(Credits: Far Out / Apple TV+)
Wed 8 April 2026 1:30, UK
He might have starred in a few sci-fi movies in his time, but life ended up imitating art when Kurt Russell had a close encounter of his own.
Not just any close encounter, though, but one of the most famous mass-sighted UFOs in recent history. Does he believe in aliens, flying saucers, and little green men from outer space? It doesn’t really matter, to be honest, because he’ll always be remembered as the guy who called it in.
The actor has been victimised by a grotesque extra-terrestrial entity in The Thing, played a living planet in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, bent the laws of time and space in Stargate, escaped from both New York and Los Angeles as Snake Plissken, and even became a computer who wore tennis shoes during his Disney days, so he’s no stranger to otherworldly events.
However, nothing could have prepared him for the phenomenon that became known as the Phoenix Lights, where multiple witnesses reported seeing a string of unidentified flying objects hurtling across the skies of Nevada and Arizona on March 13th, 1997, with visitors from beyond the stars clearly the most obvious explanation.
Over the course of several hours, a triangular series of lights was spied by numerous people, with many of them reporting that a V-shaped arrangement of anywhere between six and ten “glowing orbs” was moving southwest over Nevada, Phoenix, and Tucson, with a second set of UFOs popping up later on.
In a story so strange that it could only be true, the first person to inform the authorities that a potential alien invasion was unfolding right in front of his very eyes just so happened to be an amateur pilot who doubled as John Carpenter’s muse, with Russell revealing that he remained completely oblivious to the Phoenix Lights for years afterwards.
“We were on approach,” he recalled. “I saw six lights over the airport in absolute uniform in a V-shape. Oliver [Hudson] said to me, I was just looking at him, I was coming in, we’re maybe a half a mile out, and Oliver said, ‘Pa, what are those lights?’ Then, I kind of came out of my reverie, and I said, ‘I don’t know what they are.’ He said, ‘Are we OK here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna call in’, and I reported it.”
That was the end of it, as far as he was concerned, until one day he noticed Goldie Hawn watching a TV show about the Phoenix Lights, when the realisation struck him that it was he who had, in fact, made the first call to let the relevant people know that one of America’s most famous UFO sightings was happening.
Sadly, and not to piss on the chips of any true believers out there, the incident had a rather mundane explanation. A National Guard training programme based in Tucson and an exercise being carried out by the Maryland Air National Guard, which involved the dropping of illumination flares, were responsible. Fuck it, if Russell doesn’t know that, let’s just keep letting him think he’d seen an alien.
