Flashback: Spring ‘97 — The Phoenix Lights, Heaven’s Gate & Captain Craig Button’s Final Flight
1997 was the year that this reporter was drawn into the UFOlogy rabbit hole, and what a year for UFOlogy it was! There was a mind-boggling slew of strange occurrences, many of which resonate with ongoing mystery to this day. This series of “Greg Black Flashback” columns will set the flux capacitor to turn the clock back 20 years and re-examine these issues, highlighting their relevance to Disclosure activism in 2017.
The Phoenix Lights
The most witnessed UFO sighting in modern American history occurred on March 13, 1997 throughout the Phoenix metropolitan area and across Arizona, with reports coming in from around the state. For those not familiar with this historic incident, or who could use a refresher, AlteredDimensions.net has an excellent overview of what occurred:
“Witnessed by thousands of people and photographed by hundreds, there is no doubt that something was seen over the skies of Phoenix that night. The question remains — what did they see? The strange lights were sighted during a three hour period between 7:30 pm and 10:30 pm on March 13. They covered a 300-mile corridor from the Nevada line through Phoenix to the Northern edge of Tucson. Since thousands of witnesses called local Air Force bases, news stations (including the infamous Coast to Coast radio show), and UFO organizations with their reports, we are able to glean the exact route that the mysterious object took…”
Most reports indicated sighting of a large v-shaped or boomerang type craft. Despite all these witnesses, the Air Force and local authorities ultimately attempted to explain away the lights as flares from an exercise involving the visiting Maryland Air Guard. Except that this explanation wasn’t even offered until three months later. The concocted story suggested that USAF A-10s were on a training mission over the Gila Bend Bombing Range. As with most Air Force explanations regarding UFOs, this one was lacking in logic due to how the timeline didn’t add up with the flares allegedly launched some 40 minutes after the reports first started coming in.
The Phoenix Lights did not become national news for some time though, save for listeners of Art Bell’s late night Coast to Coast AM radio program. It wasn’t until June 18–19, 1997 when USA Today and all the networks suddenly ran stories about the Phoenix Lights in the same 24-hour period! Bell himself would comment on the odds-defying nature of such coverage to a reporter from the Arizona Republic in a story that appeared on June 20:
“Don’t you guys find it a little amazing that MSNBC, CNN, NBC and
ABC, all on the same night ran a big deal on the lights that occurred
on March 13? Isn’t it a little odd?” Bell asked from his home in
Pahrump, Nev. “I understand how pack journalism runs with a breaking story, but we’re talking about a story that’s three months old, and it all hits all
the major media, ker-thump, on the same night. That’s not possible.”
As Bell alluded, the sudden convergence of coverage seemed to indicate someone pulling strings to orchestrate the timing. This has never been explained, although seems like it could have been part of a corporate media collusion spearheaded by the Air Force to drum up publicity for the “Roswell Case Closed” press conference that would occur on June 24, 1997 (subject of a pending Greg Black Flashback story.) Let us however return to March of 1997.
The incredibly luminous Comet Hale-Bopp was visiting Earth’s skies in the spring of ’97, which was a big part of why so many Arizonans were out watching the skies on the fateful evening of March 13.
There had also been some far out speculation on Bell’s show going back to the end of 1996 about a potential companion craft tagging along with Comet Hale-Bopp. Amateur astronomer and newsman Chuck Shramek had snapped a photo of the comet that had what appeared to be another object nearby, and Coast to Coast guest Courtney Brown from the Farsight Institute reported that remote viewers he worked with had indicated a companion craft with aliens.
It’s worth noting that Shramek only asked what it might be, rather than making any definitive declarations about it. Yet he caught a lot of grief after what happened with the Heaven’s Gate cult near San Diego on March 26, 1997.
Speculation about the matter soared after the cult members committed mass suicide, with reports indicating the cult believed they would ascend to unite with extraterrestrial beings riding shotgun with Comet Hale-Bopp. Shramek then faced a media frenzy, with all too many ready to blame him for giving the cult the idea.
