March 13, 1997 is a date that the residents of Phoenix, Arizona will never forget. Spanning nearly 300 miles and witnessed by thousands of people, an extraordinary formation of synchronized lights began to invade the airspace over Phoenix, Arizona all the way down to Sonora, Mexico. Although the incident, as always, was discredited by the US government with their own version of the events, the Phoenix Lights remains the largest UFO sighting in history.

Check out the original footage from the 1997 Phoenix Lights incident that inspired found footage horror film, Phoenix Forgotten:

Whether you find yourself standing on the side of the skeptics, with the believers or somewhere in between, #PhoenixForgottenpromises to shed light on the chaos surrounding the infamous night with a #foundfootage horror that gazes deep into the "what-ifs," that still remain.

I was fortunate enough to sit down with Florence Hartigan, start of Phoenix Forgotten, about the upcoming found footage horror. Check out the trailer below.

Behind The Mystery Of The Phoenix Lights With 'Phoenix Forgotten' Star Florence Hartigan:

RR: So although the film is inspired by real events, your character (Sophie) is not. How does she fit into the chaos following the Phoenix Lights?

"My character Sophie is a documentary filmmaker who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. When she was a little kid her brother, Josh [Luke Spencer Roberts], went missing after going out to the desert with two of his friends, trying to find answers to mysterious lights they’d seen in the sky. 20 years later, Sophie is still haunted by her brother’s disappearance. It’s like she’s grown up in the shadow of this tragedy, so she comes back to her home town to do some digging. She’s driven to find answers, to shed any light she can on Josh’s disappearance."

RR: Phoenix Forgotten was inspired by actual events, like so many other found footage horrors, but what made this film seem particularly promising?

"So with this film the idea was for it to feel for the viewer, like you’re watching the actual documentary that Sophie has made. So, it was important to me that my performance felt as grounded and real as possible. I mean that’s always my goal, but particularly in this project we actually have real residents of Phoenix who aren’t actors in the film, people we interview about their real life experience and thoughts, so knowing I was going to be in scenes with people just being themselves set the bar for where I wanted my performance to land. We also did a lot of improvising in this shoot. Pretty much every scene has an improvised component, so that obviously involves a lot of thinking on your feet."

RR: That sounds like a genuinely challenging role. With all the improv, how did you prepare yourself for taking on Sophie and making her authentic?

"I found it really interesting to play somebody who experiences a tragedy like this. It’s such a terrible thing to lose a sibling and for parents to lose a child like Sophie’s parents did, especially in an instance where there’s no closure. They don’t know what’s happened to him so there’s no saying goodbye really, just this endless wondering. And for Sophie, not only did she lose her brother but she essentially lost both her parents too. They both never recovered from losing Josh, so there’s all these subsidiary tragedies that go along with the main loss. I actually watched a lot of documentaries preparing for this role, especially Werner Herzog docs. He’s someone who interviews a lot of people whose lives have been shaped by tragedy. I was fascinated by how people talk about really painful things that have happened a long time ago, that’s the space Sophie occupies. When tragedy happens to you, you keep on keeping on, you have to, but there’s still all this deep emotion just under the surface. So that was a pretty interesting thing to explore.

As I mentioned before, I watched a lot of Werner Herzog documentaries. 'Grizzly Man' and 'Into The Abyss' were two that really stuck with me. I also listened to a lot of Terry Gross interviews and I revisited 'Serial' knowing I was going to be improvising and interviewing real subjects, I wanted to hone in on how really great interviewers get good material out of the people they interview. I also did a bunch of research into how missing persons cases are handled in that area, on other cases where people go missing in the desert, that kind of thing."

RR: Being unlike the other projects you have worked on in the past, is there anything special you took away from this experience?

"I think there are a couple of interesting things I took with me. For one, I had never really thought in detail about what a hostile environment the desert is and how vast it is in Arizona. We interviewed a real pilot for our film, Kevin Boontjer, who has been involved in this kind of search and rescue mission in missing persons cases like the one in our movie and you’ll see in the film, he told us just how easy it is to just disappear out there. There’s just so much ground to cover and so much rough terrain, it’s just so easy to lose people, even with dogs and planes and people looking. On the other hand, in a case like ours you will usually find something, especially with three people. And in our story, obviously nothing has been found for 20 years. So yeah, it was interesting talking to people with real experience about that stuff."

