when flares are dropped they're sort of dropped in bunches and look scattered. >> paul scohan says arizona's weather could allow them to stay in formation after being dropped from planes. >> we have numerous evenings here in the desert especially in the spring and the fall and the lights happened in march where the air is completely still. there is no cross wind that would disturb a formation of that kind. >> i think probably it's got something to do with military. some government experiment which would seem logical to me. i don't think -- i don't know if there's evidence of it being alien spacecraft. there's no way of knowing that. >> given that we are one star in 100 billion in our own galaxy and there are 100 billion other galaxies out there, it would be unfortunate if we were the only sentient life out there. but so far we have seen no other yet. >> when you hear over and over hundreds of people describe what they saw and how they felt. they were mesmerized. >> last one left. it's gone. >> we may never know. but nonetheless, it really was so dramatic and so different from anything, anyth

paul scohan at arizona state university has a less extraordinary explanation. >> here in the desert southweste a lot of military bases and rocket launches, and it's very easy to see them because we have 330 clear nights a year. so it's very easy to see these phenomena in the night sky whereas elsewhere in the country maybe you wouldn't. >> look. the one in the middle is doing something. it's going out of alignment. >> with a growing interest in the lights, the military responds to accounts. it asserts the maryland national guards was dropping illumination flares that evening at a bombing range directly behind the mountains where the slights were seen. scohan believes the explanation. >> as we went through the video and those lights started to wink out, at every time a light was extinguished, it seems to line up with the mountain ridge line itself the area to the side of the mountains set aside for the use to have the military called the goldwater bombing range. a standard practice for a night bombing run is to drop high-altitude bombing flairs that are very bright sources of light. so you can