Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
- Mar 11, 2021

An Otherworldly Sighting

The agitated, murmuring crowd in the dark on South Mountain, 2,690 feet above Phoenix, Arizona, was saying that it was a return of the 1997 Phoenix lights, "same thing, looks just like it." It looked more like a Phoenix blackout.

My friend and I had planned to sit on a bench inside one of the open-sided stone ramadas on top of South Mountain and enjoy the night lights of Phoenix. But as soon as I stepped out of his truck I realized that there were too many tense people there, milling around, pointing down toward the city, maybe on the verge of hysteria. My friend turned back to his truck and I followed him, but over my shoulder I looked out over the city and toward Camelback Mountain, in between was a matt-black wedge shape, at about 1000 feet below us and above the city. I saw it gliding soundlessly along like a vast ocean liner gliding across an ocean of night sky, slow, steady, massive, and relentlessly blackening out the city lights below it. It blacked out half of the city lights as it went. I do not know how I felt. The awe of a dumb animal?

I have rendered this illustration of what I saw, but it is imperfect in that I do not have the skill to portray the power of that flat black unidentified flying object that may or may not have had glowing lights beneath it. I only got a glimpse of it because my friend was leaving and I went with him. I too had taken the volatile temperature of the crowd and I too had seen the glint of the long, thick hunting knife that one of the locals had flashed at him. We were not welcome, not even during a UFO sighting.