QUEEN CREEK, Ariz. - The night of New Year’s Eve, a series of strange lights appeared in the sky over Queen Creek, once again reigniting the out-of-this-world theories surrounding Arizona and possible UFO sightings.
"What is that? I don't know, it's weird," Julie Baumann and her neighbors are heard saying in a video of the lights Baumann captured with her cellphone.
“I just saw these three lights consecutively spaced out and they were close so it definitely caught my eye,” Baumann told 12 News from her home near Higley and Chandler Heights roads.
“They were moving slow. They didn't speed up or slow down,” she said.
Even she couldn’t help but think, “Are aliens really coming down on New Year's Eve?”
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But it wasn’t long before Baumann found other neighbors posting about the mysterious lights on a community Facebook page.
"I saw a lot of people making jokes, saying it was aliens, this and that,” said Baumann.
From aliens, to drones, fireworks and paper lanterns.
The theories ran wild with people debating and debunking all the crazy the possibilities.
“There's a lot of stories that are linked with Arizona and the southwest,” Baumann said.
The last light mystery happened in October, when a ball of light -- moving through the sky over the East Valley -- lit up the internet with reports of UFOs.
While the source of those lights is still being debated, Baumann believes this spectacle is a lot less controversial.
“We were looking at it, all of us and we were going ‘OK, it's definitely just paper lanterns,’” she said.
“The other three [lights] were like a ball of light and the last one just looked like a plastic bag floating in the wind,” Baumann told 12 News.
Still she knows her eyewitness account of won't be enough to solve the mystery for everyone.
“It draws that curiosity of what could it be and aliens and I know people want to believe what they want to believe,” she said, “But I saw three lit paper bags and one unlit paper bag.”
While some people commented online that the lanterns came from a holiday celebration at Schnepf Farms, the owners confirmed that was not the case.
Baumann believes the lanterns came from another property owner in the area.
The original post debating the lights has since been deleted by the original user who posted it to Facebook.