The fact that the Heaven’s Gate incident took place just 13 days after the Phoenix Lights incident struck some observers as rather peculiar, including Chuck Shramek. He wrote a spring ’97 article at his website that looked at some interesting numerology surrounding the NASA Apollo missions, the Egyptian pyramids, Roswell and the JFK assassination. There doesn’t seem to be link to Shramek’s article anymore, but having quoted it on an old webpage, this reporter can still cite it. At the end he noted:
“Just in: The Heaven’s Gate mansion was exactly on the 33rd degree. Did these people really kill themselves or were they done in by a plot. A plot that turned many people off to the entire subject of UFOs. Was this what they wanted?”
The idea that the Heaven’s Gaters were nudged over the edge in order to draw attention away from the Phoenix Lights and throw a cloud of ridicule over the topic of UFOlogy seems quite plausible. But even more interesting was the subsequent case the following week of an Air Force pilot out of the Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona whose plane vanished on a routine test flight and couldn’t be found for weeks. It became a national news story that played out throughout the month of April.
The Mysterious Disappearance of USAF Captain Craig Button
The 32-year-old A-10 pilot was flying an allegedly routine training mission on April 2, 1997 when he broke formation and headed northeast toward the Southwest’s Four Corners area until he disappeared from radar near Vail, Colorado. The story grabbed this burgeoning reporter’s attention in a particularly compelling way since I had just experienced a compelling close encounter of the first kind in Sedona, Arizona on April 1, witnessing a bright red pulsing orb perform dazzling anti-gravity maneuvers near Cathedral Rock.
With personal interest in UFOs suddenly ignited to a Fox Mulder level, the story of Button’s disappearance was difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Suspicions grew when the Air Force couldn’t find his plane for three weeks and started offering flimsy theories speculating that he had been suicidal. After they finally found his plane and body, the Air Force continued to float baseless speculation about Button being gay and in fear that he was about to be outed. His sister quickly shot that theory down, telling reporters he was quite heterosexual. His parents also stated that he had been in good spirits during a recent visit when he took them to the Grand Canyon. The Air Force would go on to flip their story and suggest Button had been depressed about an unrequited love for a former girlfriend, and would eventually close the books with suicide as the explanation. Button’s plane was also carrying four 500-pound bombs that were never found.
Quote from U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen when asked to describe the disappearance of USAF A-10 Pilot Craig Button
As with the Phoenix Lights, the Air Force’s story just didn’t add up. In the wake of the Phoenix Lights and having just witnessed the compelling UFO in Sedona, this reporter couldn’t help but suspect that Button had quite possibly witnessed a UFO himself and perhaps been overzealous in attempting to identify it. This theory received support in June 1997 from an article in the Sedona Journal of Emergence, where channeler Robert Shapiro posed a question about Button’s demise to an ET entity named Zoosh.
For what it’s worth, Zoosh acknowledged the scenario that Button had attempted to pursue an ET craft that wished him no harm, but couldn’t allow him to engage it. (A debate on the legitimacy of the channeling phenomenon is a topic for another article, but like UFOs, the body of evidence suggests there’s some level of legitimacy even in a field where there will also inevitably be misinterpretations, hoaxes, and even downright charlatans.) The Sedona Journal of Emergence article is noted here not as conclusive evidence per se, but as yet another interesting data point for the record in Button’s story.
This oddly titled, yet in-depth analysis of the entire scenario by what looks like a Phoenix Lights witness and investigator named William Warwick takes a deep dive down the Craig Button rabbit hole and offers some solid conjecture that Button’s demise and the unusual circumstances of the lengthy search to find him could indeed have been part of a cover-up related to the Phoenix Lights or similar UFO activity. Was Button perhaps part of a team of A-10 pilots at Davis-Monthan AFB that had been sent out to investigate the Phoenix Lights? Did he learn something that night or soon thereafter that led to his actions on April 2?
The length of the search to find Button was extremely puzzling. The Air Force can’t find a downed jet for three weeks? The article points out that:
Ordinarily, search-and-rescue teams find military aircraft that crash in these parts within a few hours, and there’s participation of ALL the local news helicopters (sort of a contest to see who’ll get footage first.) The newsies didn’t get involved until very late on this one,and even then, it’s been a remarkably limited participation. Also, the local media are really,really confused on this one; normally, a disappeared plane story is just a small item, but it’s been increasing in coverage each day. The story the media has gotten from the AFB gets new information with each telling; even though the AFB knew that the plane was armed, it took two days to convey this. The TV news anchors themselves are openly commenting that the missing plane story is “bizarre.”
