EDOM 13: Easter Sunday Saucer Sighting
all about that time I saw a UFO in Arizona eighteen years ago
MOOP matter:
I am performing in the play “ Wasteland: The Most Final and Ultimate Showdown” Friday, Saturday and Sunday this upcoming weekend, and the next! If you would like to watch a band of roving clowns clash against authoritarian mimes in an apocalyptic hellscape, than this is the show for you! If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, get your tix and come on down to worship the rediculous at the Church of Clown.
Now on to this issues’s story…
When I was a freshman at Arizona State University I saw a flying saucer. The day was 2007 April 8; it was Easter Sunday. I had recently come back from an afternoon dinner with my Uncle Larry, Aunt Rit and some family friends. I was relaxing on my bed on the sixth floor of the Palo Verde East dormitory. As I casually peered out my northwest-facing window I noticed an object in the sky that looked like the profile of a passenger aircraft, which was heading either directly toward or away from my location. Given that my dorm was located less than five miles from a busy international airport, such a sight was not particularly unusual. But what was unusual was it did not change in apparent size as is expected of an object that was coming or going. I walked to the window to better see this mysterious shape.
The most prominent landmark in view of my window was a mountain that is creatively called “A Mountain.”1 It’s not a big mountain—about 500 meters at its base and rises about 100 meters above the surrounding land. This strange object I saw appeared roughly 10 degrees above A Mountain’s western ridge (the left side from my perspective). It was hovering there, motionless. After a short time (maybe 10 seconds), the object began to oscillate—like the bob of a pendulum swinging in a circle; or like a spinning top that wobbles as it winds down. At this point I would see that it had a circular underside. And it glinted in the sun like shiny metal. The shape looked like two shallow bowls sandwiched together with a dome on top.
My flabbers being completely gasted, I hurriedly searched my desk for my camera. I couldn’t immediately find it and not wanting to lose sight of whatever I was observing, I abandoned the search for a recording device and continued to watch. The object stopped its precession and then began to slowly move downward, but not straight down—it zig-zagged on the way. It looked like a leaf or a feather swinging back and forth on a gentle fall to the ground. After four or five of these swings, it descended below and behind the ridge of the mountain. I never saw it again. I looked at the clock as I thought it important to note the time: it was 4:45 pm.
After waiting some time (probably not very long) to see if it would emerge, I ran down the hall to my friends’ room where Bret, Charlie and Casey were playing video games. I announced, “Guys I saw a flying saucer!” My report was met with the assumption that this was some joke I was playing. Sure, I was known to say some silly things but I didn’t just make up wild stories without slathering on the sarcasm, so I was in disbelief at their disbelief. They asked if I could have seen a kite or some remote controlled airplane. But I assured them it wasn’t like a kite or plane of any kind I’d ever seen before. But without photographic evidence or any physical implications of the unidentified object there wasn’t much to do about it. I do remember seeing hikers on the mountain ridge at the time. I wish I had run over to and up the mountain and asked “Did you see that??” to everyone I encountered. It sure seemed like someone else must have seen something as they would have been much closer than me. I fully expected there would be reports of the incident on the news; but days and weeks later I didn’t hear a thing.
Now that I’m recounting this experience, I thought it’d be helpful to illustrate what I saw as best I can remember it. Here is the general shape of the object I saw:
It was not particularly close (at least half a mile away, as we’ll discuss later) and all I could see was the general form. I did not notice any seams, windows, antenna, lights nor other distinguishing features. It was all a consistent metal grey texture.
Below is a panorama I took looking out my dorm window during sunset some evening of my freshman year. The peak at the right side of the image is A Mountain.
This photo of A Mountain is also out my dorm window. It was not from the day in consideration, but the lighting conditions (sunny, late afternoon light from the southwest) match how I remember them to be. I overlaid the path that the object took roughly to scale as I remember it.
Determining the size of objects in the sky is difficult to do by eye. However, using the power of trigonometry, we can calculate its size if we know its distance and its apparent angular size in the field of view. For example, a fist at arm's length is about 10°, a finger 1° and the sun and moon both span about a half of a degree. I would say that the shiny disk I saw was roughly the size of the moon or maybe a bit smaller. So we’ll use 0.5° and maybe as small as 0.25°. But how far away was it? There is a well defined minimum bound on the distance as it could not have been closer than the mountain ridge it fell behind. This distance is about 800 meters. It could have been further, but by how much? If it had been much further away, I would have expected to see the effect of atmospheric distortion: low contrast due to haze, with a blue color cast. But I didn’t notice that distortion and had the impression that the object was just beyond the mountain. So, a reasonable upper bound for the distance might be 1200 meters, which would put it over top of Tempe Town Lake .
Because the distance to the object is much larger than the width of the object itself we can use this simple approximation for calculating the width:
width of object = distance • angular size (in radians)
So, plugging in our numbers we get a range of roughly 3.5 to over 10 meters for our flying saucer. For comparison’s sake, the small end of our estimate is equal to the wingspan of a great albatross (which are not native to the area as they typically prefer oceans to deserts). And on the bigger end is the length of a large killer whale (which also are not native as they prefer oceans to skies).
I just checked the weather records for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for that day. The reported weather condition was “mostly cloudy” nearly all day, including at 4:51 pm, just a few minutes after my sighting. I find this interesting because I always remembered the day being sunny and cloudless (similar to the photo of A Mountain we saw above). Clearly my recollection of the day is not perfect.
While the experience of observing this unidentified flying object (that’s UFO, for those hip to acronyms) was strange and striking, it didn’t have a strong influence on my life. Aside from my initial report to my friends, I rarely brought it up and I just thought of it as a miscellaneous curiosity. From time to time, I would remember seeing that silver disk, and wonder what it was. I figured it was likely some top-secret military project, or a misunderstood natural phenomena, or of course, it could have been aliens. Of either of those options, I always considered the last option to be the most cool, but least likely. However, my opinion in that regard has changed dramatically in the last six months.
I read the written testimony that some high level government officials and a journalist submitted to the United States Congress in 2023 and 2024. They described projects that have collected vast amounts of information regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena.2 They even mentioned the recovery of physical craft and “non-human” pilots. Unlike my Easter Sunday saucer sighting, the testimony of these whistleblowers did have a strong influence on the following months.
This influence has manifested in the form of a poem that I wrote about the aforementioned ASU UFO and some of the “facts” I discovered as I dug down the rabbit hole of secret projects, leaked documents, interviews with military officers, and tales of E.T. contactees. I would like to share this poem with you now—because that was original intention of this issue of Each Day, One More—but I won’t because the entire story above was intended to be a single introductory paragraph, yet now sprawls over four typed pages. So, for the sake of readability, I will just share the first four lines of my literary endeavor. I’ll publish the poem in its entirety in the next issue of EDOM to come soon. Anyway, the title of the poem is “We Come in Peace?” and begins:
On Easter Sunday in two thousand and seven
I saw a silver disk hov’ring in the heavens.
It wobbled like a top, then fell like a feather,
hid behind a mountain, gone from sight forever…
I even had the honor of reciting this piece live at the Church of Clown in the Ten Fold Physique festival on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of last week! I will share a video of that recitation in the next issue of EDOM, as well.
Thank you for reading my strange story and curious to hear of any usual experiences you may have had…
More formally known as “Tempe Butte” or “Hayden Butte.”
UAP is the term d’jour for UFO as it is more inclusive because the unidentified thing in question might not be flying nor a physical object.