Phoenix Lights Redux

Not a very imaginative title; I just like using "redux" and here's the opportunity. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn't comment on the return of the Phoenix lights, for the same reasons I told myself I wouldn't comment on the Stephenville lights. Everybody else is already commenting, and, I'm not there. I can only do armchair punditry. Though it can be said that punditry is just that; commenting on things just because you feel like it.

I haven't even read much about the new lights over Phoenix, just casual glances. Even with that, some things about this are interesting:

The timing. A month or six weeks or so after the "first" sighting years ago.

The expected responses that the lights are flares, military planes, lanterns -- anything but a true UFO.

Visitors from outer space. In other words, aliens.

The lights, if they are the same -- and how can anyone know? -- are interesting to be sure, if for no other reason than they have everyone very excited. (And for the jaded faux UFO "researchers" and snarly skeptics, bored.)

It's an interesting look into UFOlogy itself, the infrastructure in its responses to the lights, and the witnesses; then and now.

One thing to remember is that, like many areas (Montana, Utah, Colorado, just to name three) UFO sightings, strange lights in the sky, go back hundreds of years in some cases. Same with Phoenix. Ten years ago wasn't the first; things like that have been going on in that region for a very long time.

Regardless of what this new incident in Phoenix turns out to be, it does seem we're in a "flap" UFO wise, and have been for awhile now.