The story took yet another bizarre twist when Button’s flight trainer Capt. Amy Lynn Svoboda also perished in an A-10 crash on May 28, 1997, allegedly due to pilot error. That made her “the second casualty in two months among the 355th Wing’s A-10 Thunderbolt fliers at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.” This only begs more questions. As an astute commenter at AboveTopSecret.com has asked:
“Did Amy and Craig become unwitting participants in a cover-up and did they know something about what happened on March 13, 1997 that got them killed?”
Svoboda’s Air Force memorial profile page indicates that : “Captain Svoboda was killed during a night training mission on the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range near Gila Bend, Arizona. She was flying an A-10A Thunderbolt II (#78–0690/DM). There is a finding that she became disoriented during the mission and crashed into the desert. She was the first female fighter pilot killed. At the time of her loss, she was a training officer in her squadron, having logged more than 1,400 hours piloting jets.”
The finding that Svoboda crashed because “she became disoriented during the mission” eerily matches with what Button’s parents concluded happened to him. Richard Button told the New York Times he thought the Air Force suicide story was a lie: ‘There must have been some kind of air contamination,’’ Mr. Button said, suggesting that his son had been stricken by fumes from the jet fuel. ‘’We think he was disoriented, that he wasn’t able to control his airplane for a period of time. We think that caused the accident.’’
As to the search for the missing bombs from Button’s plane, a 2007 story in the Scottsdale Times from journalist Jimmy Magahern reported that the Air Force had subcontracted a mountaineering team in the summer of ’97 to comb the mountain where Button crashed for wreckage and the bombs:
A Mountain of a Mess
John Peleaux, the leader of the mountaineering team that spent two and a half months in the summer of 1997 combing every square foot of Gold Dust Peak for aircraft parts and unexploded ordnance, or UXOs, still wonders what became of those disappeared bombs.
“All we know is that [Button] did not have the bombs onboard at the time of the crash, because we looked all over that mountain for them,” says Peleaux, whose Evergreen, Colorado-based company, Innovative Access, was subcontracted by the Air Force to lead a 12-man team that systematically scaled and inspected the entire northwest face of the 13,000-foot peak.
Peleaux’s search turned up nearly 11 tons of aircraft debris, mostly in tiny pieces that wound up being carried from the range on dozens of large pallets. But remnants from the bombs were not among the wreckage, leading officials to conclude they would have had to have been dropped somewhere between the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range near Gila Bend, where Button broke formation, and the peak near Eagle, Colorado, where the wreckage was found 18 days after the crash.
Peleaux would go on to state that he developed his own suspicions about the Air Force knowing more than it was letting on.
Over the course of the mission, Peleaux became suspect of how much the military knew about the incident that wasn’t being made public.
“I was privy to a lot of information — I was in charge of the mountain, basically,” he says. “And I watched the media being told things that were incomplete at best.”
Gazing Through the Looking Glass at Potential Connections Between Craig Button, The Phoenix Lights and Heaven’s Gate
In a story from May of 2016 titled “The Invasion of ‘97”, Ron Patton from the Ground Zero Media site offered a look back at these events and noted some additional points of intrigue. This includes a theory that the Phoenix Lights were a successful psy-op for a potential fake alien invasion. Then there’s an interesting citation where he writes:
“NORAD went Defcon 2 on the evening of March 13, 1997 after an air force misti-3 satellite covering North America was disabled and had its batteries drained as a space borne object was observed passing over the satellite. The mysterious object was also accompanied by a gamma ray burst detected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Just hours after these events, around 2 am on March 14, 1997, President Clinton was rushed to the hospital after suffering from a knee injury.
Did the secret service — fearing that the country was under attack, rush President Clinton too quickly and severely injured his knee just hours after thousands of people began reporting seeing UFO’s?”
