Lynne D. Kitei, an Arizona physician, became one of the best-known witnesses to the Phoenix Lights, the mass sighting over Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997. She photographed and filmed lights near her home before and during that night, kept her identity hidden for seven years, and has since spent nearly three decades writing, filming and speaking about the event.

Before the sightings, Kitei combined medicine with work in front of the camera. The Arizona Republic described her in 2004 as chief clinical consultant at the Vital Imaging and Wellness Center of the Arizona Heart Institute in Phoenix, and Phoenix magazine reported in 2017 that she had practiced medicine for more than 40 years. She had also performed in more than 30 stage productions, many of them musical comedies, and played Florence Arizona in the Coen brothers' 1987 film Raising Arizona. She has called herself a "healthy skeptic" who had no prior interest in UFOs.

According to the Arizona Republic, Kitei first saw three lights near her Paradise Valley home in February 1995, saw lights again on January 22, 1997, and on March 13, 1997, watched from her bedroom window as orbs in a triangular formation passed over Phoenix. She told Phoenix magazine that she took 35mm photographs of oval orbs in 1995 and filmed a formation of lights in January 1997. Her photographs and video of the March lights aired on local stations, the Discovery Channel and network news, while she appeared on radio and talk shows only as "Dr. Lynne" or "Dr. X" to protect her privacy and her standing as a doctor.

Kitei came forward publicly in March 2004 with The Phoenix Lights: A Skeptic's Discovery That We Are Not Alone, published by Hampton Roads and reissued in later editions, including one for the 20th anniversary in 2017. She was executive producer of The Phoenix Lights Documentary (2005), made with filmmaker Steve Lantz and featuring former Arizona governor Fife Symington and astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The Air Force and Air National Guard have attributed the later lights that night to flares dropped during a training exercise at the Barry Goldwater Range. Kitei rejects the flare explanation and told Phoenix magazine that she had yet to find a logical one.

She has continued to hold anniversary screenings and talks. In March 2026 she marked the 29th anniversary with a presentation in Scottsdale, telling ABC15 that the event's impact on witnesses was "so profound and so life-changing." In July 2026 a YouTube interviewer brought her the account of Dustin Wilkins, a software developer who said he saw the 1997 craft and that it matched one named in material attributed to the British hacker Gary McKinnon, an unverified claim. Nearly three decades after the sighting, Kitei remains the event's leading witness-advocate, a physician who turned her own photographs and video into a book, a documentary and a yearly public commemoration.