Turns Out Captain America: Civil War Had A Subtle Captain Marvel Reference

Captain Marvel‘s 1990s setting was a great decision from Marvel Studios. Not only does it let us explore a corner of the MCU we haven’t seen before, but it’s recent enough that we can meet characters we know from the modern films in their formative days. Perhaps the only fly in the ointment is that the pic’s scope is necessarily limited, since as far as the MCU to date is concerned, the world was first alerted to the presence of aliens during the Battle of New York in The Avengers.

But surely something as momentous as an attempted Skrull invasion of Earth couldn’t have gone unnoticed by everyone, right? No, it couldn’t have. At least, not if this convincing theory on a line of dialogue in Captain America: Civil War has anything to say about it.

Coming to us from Reddit user CaptainDeadpool172, we zero in on the first meeting between Tony Stark and Peter Parker. During this exchange, Parker denies that he’s Spider-Man, only for Stark to show him a series of videos of him saving people, with Parker dismissing the footage as fake. Tony responds with the slightly cryptic line, “like UFOs over Phoenix.” In other words, if the videos of Spider-Man are real, so are the UFOs over Phoenix.

This is a reference that’ll go right over the heads of 99% of the audience, but he’s referring to the ‘Phoenix Lights,’ a famous UFO sighting from 1997 in which unexplained lights and V-shaped crafts were witnessed by thousands of people in the skies over Phoenix. With Captain Marvel being set in the 1990s, this could be a hint that any alien attack in the film is simply going to be explained by this real-life UFO sighting. And with Stark spending so much time with S.H.I.E.L.D. over the last decade, who knows what secrets about their past he might’ve learned?

It’s a neat little theory and holds a hell of a lot more water than most of the stuff that passes for fan theories these days, but I guess we’ll have to wait until Captain Marvel hits theaters next year to find out for sure if there’s any truth to it.