Posted: 10/14/2006

The Phoenix Lights

(2006)

by Hank Yuloff

Documentaries and documentarians are a difficult breed to understand when you compare them to regular filmmakers. The huge majority of them are not serial documentarians; most have one particular subject that is near and dear to them, and they decide to share their passions with the world.

Such is the case with The Phoenix Lights. It is the culmination of a seven-year quest by writer/director Lynne D. Kitei, M.D., to talk about a series of unexplained sightings of objects that have appeared over the skies of Phoenix, Arizona.

In this documentary, Kitei brings together both eyewitnesses, to share what they saw and felt during these sightings, and scientists, to explain what the sightings might be. The story has been reported by most of the major media outlets (ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, the Discovery Channel), but the government and military have only offered explanations that do not seem to fit the recorded evidence.

Recorded? Yes. Dr. Kitei has included several photographs and some video in the film to back up what she and the others said they saw. That, along with many simulations, tells the story of this phenomenon.

The trouble is, there are not enough photos and video (roughly two minutes total that are repeated throughout) to make this a grabber worth sitting through. It is mostly interview after interview, talking about what they saw and their individual hypothesis as to what it might be. The 35mm photos are anything but clear, and though this writer believes that something did show up over the Phoenix skies several times, they are not clear enough to give someone who has not actually seen the lights (or space vehicles) enough detail to form their own conclusions.

The project began with Kitei, a medical doctor specializing in community health issues, writing a 750-page book of her experiences attempting to get to the bottom of this sighting. She ran into continuous dead ends with official channels. And though she considered herself a healthy skeptic on the subject of UFOs before the sightings, her experiences in the past seven years has put her strongly in the True Believer category. She feels that there is much to be learned by the sightings. They may just be a gentle way for visitors from other planets to let us know they exist, but, she says, we should be prepared for when they finally do come down and communicate face-to-whatever-they-have. “Something is going on, and it’s time for us to move forward in our evolution. It is time to open our minds,” said Kitei.

Hank Yuloff is a co-founder of Film Monthly, a film critic and media mogul in Los Angeles.

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