Frances Emma Barwood discusses political perils of UFOs
3/7/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
As far as ufology is concerned, March 13, 1997 seems to take on greater importance each year. On that date, around 8 p.m., five mysterious lights slowly drifted across the skies of Arizona, including downtown Phoenix - almost directly above AlienZoo's headquarters. Hundreds, if not thousands, of persons saw the lights, from the northern region of the state to the extreme south. Some observers even saw the dark object (which is commonly believed to be V-shaped) that accompanied the lights.
As we travel further in time, the lights seen over Phoenix grow more puzzling. Official explanations - primarily that the lights were high-intensity flares dropped by Maryland Air Guard A-10 pilots on a special mission - failed to convince many observers from the beginning. Meantime, the UFO community's appetite for the truth has increased.
One of the key figures in the story of the Phoenix Lights is Frances Emma Barwood, who served as Vice Mayor of the City of Phoenix while the lights were seen. In spring 1997, when Barwood asked her colleagues in office to help find answers regarding the lights, she was met with silence, even ridicule. Inspired by her UFO experience, Barwood in September, 1998 ran for Secretary of State of Arizona on the premise that she would open up secret state records. Barwood lost in a primary election, to Betsey Bayless, who gathered 73% of votes.
Since, Barwood has settled in a rural town north of Phoenix, where she has been writing a pair of books. One deals with the March 13, 1997 incident, its repercussions, and the UFO sympathizers she has encountered. The other book is about government, politics, and the lengths leaders take to keep people from knowing what is going on.
Here, in a visit to AlienZoo, Barwood recounts the disappointment she met while in office, and offers theories about what the lights really were.
AlienZoo: What was your role in researching the lights?
Barwood:I came into the story in May 1997. A TV crew asked me if I could find out anything, because they had gone through every level of government, and nobody would talk to them, or would give them a statement saying that they were not investigating. I didn.t know about what had happened that night. I came home that night very late; I watched the 10 o.clock news, and saw something about the lights on the news. I thought it was an airplane that had flown off course or something, and just disregarded it.
I went into a Phoenix City Council meeting and asked council if we could look into it. Apparently, this object flew over the entire state of Arizona. Everybody was so silent. It was very awkward. I thought, "What did I say?" After the meeting was over, one of the deputy city managers came over to me and said, "You shouldn't have asked that. You're opening Pandora's Box. I know that they don't want to talk about it." I found out that the mayor [Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza] had issued a statement saying there are no UFOs over Phoenix. I remember wondering how he could just say that without anybody checking it.
I asked Pat Manion, the deputy city manager, whether he could find out what was going on and why they were so afraid to talk about it. Unfortunately, two weeks later, he died of a heart attack. I never was given an answer, but he would have told me, because he was that kind of a guy.
The next thing that happened was that a very nice newspaper article [by Arizona Republic reporter Chris Fiscus appeared, on Saturday, May 10. It was incredible. The phone started at 7 o.clock in the morning that Saturday. Calls came from all over Arizona, from Paulden (in the north, near Flagstaff) to Tucson (in the south). Over the next several months, I probably talked with more than 700 people, and they all described the same thing. It was absolutely huge. It was low. It was slow. It was obvious. And it had lights on it, between three and seven lights. It was totally silent. Nobody was afraid. Everybody said they were astounded, amazed, and in awe. Most had totally forgotten about it between March and the time they saw the article. I kept thinking how they could forget something like that. But maybe that's fairly common; it's just the mind blanking things out.
AlienZoo: Or maybe we're just taught to ignore these things?
Barwood: It.s the scorn factor. That.s one thing I learned since then. There are things you tell a little child . like .don.t talk about these things.. and if they talk about them in public, people scorn them. Yet, there are so many people who will say privately, .I saw this,. or, .I saw that, but I don.t want to talk about it..
I remember Mayor Rimsza handing out business cards with my name on it, saying, .Frances Emma Barwood from the planet Xenon. Talk into the aluminum foil and she.ll hear you.. Or something like that. And he was handing them out to people like that. I wonder why they were so intent upon ridiculing me, other than to just shut me up. He was even on television, doing a speech before National Guard pilots, and he ridiculed me about trying to find out about things flying over Phoenix. A couple of the National Guard people who were there came to me and told me that they couldn.t talk about these things, because they would lose their commission.
AlienZoo: What were the official explanations?
Barwood: There were three. One was that it was planes flying in formation. Well, this was seen by so many pilots, and they know planes. This wasn.t a plane. Then they said this was flares.
AlienZoo: Flares that fly horizontally.
Barwood: And lasting two hours. Unless they had a new kind of flare, that nobody knows about. Then, five months later, this spokesperson - not even the actual person that supposedly flew out here - comes out; this fleet of planes, he said, came out all the way from Maryland to the Yuma Air Force Base to drop flares. He called it Operation Snowbird, and he was on television.
Because of all of this, I now have a library - video, audio, pictures, and books. Slowly, I was going through all of this stuff. This man came out from Chicago to see me, and give me all of these papers. In them, he gave me the government language for different things. Snowbird is the word for diversion. Later, I went back and watched the television interview with the spokesperson. I thought, wait a minute, he.s flat-out saying that this is Operation Diversion.