RR: Before signing on to play Sophie, were you aware of the Phoenix Lights incident that occured in 1997?

"I wasn’t, though in my research for the film I discovered it’s an incident a lot of people are really passionate about. I grew up in New Zealand, so the story didn’t quite reach me there, though it was a huge news story at the time. The 24-hour news cycle kinda picked up and ran with it and it’s the sort of story that kept getting play on its anniversary, stuff like that. That was useful in my preparation for the role too, it was so powerful for me to imagine; what if the worst thing that ever happened to you was one of the most famous things that ever happened in your town? Every time it gets brought up those old wounds get opened again. That would be devastating."

Florence Hartigan, 'Phoenix Forgotten'

[photo credit: Cinelou Films]

RR: Next comes the big question, and this is the one I am totally asking on a personal level. Do you believe that the Phoenix Lights - the notoriously enigmatic event that inspired Phoenix Forgotten - could have extraterrestrial origins?

"Oh sure! I think there’s so much we don’t know about the universe, so who’s to say what’s out there? I like the idea that we’re not alone in the universe.

I think going in to the film I was more inclined to think there was something a little more supernatural about the origins of the lights, but having talked to the people I talked to at this point I feel skeptical. There’s still that aspect of the case that feels like a cover-up though and we show some of that actual footage in the film. The Arizona government at the time goes a long way to make the whole thing seem like a joke. The official press conference about the sighting at the time featured a guy in an alien suit. I just think if there’s nothing there, why bother?"

RR: So how closely does this film follow along with the actual events that occurred?

"One of the things I think is a cool point of difference in our film is that it’s a blend of fact and fiction. The jumping off point for our story is a real event. The Phoenix Lights were something that actually happened, the largest recorded UFO sighting in history. In terms of accuracy, we actually use real news footage from the time as well as news footage we created to serve our story about the missing kids. So in terms of accuracy I think what’s created is a really realistic, 'what if' scenario; what if a kid had been so obsessed with the Phoenix Lights that he went looking for them?

I think it blends fact and fiction in a way I haven’t seen very often and that’s really interesting to me. I also think there are some really great performances from our cast and I think it’s a horror movie that has a really engaging, emotional heart to it...The message for me is that you should always look at where you’re getting your information from, there’s as many sides to a story as there are people to tell you that story. And don’t go wandering off into the desert at night!"

RR: Phoenix Forgotten is quickly becoming a favorite among found footage connoisseurs. Now that it's making it's way into the homes of horror fans and cinephiles everywhere, where can fans be on the lookout for you next?

"My next project is another horror movie, an animated feature called 'Malevolent.' It stars Morena Baccarin from 'Deadpool,' William Shatner and Ray Wise from 'Twin Peaks,' who plays my father. That was a cool experience. I feel like with horror so much is communicated with body language and facial expression so it was such a fun challenge to create a character just with my voice, as well as getting across all the physical gory horror stuff. I had a ball!"

Phoenix Forgotten is out now on Blu-ray and DVD. It's also available through major retailers and popular streaming platforms such as #Vimeo, #iTunes, #Amazon and #GooglePlay. For real time updates on Florence's upcoming work be sure to follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Mystery in the Desert: The Shadow of Area 51

In July of 1947, a foreman at a homestead in New Mexico found a pile of debris some miles from his home. He took his son to go look at it, finding a bright wreckage of tinfoil, rubber strips and various paper and sticks. It seemed of little consequence to him, but he returned a few days later with the rest of his family to collect the material. The next day, the foreman heard reports from an army base about a so-called “flying disk” crash and, thinking that perhaps this was the debris he had picked up, went to the Sheriff immediately. The situation was handled in a confidential but polite manner. The U.S. military assured the citizens that the crash was a simple conventional weather balloon. The residents of the small town nodded and returned to the buzz of their normal lives, the story fading to the back of any and everyone’s mind. The military had always been a little secretive and looming, but they were the government and could be trusted, of course. It wasn’t until decades later that anyone would be back asking questions about Roswell, New Mexico.

