Supernova (SN) and baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) distance measures have recently provided hints that the dark energy is not only dynamical but apparently evolves from normal to phantom dark energy between redshifts $0<z<1$. A normal axion dark energy component in the mass range just below the Hubble scale can mimic a phantom component by appearing as dark energy at $z=1$ and dark matter at $z=0$, raising the possibility of a phantom mirage. We show that there is a wide range of axion dark energy contributions that can resolve the SN-BAO tension as well as thawing quintessence does, leaving BAO tension with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for the distance measures from $z\sim 1$ to recombination to be resolved at high redshifts. With axions, raising the optical depth to reionization to $\tau \approx 0.1$ works essentially as well as $w_0-w_a$ phantom dark energy for all but the lowE CMB data, with a remaining $\mathrm{\Delta }{\chi }^2\sim -16$ compared with $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ cold dark matter ($\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$), whereas a small spatial curvature of ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_K\sim 0.003$ can largely relax the full SN-BAO-CMB tension with a total $\mathrm{\Delta }{\chi }^2\sim -12$.

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• Dark energy
• Axion-like particles
• Axions