the exact same millisecond.
Speaker 2: They are two independent systems. One will burn out a
few seconds or a minute before the other, and that
gives you that mysterious looking sequential disappearance.
Speaker 1: So the sky lantern theory seems to account for everything,
the oblong shade, the silent hovering, the split, the color,
and the vanishing. It's a really strong.
Speaker 2: Case, it is, but the source material leaves us with
one final analytical problem, one little knot that keeps it
from being a one hundred percent closed case.
Speaker 1: And what's that.
Speaker 2: It comes down to the physics of the launch. How
could two unguided paper balloons, subject to every little gust
of wind fly so closely together that they appear as
a single object for any length of time.
Speaker 1: They'd have to be in perfect alignment.
Speaker 2: Perfect alignment maintaining that position one behind the other without
turbulence pushing them apart would require either an incredible amount
of luck or very specific atmospheric conditions.
Speaker 1: That's the part that still requires a bit of a
leap of faith. I mean, if you launched two from
your backyard, you'd expect them to drift apart almost immediately.
Speaker 2: You would, and without finding the launch site or the
lantern debris. That tiny bit of ambiguity is enough to
keep the case technically classified. As unidentified.
Speaker 1: So we've reached the end of the analysis from the source,
and despite this incredibly strong, mechanically sound explanation from Mark D'Antonio,
the official verdict is still unidentified.
Speaker 2: And that's the fuel that keeps these mysteries alive, isn't
it that inability to get to one hundred percent certainty.
We can get to a high probability hypothesis, but not
a definitive classification.
Speaker 1: And when you look at the whole Phoenix light story,
from the giant v in ninety seven to the splitting
lights in O four, you just see this same conflict
playing out over and.
Speaker 2: Over, official skepticism versus public conviction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have these rational, down to earth explanations. The
ninety seven event was very likely military flares from Operation.
Speaker 2: Snowbird, and the two thousand and four event has an
extremely high probability of being two sky lanterns explained by optics.
Speaker 1: Both are completely man made explanations, But the source makes
it clear even after you give people these detailed scientific answers,
there are still those who are skeptical.
Speaker 2: Which brings us right back to the psychological damage that
was done in nineteen ninety seven. The public trust was
broken by the government's response to Operation Snowbird.
Speaker 1: That delayed, confusing and initially mocking response created a credibility gap.
Speaker 2: It's a huge depth. So when the military finally did
confirm they were dropping flares, it wasn't seen as a confession.
It was seen by skeptics as a cover up, a
convenient lie.
Speaker 1: And that initial mistrust just taints everything that comes after completely.
Speaker 2: The public isn't just analyzing the physics of a sky
lantern in two thousand and four. They're distrusting the source
of the analysis. They're primed to believe that any simple
explanation is just another attempt to hide a bigger truth.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating situation where the truth might just be
too simple to be believed. The experience of seeing something
so so profound, so impossible, just overwhelms the dry scientific breakdown.
Speaker 2: It really reinforces the power of that initial emotional reaction.
When a witness categorizes what they saw as impossible, the
bar for accepting a mundane explanation becomes impossibly high.
Speaker 1: It really seems like the enduring mystery of the Phoenix
Lights is less about aliens and more about human perception
and the consequences of governmental ambiguity.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect case study in how doubt can sustain
belief for decades.
Speaker 1: So we have covered a ton of ground in this
thrilling threads deep dive. We started with this single bright
light from two thousand and four that did the impossible and.
Speaker 2: Split in two, and we've walked through the very likely
explanation that was just two sky lanterns creating an optical illusion.
Speaker 1: We put that against the backdrop of the massive V
shape from nineteen ninety seven. We talk about military flares
and operations, snowbird and the physics of visual deception, and when.
Speaker 2: You zoom out the whole saga of the Phoenix lights,
it's really more than just a collection of sightings. It's
a powerful lesson in how an unexplained event, when it's
mixed with a fumbled official response, can create decades of
belief in a hidden truth.
Speaker 1: The key lesson really is about institutional credibility. Once you
break it, it's almost impossible to get it back.
Speaker 2: We heard rich Hoffman say there's no comparison between the
ninety seven and oh four events. One was a massive
structure or a flare drop, the other was a small
optical illusion, but they are forever linked under that one name.
Speaker 1: So here's our final thought for you. We have the
military's confession about using flares in nineteen ninety seven, and
we have a really strong scientific argument for the two
thousand and four event being two sky lanterns.
Speaker 2: Considering all the evidence, the physics, the timing, the political
mess of that initial response, what stands out to you
is the strongest indicator of what these objects actually were.
And maybe more importantly, why do you think we as
the public still find these down to earth answers so
hard to swallow? You?
Speaker 1: We'd love for you to think about that, and if
you're so inclined to share your stand with us,