The military base known today as Area 51 is a remote link of the Edwards Air Force base in Nevada. It is referred to by the Central Intelligence Agency as “Groom Lake” – the nickname “Area 51” originally coming from reports during the Vietnam War. It is known in popular culture to be a place of great mystery: UFO sightings, government conspiracy, and withheld information litter the history of the base. Over the decades, Area 51 has been accused of the storage and reverse engineering of alien technology, the study of those aliens alive and dead, and the development of time travel and teleportation equipment. Seeming to feed these nationwide suspicions, the current purpose of Area 51 remains unknown to the public. In fact, it wasn’t until July of 2013 that the CIA openly admitted to the existence of the base. Some history was offered to the public, and then the case was abruptly closed. It would seem that the most likely purpose of Area 51 is the development and testing of confidential air and spacecraft weapons systems, otherwise known as Black Projects. Though it has never been declared a secret base, all research conducted there is labeled Sensitive Compartmented Information.

However, there are a great many secret bases across the nation and the world, and even more UFO sightings, so what draws theorists and government officials alike to this empty area of the desert? Surely the plain factor of mass hysteria cannot be overlooked, but it is most definitely balanced by a series of dubious occurrences. The first of which, on a mainstream scale, was a sighting in 1955. Ordinarily enough, the first UFOs spotted were not of a blatant extraterrestrial nature, but rather new weapons testing. The site was being used by the CIA for the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft. What the locals who reported these strange aircrafts didn’t know was that three years earlier, in 1952, Project Blue Book had paid a visit to the base.

Project Blue Book was a study conducted by the United States Air Force with two goals: the first was to determine if a unidentified flying object could be a threat to national security, and the second was to scientifically analyze said UFO data. Of course, this all seems to have a funny smell to it. A military program making judgments and final calls on the safety and legitimacy of its own operations is perhaps not the most reliable situation. Unsurprisingly, Blue Book reported no threats to national security and, interestingly enough, no UFOs that contained extraterrestrial life. In 1952, this response left no questions screaming for answers, and the matter was put to rest. Coincidentally, five years prior, in 1947, a small town foreman and his son found a pile of debris in Roswell, New Mexico. These stories become perpendicular at this point, for the wreckage of that mysterious aircraft in New Mexico was transferred to where but Area 51.

Suspicions continued to rise following another incident, this one related less directly to the hiding of extraterrestrial technology and more to the missteps of the military. In 1994, five resident contractors (who insisted on remaining anonymous in official reports), and the widows of contractors Robert Frost and Walter Kasza sued the United States Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency. They claimed that immense amounts of unknown chemicals were being burned in open trenches at Area 51- more specifically, Groom Lake. Tissue samples were taken from the petitioners, and their body fat revealed high levels of dioxin (a highly toxic organic chemical), dibenzofuran (a chemical derived from coal tar), and trichloroethylene (a compound often used as an industrial solvent). They argued that these chemicals had harmed their health and, in the case of the widows, killed their husbands. They sought knowledge about the chemicals so that they could take precautions to prevent future injury. However, they were denied. Citing the State Secrets Privilege, the base claimed that releasing information would be a threat to national security and would discharge military secrets. The judge on the case rejected this argument, siding with the petitioners. At this point, dramatic measures were called for. President Bill Clinton signed a Presidential Determination protecting Area 51 from environmental disclosure laws, and the case was henceforth dismissed due to supposed lack of evidence. Whatever it was that was burning at Groom Lake, the military had just sacrificed human lives for it.

Outside of popular culture gags about UFOs and conspiracy accounts, the deeper history of Area 51 seems to present a serious question about the power of the military in our nation and what it is exactly that they constitute as “national security”. Whether you believe in the government’s possession of extraterrestrial science or just think Groom Lake is a spooky place, one thing is clear: it is of utmost importance to the Unites States Military that we do not find out.

Featured image courtesy of dailymail.co.uk.

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