Where is Tom when you need him?

There WAS "confirmed" military involvement. Of course, all the ones who saw the scrambled jets were just hallucinating. After all you can HEAR them. From the UFO Casebook:

Military Involvement

It was almost inevitable that the United States Air Force would become involved in an event of this magnitude, and the Phoenix lights mystery would be no exception. While driving down Interstate-I-17 from Camp Verde, a truck driver had been seeing two amber colored UFOs moving ahead of him southward for two whole hours. His destination was a materials plant near Luke Air Force Base. Upon arriving there, the two UFOs hovered nearby. While his truck was being loaded, the driver walked upon a pile of materials to get a better look at the two UFOs. He could make out two identical "toy, top-like amber orbs" with a white glow to them. A band of red lights pulsated on the craft as it hovered near the Luke AFB runway. Suddenly, two F-16s "blasted out of Luke with their afterburners on full." Soon, a third plane followed, and all three made a direct run toward the hovering UFOs.

As the first two jets were about to reach the UFOs, the unknown objects shot straight upward, and disappeared "in an instant." The two jets flew right through the exact spot the UFOs had previously occupied. A Luke ground crewman later confirmed to NUFORC that the driver's account was true. He also stated that upon returning to the base runway, one of the pilots had to be helped from his cockpit. He was visibly shaken from what had just happened.

According to Peter Davenport of the NUFORC one of the more intriguing reports was submitted by a young man who claimed to be an Airman stationed at Luke Air Force Base, located to the west of Phoenix in Litchfield Park. He telephoned the National UFO Reporting Center at 3:20 a.m. on Friday, some eight hours after the sightings on the previous night, and reported that two USAF F-15c fighters had been “scrambled” from Luke AFB, and had intercepted one of the objects.
Although the presence of F-15’s could never be confirmed, the airman provided detailed information which proved to be highly accurate, based on what investigators would reconstruct from witnesses over subsequent weeks and months. Two days after his first telephone call, the airman called to report that he had just been informed by his commander that he was being transferred to an assignment in Greenland. He has never been heard from again since that telephone call.

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I would have a tendency to believe Peter Davenport who confirms what he can rather than an "observation by an astronomer"....I've met him and he comes highly recommended by professionals I know (MDs and PhD's) Besides, I didn't think you could observe a group of large objects so close together under a regular telescope unless they were thousands of miles <away.>