New Mexico
I would be lying if I said that I hadn't seen (now) documentaries on the Phoenix Lights. But back in 1997, my husband and I had just purchased a 28' travel trailer to enjoy camping and travel some with our young children. He had taken a week off from his job at Mobil Oil in Beaumont, TX, to spend with the family for their spring break. It took us 3-days to get there, as we enjoyed stopping twice to camp before we got to White's City, just SW of Carlsbad. I remember the temperature that night, the night of our sighting, because where we come from, it's very humid, and 28 degrees in Beaumont would be a cold-wet. But there in New Mexico, 28 degrees felt like heaven! We had gotten our three children showered and off to bed and decided to go outside and have a cup of coffee; and a last smoke for the night. It was around midnight to 1 a.m.. We sat out in our lawn chairs, placed at the end of the travel trailer, which was facing north. As we sat and talked, it was my husband that said, "What the hell is that?" I looked over at him, (he was sitting to my left) and saw that he was pointing up towards the sky, so I followed where he was pointing at to see in the sky, approximately 300' up, was a MASSIVE, triangle shaped UFO. My husband seemed horrified, but then, this was the first one he had ever seen one. For me, I've been seeing them since I was a little girl. However, this was the first time I had ever seen one this close up. I mean, it blocked out an expanse of stars, which we had also been admiring the beauty of, and the moon, which was about half full that night. I told my husband, "Hon, THAT is a UFO!" It was moving silently, but it made NO sound whatsoever. We both agree that we believe that it was moving about 10 MPH. It was black with huge round lights, which did not show on the ground. As my husband describes it, he said; (we couldn't see the top of it, ONLY the bottom of it at first) "It was like looking up at a ceiling (albeit, black) that had recessed lights." You see, the lights did not show on the ground, nor the road. It is like in a home, where you dim the lights (which, the UFO's lights were dimmed) and yet it does NOT shine on the floor itself. We both watched the UFO silently "float" on a northward course until we could no longer see it, which took a good while. Unlike other's I've seen, it didn't go from point A to point B in an instant, like I've witnessed those in the past. This one took its own sweet time, and I even joked with my husband that it must have MapQuest, because at first it seemed to follow the highway due north. I know it sounds crazy, but I had the mind to tell my husband, (as it was going over) to put out his cigarette, they can see us from here! Which we did both put ours out. No one else in the campground was up and outside like us, at least none that we saw. One thing that gets me, is that the RV campground we stayed at was built upon a plateau that you had to drive up. And beneath that, were the caverns, to our right. Now, we can't find that same campground anywhere. My guess is that it was either an RV park that has since closed, or it was perhaps the State Parks RV park back in 1997? The only place I find that has any parks that close to the caverns today (2020) are in Whites City, NM, but they obviously are close enough. I believe that at one time the Park did allow people to park on that plateau, but no longer do for whatever reason. The UFO continued on a path that took it to the left of Carlsbad, NM, out of town on the west side of Carlsbad and continued towards Roswell, NM. I wanted to tell our side of it because for years, I had told family and friends about the sighting, and it wasn't until years later that I first saw it on a UFO documentary about the "Phoenix Lights." I'm telling you, this is the same craft that we saw over New Mexico, while on spring break. However, we've never heard anyone from New Mexico say anything about it. We didn't own a video camera nor a cell phone at the time. We did have a camera, but we were pretty mesmerized by object in the sky that we just viewed it in awe. The UFO was so close, so low, we think about 250-300' high in the sky, and as for the size, a football field is probably the best description of the massive structure.