John Fife Symington III (born August 12, 1945 in New York City) was the Republican governor of the U.S. state of Arizona from 1991 until his resignation in 1997.
He attended the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore, then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1968 with a degree in Dutch art history and was a member of the Porcellian Club. He served in the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War, stationed at Luke Air Force Base in Maricopa County, Arizona. He remained in Arizona and became involved in real estate development, founding his own company, the Symington Company, in 1976.
In 2007, Fife said that he had witnessed one of the "crafts of unknown origin" during the 1997 Phoenix Lights event, but noted that he didn't go public with the information.
In an interview with The Daily Courier in Prescott, Fife said:
I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people. I don't know why people would ridicule it.
—Fife Symington III,
It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.
—Fife Symington III,
However, when he was Governor in 1997, Symington promised he would look into the mass sighting, but then quickly ridiculed it at a press conference where he had his chief of staff dress up in an alien costume, telling reporters that they had found the culprit. His explanation today is that as a public official he felt a responsibility to avoid public panic and therefore tried to introduce some levity into the situation.
On November 9, 2007, Symington appeared with a panel of guests discussing their UFO experiences on Larry King Live. A few days later, on November 12, Symington acted as moderator for a UFO press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Other speakers included U.S./foreign military witnesses/public officials involved in some major UFO cases, such as the 1980 Rendlesham Forest Incident, 1990 Belgium UFO incident, and 1976 Tehran UFO Incident, and heads of some official foreign government UFO investigations, such as Nick Pope in the U.K. and Claude Poher of France. They said the phenomenon was quite real, should be taken seriously, and urged that the U.S. reopen its public UFO investigation.
Symington also appeared as a witness of the Phoenix Lights in an updated version of the 2002 UFO documentary Out of the Blue by filmmaker James Fox. Fox helped organize the witness panels for both the Larry King show and followup National Press Club event.
