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On the other hand, you are deliberately 'shrinking' the apparent size and playing down the strangeness of a flight of planes at that height and speed. Overhead, the flight would have appeared 9 degrees across, and that is assuming that Stanley was correct, and that they did not spread apart...

Tim Ley claimed to have seen the formation from 65 miles away; I'm not sure how he determined that distance, but it seems to confirm that the planes were a high and distant formation, rather than a large and low object that would be difficult to see at that distance. The Snowbird A-10s flew...

Also a convicted fraudster, but that doesn't seem to count for much these days.

Approximately 40 witnesses are listed on Tim Printy's website, here. http://web.archive.org/web/20080321054330/http://members.aol.com/tprinty/azwit.html Since that time an increasingly large number of people have claimed to see either or both events; probably significantly more than 2000...

I suspect that Printy was estimating that Stanley could not see the flight until it was 20 degrees above the horizon. This may have been an error- there are several things I might have asked Stanley that Printy didn't, but for the most part Printy's correspondence with Stanley was quite...

Well, having done a bit of trigonometry, an object that was perfectly level, and subtended 5 degrees at 40 degrees elevation, would subtend 9 degrees directly overhead (eighteen times the width of the Moon). Not quite 15 degrees. But if the formation was even slightly tilted that figure could...

Well, I can, if the angle Stanley was observing the phenomenon at was similar to the angle of the Proctor clip. Remember that Stanley watched it from 20 degrees elevation to 60 degrees elevation; if his estimation of size was made at 40 degrees elevation, 5 degrees width is roughly consistent...

First 2 objects. As I have pointed out many times. The third object was outside the field of view, according to his correspondence with Printy.

I am sure of nothing. Many of my friends have only '1-hour precision' when talking about their own schedules; if they say 8:00 they mean anything between 8:00 and 9:00. But there is a definite trend in the witness reports favouring 8:15pm as the start of the event, which is a bit early for the...

A bigger problem is the timing. Reports start coming in at about 08:15 pm, with the flight of planes appearing NW of Phoenix; the Snowbirds are supposed to have taken off about then, in Tuscon, and it would have taken them at least a quarter of an hour to get to the NW of Phoenix...

That is not correct. There is another reason; if it was high and fast, and they misperceived the height, which is what seems to have happened here. The model that Printy has been using is a flight of planes travelling at 300-450 miles per hour at 35,000 feet. Several people who saw this flight...

Front Two lights. The third one was outside the FOV. I have already pointed this out. Here's a (cleaned up) frame from the Proctor video. You can see that the front two lights are very close together, and the outermost light is at least five times as far away. Translated to an overhead view...

Eight degrees across would be a Jumbo Jet at 1600 feet. That would be an impressive object, sixteen times as wide as the Moon. And if it were crawling across the sky at an apparent speed of a few tens of miles per hour, then it would look more impressive still. That would be the speed of a...

My calculation suggest the flight of planes would have been eight degrees across from directly underneath, and that assumes that Stanley was making his 'five degree' estimate at 60 degrees, and not at some lower angle above the horizon. He watched it from twenty degrees to sixty degrees. There...

Actually 'two'. He was misquoted, or so he said to Printy.

I thought they may have been tropicbirds, which have long tails, but Indian examples don't have black tips to their wings.

They sure look like birds to me.

Directly overhead, this formation would appear about 8 degrees across, assuming Stanley's estimates are all correct. I notice that he first saw the formation at an angle of 20 degrees or so above the horizon, so we don't really know at which angle he made his observation. (20 degrees or 60...

As I've pointed out before, the middle three planes in Proctor's video were much closer together than the two outer ones. Only two lights were in the FOV of the telescope at any one time. Calculating the trigonometry for a 60 degree angle at 20,000 feet, I get 0.465 miles, which is roughly the...

Another quote from Printy's site http://web.archive.org/web/20080102174259/http://members.aol.com/tprinty/azconc.html