President Clinton being rushed away under the cover of a medical issue recalls the legendary lore about President Eisenhower meeting with aliens in 1954, under the cover of emergency dental work. And while it’s difficult to find an official citation about NORAD going to Defcon2 that night, the story about the satellite being disabled and drained has been corroborated by noted UFOlogist and intrepid investigative journalist Linda Moulton-Howe.
Speaking on a panel at the 2015 Contact in the Desert Conference at Joshua Tree, Moulton-Howe said she received a call right after the Phoenix Lights incident from a contact who works on computer systems for the Department of Defense. “Linda, I want you to know, last night, I got a communication that one of our most secretive DoD satellites was fried… and it was ETs,” her source indicated. Moulton Howe concluded her thoughts on that panel by suggesting that, “If we knew the whole truth, we’d learn that their future survival and our survival are linked.”
Ron Patton’s story goes on to cite some truly anomalous information about the Heaven’s Gate incident:
Three members of the Heaven’s Gate “away team” worked for Advanced Development Group (ADG), Inc., a company that developed computer-based instruction for the US Army. ADG later became ManTech Advanced Development Group; these organizations have connections to the First Earth Battalion [inspiration for the film The Men Who Stare at Goats].
A Psy-op group that was formed in the U.S. Military to allegedly handle Military extra terrestrial affairs such as abductions, contact through telepathy Remote Viewing and ESP , and possible simulated extra terrestrial “drills” using holographic technology. First Earth Battalion eventually became the Jedi Project. All of these secretive Psy-op groups are, or were, well skilled in spreading information and disinformation about the occult, the Heaven’s Gate cult, the attacks of 9/11, remote viewing and UFO’s.
If the Heaven’s Gate cult were working on battle game scenarios for an alien invasion, could this be the smoking gun that could indicate that this whole affair was a Psy-op that was even fooling the President and some of the military?
The information that there was a connection between Heaven’s Gate and a firm providing “advanced technological services to the United States government” should be enough to trip anyone’s conspiracy detector. A 10-year flashback article on Heaven’s Gate from 2007 provides a few more details:
For a few months prior to their deaths, three members, Thurston-ody, Sylvie-ody, and Elaine-ody, worked for Advanced Development Group (ADG), Inc. (now ManTech Advanced Development Group), a small San Diego-based company that developed computer-based instruction for the U. S. Army. Although they were polite and friendly in a reserved way, they tended to keep to themselves. When they quit working for ADG, they told their supervisor that they had completed their mission. A few weeks later, they were dead.
This is murky territory but it begs questions, like what exactly were these were working on and to what degree could they have been manipulated? It all provides further fuel for the theory that there was an element of the Heaven’s Gate cult that went deeper than surface inspection would indicate, and that the timing of the group suicide may well have been orchestrated as a defensive psy-op response to the growing buzz around the Phoenix Lights.
As to the concept of psy-ops imaging that could fool the military, Patton goes on to suggest that Button could conceivably have been alarmed that an invasion had begun. That seems like a stretch, although put the invasion scenario aside and consider whether Button could have wound up learning something during the Phoenix Lights affair about the 50-year UFO coverup since Roswell. Patton goes on to note that: “there has been some speculation that after the sighting in Arizona, Button became obsessed with the possibility of hidden alien bases in the Southwest and decided it was his duty to destroy them. Hundreds of people reported hearing loud explosions in Northern Arizona, Telluride and Aspen. It was a mysterious situation that will never be explained. Some believed that Button was attacking a secret U.S. underground base. However, the government had covered up the situation.”
This scenario remains highly speculative, although in the grand scheme of things, one could argue that it’s more plausible than the baseless suicide theory that the Air Force closed the books with. A scenario along these lines would also corroborate with what mountaineering team leader John Peleaux reported about Air Force officials not being fully forthcoming regarding how much they knew about the situation.
In the end, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s description of Button’s disappearance while he was still missing is as good a summary of the strange tale as any: “It is a Mystery, Wrapped in an Enigma, Inside a Riddle.” And it remains so 20 years later, as does the mystery of the Phoenix Lights and the strange military connection with Heaven’s Gate…
#TheTruthIsOutThere #CraigButton #PhoenixLights #HeavensGate #20YearsLater #DisclosureActivists
