I’ve extolled the talents of the young Mouthy Buddha before. His latest piece offers the best coverage of the 1997 Phoenix Lights case that I’ve ever seen, full of details I’d never previously heard, including a classic Men In Black story and former Phoenix Vice Mayor, Frances Barwood.
Barwood’s politically-unsupported pursuit of the truth saw her ridiculed in the press. The city government refused to engage the thousands of witnesses looking for answers so she became the personal recipient of their calls and correspondence. Barwood remembers her calls with a disabled veteran named Richard Curtis who owned professional video equipment and who said he’d captured high-quality images of the large object hovering over the valley that revealed the outline of the craft. Two weeks after sending her the video tape, he called her to ask her what she thought. She’d never received it.
Curtis explained that he’d been on his way to make a duplicate for her when he was intercepted by two men who claimed to be from her office, who offered to make the duplicate for him. Barwood says she only had women working in her office. The manager at the hotel where Curtis lived told Barwood’s investigators that he’d seen a black car pull up from which emerged two men who “looked identical”, wearing dark glasses, black hats and black three-piece suits (in Arizona!) going towards his room. The last she’d heard, Curtis had had a bad reaction to a change in his medication and had been taken away. Nobody knew what had become of him.
Mouthy takes the most relevant snippets from the existing documentaries about the case and puts them together in one place with his usual pizzazz.
