Phoenix, Arizona - Did anyone see the recent lights over the East Valley?

Steve Neal did last Saturday night, and the 62-year-old Mesa resident has one question: "What was it?"

He learned this week that he's not the only one who saw it, according to officials at Valley airports.

Neal said he hopes more residents who saw something will come forward. He described the object as having "one light in the center surrounded by several other lights in a circle."

But he stopped there.

"I don't know what I saw, and I don't claim anything," said Neal, who said he lives 10 miles from Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport and almost as far away from Falcon Field Airport in east Mesa, and sees plenty of aircraft. "It was the first time I ever experienced something like this."

Patrick Oakley, a spokesman for Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, said he received a handful of calls from the public about lights in the evening sky April 25. "I got calls on that particular one over the weekend," he said.

After checking into it and confirming the sighting with Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, Oakley said the explanation was less out of this world than out of a nearby agribusinesses to the southeast.

"We confirmed that there was a crop duster operating in the area over the weekend," Oakley said, proffering what he described as a plausible explanation for the brightly lit, sporadic flight pattern over the East Valley. "There was one operating at one point south of the airport on Saturday, and it was verified by our radar."

Oakley said crop dusters have multiple large lights to allow the pilots to spot innocuous yet potentially disastrous "power lines, and other structures the planes may hit because they fly so low to the ground to spray the crops."

With crops sometimes contained to a square mile or smaller radius, "the planes have to do loops and fly in one area in order to precision spray," Oakley continued, stressing that it was merely his attempt at possibly explaining the sporadic flight pattern.

Neal paused when given the explanation of a crop duster, then asked: "Can those things fly at extremely high altitudes?"

Neal said that what he, and an unknown number of East Valley residents the airport reported, spotted was at an extremely high altitude and made a loop before disappearing off to the east in the direction of the Superstition Mountains and beyond.

"It zoomed away and was gone in seconds," he recalled.

Neal said he and his wife, Veoleta, asked their immediate neighbors, not far from Crismon and Guadalupe roads, about Saturday night's incident, but no one was outside for what he described as a 30-second celestial show shortly after 8 p.m.

More than a decade before Neal's sighting and the reports received at the Gateway airport, there was a much-publicized incident that elevated Phoenix into the annals of UFO lure.

Witnesses of the oft-chronicled Phoenix lights incident, a UFO sighting in the Valley in 1997, included pilots, residents and military officials. Although local authorities eventually came forward with an explanation, the lure persists beyond the reason given for the mass sighting.

At the time, the Arizona National Guard reported that military aircraft were deploying flares as part of a training operation that caused the aerial spectacle over the Valley.

Although the East Valley is not known for its military bases, it is actually the proving grounds for a number of military aircraft hailing from such places as the far West Valley, Tucson and even Nevada.

An example of a rapidly maneuvering, high-altitude aircraft might be best found in military stock, but that would require the presence of a fighter jet in the East Valley over the weekend.

Luke Air Force Base public affairs specialist Mary Jo May said her base's military flight operations are kept to the West Valley because of the congestion experienced over Sky Harbor.

"We never fly to the East Valley," she said, also citing a much more adequate flight range in the West Valley.

Arizona National Guard spokesman Maj. Paul Aguirre said his department does fly in the East Valley, but there was no activity last weekend.

"It was definitely not our folks," he said.

Similarly, Air National Guard Captain Gabe Johnson of the 162nd Fighter Wing, based out of Tucson, said his unit also uses the East Valley, but they did not have any flight operations over the weekend in the areas of east Mesa or Queen Creek.

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Nevada, which performs para-rescue training missions near the Superstition Mountains, also reported it had no flight operations over the weekend.

With most military scenarios ruled out, and with little suitable explanation from local officials to his satisfaction, Neal said he is simply resolved to wonder.

One thing is for certain: He's not satisfied with the answer local airport officials gave him to his question.

"I really doubt that a crop duster can fly as high as a commercial plane," Neal said. "Did nobody else have a camera?"