PHOENIX - Arizona's former governor is in the nation's capitol talking UFOs.

Today, Fife Symington hosted the national press to say: he's a believer!

3TV has the former Governor on the record about his own close encounter.

We met Fife Symington in the park near Sunnyslope where he said back in 1997 he had a sighting.

He saw not only spotted what we call The Phoenix Lights, but also a big black craft flying overhead.

"What I saw wasn't flares,” he said. “It wasn't flares. Flares don't hold their altitude in geometric formation and move in a corded fashion so those weren't flares"

Instead of reporting his sighting as hundreds of others did, he kept quiet for three months.

But ten years later, he decided to come clean to California filmmaker James Fox, who added the former governor's account to a documentary called "Out of the Blue".

Symington granted only one interview with Phoenix media and he told Arizona Tonight, he's ready to apologize.

"I'm sorry if I hurt anybody's feelings, that was never my intent,” he said. “My intent was to do a spoof and to me there's a real distinction between ridicule and a spoof and I did the spoof to kind of break the hysteria that was building at the time to add some levity to the situation but it was never meant to be an attack.”

Now, he's going before an even bigger audience, the National Press Club in Washington D.C. where he and other high-ranking former government officials want to get another message out: the UFO phenomenon is real.