Local Television Interview with the Ley family Friday June 13, 1997

Phoenix Lights Ley Family First Interview

This is a video aired on local Television in Phoenix Arizona on Friday the 13th of June, 1997. It's the first time our family was exclusively interviewd on Television. My wife and I had made a brief appearance on Strange Universe a couple of months earlier but we were just a couple in a whole group of people. In this video the focus is on us and on our experience.

I think it was this televised interview that really got things going about the event that became known as the Phoenix Lights. Let me back up a little and give you the background of how this interview came about. After the initial "happening" the night of March 13, 1997 the only organized attempt to make any sense of what exactly happened that evening was put together by Jim Dilettoso who had a company called Village Labs (you'll see him in this video). His office building became UFO investigation HQ for the Phoenix Lights. Jim Dilettoso had a lot of previous experience in analyzing purported photos and films (or videos) of UFOs. One of the famous cases he got involved in was the Willy Myer films and photos from the 70's in Switzerland. I just happened to be personal friends with Jim Dilettoso before the Phoenix Lights event. When I created the images of the UFO on my computer I took the digital images down to Village Labs and let Jim load them into his system as part of my contribution to the investigation; Jim knew me well enough that I (and my family) would never make anything up ever at all. So one day I was down at Village Labs when some people from the local Fox affiliate TV Station Channel 10 were visiting Jim and checking out the data from the investigation. I met one of the producers and got talking to him. I gave him my first-hand account of what happened that night and as it is with anyone that speaks with me directly he knew what I told him was true and real. The next thing that happened a couple of weeks later in early June was that I got a call from a reporter at Channel 10 asking to come over to my house on June 11th and interview our family for a show that would air on Friday June 13, 1997 (exactly 3 months since the UFO passed directly over our property).

At the same time as this show aired on TV I was contacted by USA TODAY and interviewed over the phone for inclusion in an article they were preparing for publication in their paper on June 18, 1997. As a matter of fact the image that they used on the front page of the paper was photographed off of a monitor at Village Labs that was displaying my CGI of the craft that I created on my computer and then allowed Jim to put it on his computers at Village Labs. USA TODAY never got my permission to use that image and they only credited the photographer (Scott Troyanos) who "lifted it" off of Jim's monitor. I called USA TODAY up and complained about it but they brushed me off and told me that by my agreeing to be interviewed by them and photographed (their photographer came over to our house and took photos of us out in the desert up on a hill to use in their article) that covered their use of my image of the craft on the front page. What was important to me was that I thought it should have been made clear that I created the image on the front page (I wasn't really concerned about money considerations although they were certainly going to sell more newspapers that day because of the UFO image being on the front page). Here's a scan of the fron page of USA TODAY from June 18, 1997. Notice the scan line in the image showing this is a photograph off of a CRT monitor. If you click on the picture of the newspaper you will see an enlarged view that you could save to your own computer if you wanted to. That's the case with any of the images on this blog: if you left-click on the image you will see a full sized view.