On March 13, 1997, Kurt Russell was flying his partner Goldie Hawn’s son, Oliver Hudson, to meet his girlfriend when they spotted something unusual near Phoenix, Arizona. “I saw six lights over the airport…in a ‘V’ shape,” Russell revealed during a 2017 BBC interview. “I was coming in, we’re about a half a mile out, and Oliver said, ‘Pa, what are those lights?’” he continued.
“Then I kind of came out of my reverie and I said, ‘I don’t know what they are,’” the Escape From New York star explained. “[Oliver] said, ‘Are we okay here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna call in,’ and I reported it.” It wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that Russell learned how significant the event he’d witnessed that night was.
Kurt Russell Witnessed the Phoenix Lights in 1997, but Didn’t Learn the Truth Until Years Later
One evening, Russell found Hawn watching a TV show about UFOs that happened to be covering the Phoenix Lights incident, which has since gone down in history as the most-witnessed UFO sighting ever. Between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on the same night Russell saw those mystery lights in the sky, thousands of other people claimed to have observed a similar phenomenon. The show went on to mention that it was an unidentified aviation pilot who first noticed the V-shaped formation.
What’s especially interesting is that neither Russell nor Hudson had given what they’d seen a second thought. Russell evidently found it so unimportant that he didn’t even mark it down in his log book. “I call Oliver, and I said, ‘Hey, Oliver, remember the time we landed in Sky Harbor and we saw those lights?’ and he went, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah.’” Russell recalled while speaking with Jonathan Ross in 2026. “I said, ‘Have you ever thought of that between now and then?’ and he said, ‘No.’”
As for what it was that everyone saw over Phoenix back in 1997, the Air National Guard attributed the light show to high-intensity flares dropped by military jets.
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