Flare Drop

A flare drop is a military illumination flare — typically several dropped together on individual parachutes from an aircraft during a training exercise — descending slowly in a visible string of bright, hanging lights, a routine and unremarkable event to anyone familiar with nearby military range operations but a genuinely startling sight to an unprepared civilian witness who has no such context. Flare drops are the confirmed, radar-tracked explanation for the second and later set of lights reported during the March 1997 Phoenix Lights case — a separate episode from the earlier V-formation sightings that same evening, this later set specifically traced to flares dropped by Air National Guard A-10 aircraft conducting a training exercise at the nearby Barry Goldwater Range, and corroborated by the Guard's own after-action acknowledgment. The Phoenix case remains the field's clearest illustration of why investigators insist on treating each reported light cluster from a single night as a potentially separate incident rather than one unified event: the earlier formation lights and the later flare-drop lights are both real, both witnessed by thousands of people the same evening, and yet have two entirely different explanations, one still genuinely unresolved and one conclusively identified. Flare drops recur as a trigger near any active military training range with a UFO-report history.