Going public with missing time

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Going public with missing time
March 11, 2011
by Billy Cox
Herald-Tribune

Sunday marks the 14th anniversary of arguably the most ostentatious UFO event ever, considering how the spectacle known as the Phoenix Lights rather blithely asserted itself over a city of more than a million residents at moment when the spectacular Hale-Bopp comet beckoned Americans to step outside and look up.

If you’ve stumbled onto De Void by some tragic accident and you’re new to this thing, you can catch up here with the visual Cliff Notes:

It’s a complicated case involving perhaps multiple UFOs of ridiculous proportions, a suspiciously timed military flare drop, a flip-flopping former Arizona governor, and other elements De Void doesn’t have the inclination to rehash here. But spearheading this annual retrospective in Phoenix, once again, is the relentlessly persistent erstwhile actress and M.D., Lynne Kitei.

On Sunday, she’ll be screening her 2005 documentary, “The Phoenix Lights,” at a local theater, where guests will include Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, repentant ex-guv Fife Symington, and Frances Barwood, the only city council member with the stones to do her job back in 1997 and take an avalanche of constituents’ phone calls seriously. (It’d be even better if Arizona senators John McCain and John Kyl would show up and answer questions as well, but since there’s no political capital to be wrung from this radioactive goo …)

Kitei will also be promoting her 2004 book The Phoenix Lights, which she updated last year with the astonishing claim that she may have documented a missing-time episode with photographs.

Like everything else, this one’s complicated, too, and you can get the full story at her Phoenix Lights Web page. But the skinny here is that in 1995, two years before the mass sightings, she took a sequence of UFO photos from her porch. In 1998, she decided to send the pix to Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the Naval Surface Warfare Center analyst recognized for his longstanding personal work in UFO investigations.

Maccabee drew Kitei’s attention to the fact that the photos didn’t add up. She’d told him maybe two to three minutes had elapsed between the images, which she acquired around 8 p.m. on 2/6/95. But Maccabee informed her the city lights in the second photo were significantly dimmer than in the first.

The city skyline in this photo is much brighter than .../CREDITS: Lynne Kitei

He told her to take additional photos of the horizon from the same angle on the hour between 8 and 11 p.m. as businesses closed for the evening. The progression of fading lights in the second set of controlled photos indicated at least an hour, and maybe more, had passed between the first and second shots in her original sequence.

... the horizon lights in this picture, allegedly taken several minutes later. Is this evidence of missing time, or just a faulty memory?

Maccabee presented his findings — which he labeled “Photographic Documentation of Missing Time” — at a MUFON conference in 1999. Kitei’s only stipulation was that he keep her name out of it.

Kitei, who says she has no recollection of going to bed after taking the 1995 UFO pix, didn’t include this freaky chapter in the first edition of her book, when she finally decided to go public.

“I had some pretty astounding things in my first book to begin with,” she says. “Being plucked out of my body, automatic writing, a near-death experience — putting a missing-time experience in there would’ve been way too much. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.”

Six years later, she changed her mind. Why?

“Now that quantum physics is starting to catch up to the idea that there may be other dimensions out there, and that our idea of linear time is primitive, I thought this data might be useful,” she says. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, just keep it stuck in a drawer.”

Obviously, the key issue is when, exactly, Kitei took the photos, which can’t be precisely ascertained. In an e-mail to De Void, Maccabee was sticking to his original analysis. He added, “I have no doubt that she is telling the truth about the photos and event as she remembered.”

So it goes.