The lights moved southeast towards Tucson, following Interstate 10 at slow speed. Reports during this period had the lights as being amber in color. A driver on the Interstate noted that a large object hovered over the car, which was moving at about 65 mph.

The object was next reported over Oracle. Here, it was described as having a reddish-orange color. Witnesses claimed that the object split up and each of the bright lights started moving in a separate direction along the edges of Tucson.

The final report came from a young man in the Kingston area who stopped his car at a payphone to report the incident. "[The] young man, en route to Los Angeles, called from a phone booth to report having seen a large and bizarre cluster of lights moving slowly in the northern sky"

On the Coast to Coast show known as The Art Bell Show, broadcast some time after the lights were reported, people claimed to have seen the lights. One caller reportedly said that Luke AFB sent up armed jets at the lights but there is no evidence to support this.

Sceptics agree with the USAF explanation that the lights were simply slow falling, long burning flares dropped by an A-10 Warthog aircraft on a training exercise over Luke AFB. Proponents of the spacecraft theory stated that the lights were over the city and not beyond the mountain where the Luke AFB was located. However, detailed analysis of the falling flares shows that they were actually beyond the mountain, as investigators discovered the lights vanished in line with the outline of the mountain. An investigation by Luke AFB itself also came to this conclusion and declared the case solved.

A video illustrating this was broadcast on a special on Fox Television stations about a year after the event. A copy of the original video was use in coordination with a video shot in the daytime from the exact same location. The two videos were merged into one on a frame by frame basis, so that the landmarks were always perfectly aligned. This allowed analysis of the lights regarding their apparent height above the mountain, and it was easily seen that the lights vanished in line with the outline of the mountain.