The spokesperson said they dropped these flares at the Yuma Air Force Base. In the interview, he said, it was only 30 miles from Phoenix. Yuma is really 90 miles from Phoenix, and you cannot see anything down there from Phoenix.
I talked with a man who was from Prescott Valley. The Hale-Bopp Comet was happening at the time, and he had a Hale-Bopp party that night. There were 20 or 30 people at the party, and they all felt something over them. They looked up. They didn.t see the object, but they saw its shape. It blocked out the sky. He said they just stood there and watched this thing. It was the biggest thing he could imagine, slowing moving south. They watched it until it was gone. Then they went back in and continued with their party, and didn.t think again about it until May, when he read the article.
AlienZoo: What do you think the lights could be? Do you have any theories?
Barwood: I think the Phoenix Lights could be one of three things. It.s either military. Or it.s a hoax. Or it.s something that we don.t know.
If it.s military, why would they run an operation at a time when everyone was watching Hale-Bopp? Wouldn.t the military rather do something like this out in the middle of the desert at 2 or 3 a.m.? The object traveled over the most densely populated pathway. Isn.t there a public-safety issue?
If it.s a hoax, I can.t possibly imagine how they could do something that went all the way across Arizona. It would take a whole heck of a lot of money, time, and effort. And I don.t know how they could do a thing like that.
If it were unknown, you.d have to think about what kind of unknown we.re talking about. If it were another country invading our air space, our military is doing nothing. Why are we paying them? What are they there for? If it were another country, and they wanted to be obvious, why would they want to do this? To me, they wanted us to know that we.re not the only ones in the whole universe. They obviously have technologies well beyond ours.
Why are they trying to keep it a secret? Well, governments have power. Religions have power. I.m a Christian. I.m not going to change my belief. But to me, it comes down to God being the god of the universe, not just of this Earth. If other beings from some other world came here, it would topple government or religion.
To me, there.s nothing to be afraid of. I.m so nosey. I just want to know.
AlienZoo: You.d have to think that this was some kind of boomerang-shaped craft, a V-shaped craft?
Barwood: Everybody described it as either triangular or boomerang. They all described exactly the same thing. Old people. Young people. I talked with doctors. I talked with lawyers. I talked to Little League coaches and mothers. I talked with truck drivers. A couple of joggers saw it. A family getting out of their car at a shopping mall saw it. The people who saw it run the whole gamut.
The light were obviously something astounding . a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I have realized that this has happened all over the world. But only in the United States is it the case that no one wants to talk about it.
AlienZoo: If you could have done or said anything differently, what would it be?
Barwood: Let.s put it this way. I didn.t have a clue what it was. I just asked people around me: .Let.s find out.. If I were in the same situation again, knowing what I know now, I would push so hard that I would back them in a corner.
I sent a letter to Senator John McCain. He sent it to Air Force Maj. Gen. Lansford Trapp, who then sent it . with full knowledge of Senator McCain . to the Blue Book archives. I found out that it is a filing system for UFO reports. They weren.t going to answer me. I never got my letter back.
So I sent Senator McCain a second letter, and he sent it directly to the National Archives, which is a bigger and better filing system. He didn.t even refer to me as a councilwoman from Phoenix; he said I was a constituent, as if I had no pull at all. My assistant traced it, and they didn.t want to give me a copy of the letter. She called the National Archives, and someone there said they don.t send letters out, that they just file them. She ended up faxing us a note saying that the National Archive does not respond to questions on anything. I felt like the bumpkin.
AlienZoo: You ran for office afterward. What happened?
Barwood: Yes. Secretary of State. It was interesting. I had decided to do so before the March sighting. Because of that, the people who had supported me were told that if they supported me, they would never again do anything politically.
A really good friend, whom I knew for 12 years, offered me, through the head of the Republican party, a really good job if I dropped out of the race. The first offer was for an appointment to the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles, at $55,000 a year. I told them that if they had offered me the job previous year, I probably would have taken it, I would have loved to have been on it, I would never let a violent person out on the street again. I said, .But, I.m not going to do it now..
The next offer was on the day I formally announced . January 13, 1998. And it was for the Clerk of the Courts. Judith Allen was retiring. Nobody else knows it. I could have the job. The offer came from the governor.s office . Jane Dee Hull.s. I said I had just announced my candidacy. They said I could un-announce. I told them I wasn.t going to do it. A man who was working for my campaign as a private investigator then received a phone call saying I had to take this job. They really pushed me. And then they worked against me. It was a rude awakening.
AlienZoo: Regarding the lights, you.re particularly interested in the theory proposed by Norio Hayakawa, who is best known for his work on Area 51. Tell us about that.
Barwood: One really good video I saw was the Panic Project, by Norio Hayakawa and Anthony Hilder. Both were looking at Area 51. And when this whole thing came up about Phoenix, they called me and talked to me, and sent me the video.
It.s really interesting, when you piece it all together, how the government may be using UFOs with their own craft. It.s disinformation: They may throw wackos into a crowd, and say the crowd is a whole bunch of wackos. Hayakawa feels that the government knows that things are coming to a head, and pretty soon they won.t be able to hide things anymore. So they.re creating their own UFO scare tactics, to create a panic. Once the panic is in the population, they put martial law in place, so that nobody can do anything without permission. If there are visitors from someplace else coming, the government would have total control. It.s a very interesting video.