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government. nan a On that unforgettable March evening in 1997, Symington had already arrived home and was watching the news when he received some calls about the sighting. He jumped into his car, and without his usual security detail, which had just left, he drove to a park near Squaw Peak, outside Phoenix, and amazingly enough, saw something highly unusual, brightly lit, overhead. "It was dramatic," he said in our first interview. "And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a a 4 geometric outline, a constant shape." A Harvard graduate and decorated Air Force veteran of Vietnam, Symington is a great-grandson of Henry Clay Frick, the coal and steel magnate, and a cousin of the late Stuart Symington, Democratic Senator from Missouri. He served as the Republican governor of Arizona beginning in 1991, and was reelected in 1994. A longtime pilot, he frequently flies his twin-engine Beechcraft Baron plane between his two homes in Phoenix and Santa Barbara, California. Symington was first nudged into coming forward in late 2006, when my colleague James Fox, an accomplished documentary filmmaker, sent him a copy of his UFO documentary Out of the Blue, which includes coverage of the Phoenix Lights. Fox was adding new material to the acclaimed film for a second release. He had never spoken to the former governor and decided to approach him to see if he ‘could find out why Symington had staged the infamous spoof press conference. Fox had interviewed numerous witnesses who did not think Symington's spoof was 6 funny, and were still rather upset by what, to them, was the governor's mockery and ridicule. He assumed that, given this behavior, the conservative governor did not take UFOs seriously, and he had no expectation that Symington would agree to an interview. When he received Out of the Blue, Symington watched it and apparently found it fascinating, but at first was hesitant to reply. Eventually he came around. At that point, Symington says, he decided that when he met with the filmmaker, he would tell him the whole story. "I was sick and tired of people being ridiculed for reporting legitimate sightings," he later explained to me, and he decided that it was time to take a stand. Still, James Fox had no idea what was in store when he first met the former and ridicule. the He governor in Santa Barbara, and started his cameras rolling. The two men seemed to hit it off right away. At one point during the filmed interview. Fox pulled out his cassette tape recorder. While the camera held a close-up of Symington's face, capturing his subtle change in expressions, Fox played for Symington a personal message he had recorded from one of the governor's former constituents, Stacey Roads. Roads and her teenage daughter were witnesses to the Arizona UFO, and she began by describing exactly where they were when she saw the craft. "A massive triangle came over I-10 and over my car. It was so large that if I'd opened a newspaper and laid on my back I couldn't have blocked out