Government cover-up or cosmic starship? UFO filmmaker unravels 1997 Phoenix Lights mystery

Documentary filmmaker and content creator Patrick James has garnered millions of views on his YouTube channel exploring conspiracy theories, ancient mysteries, and unexplained phenomena. The popularity of his podcast, “So Weird with Patrick James,” is a testament to humanity’s intrinsic proclivity for mystery and the supernatural. From secret government projects to Egypt’s many conundrums, James takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach, blending compelling storytelling with open-minded inquiry as he dives into the unknown.

On a recent episode of “Back to the People,” James joined Nicole Shanahan to discuss the chief of all conspiracy theories: UFOs.

Nicole’s theory about UFOs is that they are “government contractors that are flying drones around our airspace,” likely paid for by the “$2 trillion in unaccounted spending” revealed by the Department of Defense’s 2023 audit.

James then brings up the mystery of the Phoenix Lights — a series of unidentified lights observed in a triangular formation over Phoenix, Arizona, on March 13, 1997, by thousands of eyewitnesses. Months after the sightings, the U.S. military dismissed the lights as flares dropped during a training exercise, but this response failed to address several aspects of sightings, including the miles-wide craft that were seen passing silently over the city. In his documentary, James dug “as far as [he] was comfortable going” into the controversy.

“What makes you uncomfortable?” asks Nicole.

“What makes me uncomfortable is that this story itself has been gate kept for at least 25 years, and the gatekeepers are the people who are collecting and filtering all the information coming from the witnesses and the people who were collecting the photo and video evidence,” he says.

One of the people he interviewed for the documentary was image processing pioneer and UFO researcher Jim Dilettoso, the founder of Village Labs in Tempe, Arizona, where the Phoenix Lights evidence was stored. Jim played a significant role in analyzing the video and photographic evidence.

After their interview, Dilettoso “called [James] every day” for weeks, pleading with him to not pursue the story deeper, especially as it related to a story about “men in black” confiscating video evidence from Richard Curtis, an eyewitness.

“I caught Jim contradicting himself multiple times,” says James, noting that Dilettoso was clearly uneasy any time he “started touching the stove around the men in black or this Richard Curtis character,” who mysteriously “disappeared” without a trace after he claimed in a FOX10 News interview that men in black had confiscated his footage. He claimed men in black were not real, even though a phone call from 1997 records him claiming he was personally visited by three of them at Village Labs.

James believes Dilettoso is clearly hiding something.

As for the numerous impossibly large aircraft spotted on that strange night in Phoenix, he says, all evidence considered, “I don’t think this was man-made.”

From a ship with “bright orange ... lava lamp” bubbles and “rainbow mists” that supposedly inspired “love and gratitude” to black hole theories, James and Nicole’s conversation leads to many strange and fascinating places.

To hear it in full, watch the episode above.

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