Frances Emma Barwood never said she saw a spacecraft. She never said she saw anything.
She was a Phoenix city councilwoman and the city’s vice mayor in the spring of 1997, and after the night of March 13 her office began taking calls. She took the calls. Over the following months she collected more than 700 witness accounts, and she brought them to the governor’s office, and she asked for one thing, which was an investigation.
That request is the entirety of her offense.
The Arizona Republic ran cartoons about her. Signs appeared on her portrait in the city hall hallway. Business cards circulated around the mayor’s office telling people to speak into the tin foil. She lost her next election.
Ten years later the governor who set the tone for all of that said publicly that he had seen the object himself, that he believed at the time it was not a conventional aircraft, and that he did not understand why anyone would ridicule the people who reported it.
What happened on March 13
Two separate things happened that night, and almost everyone writing about this case, in both directions, collapses them into one. Keeping them apart is the whole argument.