John Fife Symington III is an American businessman and Republican politician who served as governor of Arizona from 1991 to 1997. He is one of the central figures in the story of the Phoenix Lights: as governor he lampooned the March 1997 sightings at a news conference, and a decade later he said he had seen an enormous, silent craft over Phoenix that night himself.

Symington was born on August 12, 1945, in New York City and raised in Maryland. A great-grandson of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick and a cousin of the former Missouri senator Stuart Symington, he graduated from Harvard in 1968 and joined the Air Force, serving during the Vietnam War and receiving the Bronze Star before leaving as a captain in 1971. He had been stationed at Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix, and in 1976 he founded the Symington Company, a commercial real estate development firm he ran until he began his campaign for governor in 1989.

He won a runoff election in February 1991, took office that March and was reelected in 1994. In September 1997 a federal jury convicted him of defrauding lenders during his years as a developer, and he resigned on September 5. A federal appeals court overturned the conviction in 1999, and President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 2001. While his appeal was pending he trained as a chef, and he later co-founded the Arizona Culinary Institute.

On March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona reported lights in the sky, and the later lights were widely attributed to flares from a military training flight. In June, Symington told reporters that an alien had been captured and brought out his chief of staff, Jay Heiler, in an alien costume, saying, "This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious." In March 2007 he told the Associated Press that he had seen the lights himself and that the object was "bigger than anything that I've ever seen," explaining that he had kept quiet to avoid panic. That November, in a CNN commentary, he described a massive delta-shaped craft passing silently over Squaw Peak, called the Air Force's flare explanation "silly," and said his office's inquiries had gone unanswered. The Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha has attributed the first sighting of the evening to A-10 aircraft flying in formation.

Days after that commentary, on November 12, 2007, Symington moderated a National Press Club news conference hosted by filmmaker James Fox, where former military and government officials from seven countries described UFO encounters and called for investigations to be reopened. He has kept speaking about the sighting; an attendee reported that he appeared at a June 2026 stop in Tempe on the speaking tour of former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo. His move from mockery to testimony made him one of the highest-ranking American elected officials to say publicly that he saw an unidentified craft, and it remains one of the most cited chapters of the Phoenix Lights case.