Scintillating Lights In The Arizona Night Sky

By James Donahue

When my wife and I moved to Arizona and had the good fortune to be invited to live with a Navajo family in the Southwest American high desert, we arrived in time to enjoy what was to be the last of clear unpolluted visions of the night sky.

The brown haze moved in at about the time we left four years later.

Those were amazingly wonderful times in that desolate part of the world. Among all of the great experiences we shared was the rediscovery of the starry night sky and all of the other wonderful things going on up there. We learned that there was no mystery to the obsession our ancestors had with the stars and their positions throughout the heavens. The display for us was quite spectacular.

People who live in the high desert enjoy clear blue skies most of the time. Before there was smog, the night sky was pure black with a broad array of twinkling stars, a brilliant moon, and some other things that didn’t quite belong up there.

We thought they were UFOs at first and got quite excited about it. I had a good pair of binoculars that helped amplify our view of whatever it was that we were looking at. Every night, at various points in the sky, there could be seen extra bright stars that seemed to twinkle more than the others. When we trained the glasses on them we noticed that they changed colors.

We saw scintillating reds, blues, yellows, oranges, whites. I remember how excited we got about our discovery and told people around us what we were seeing. How surprised we were when they acted as if it was nothing unusual. They didn’t even bother to look up.

People in Arizona took that night sky for granted, much as I think I did when I was young and the stars were there for us to examine in all their glory in the Michigan sky. I never thought that brilliant display would ever grow dim and eventually disappear from sight. But it did.

We took advantage of our nights in Arizona. We studied the stars. We observed a rare alignment of the planets in a row right over our heads. We saw two comets sweep the solar system, one of them the notorious Hale-Bopp that led to the alleged mass suicides of the Hale-Bopp Cult in Arizona that year.

There also was a full eclipse of the moon.

All of these things appeared to have been gifts to us from the Universe. Yet nothing truly explained the flashing multiple lighted objects hovering overhead among the stars.

When we were getting our first lessons on remote viewing, we targeted one of these objects. I drew a frightening alien face, suggesting that it was a UFO. But was I being tricked? The object appeared too stable a craft . . . always showing itself in about the same place each night . . . making be think it was a government placed satellite rather than something from the stars.

We will never know just what it was that captured my fantasies in those days. Now that we are moved back under the smog, I never get to see those twinkling lights. When meteorite showers fall, they are not for us to enjoy. What we have done to our sky is a crime.