Hawaii is the darkest place in the US. It’s a hotspot for UFO sightings.
In a remote region of the
island of Hawaii (aka the Big Island), where the road ends completely at a hardened lava field, I walk a short gravel path to the edge of what is Hawaii’s only UFO landing pad, at the
Hawaii Star Visitor Sanctuary.
A handmade sign announces my arrival at the alien landing pad, a large and level undeveloped patch of black lava rock. It was
dedicated in 2014 and advocated for by the late
Robert Keliihoomalu, who was the patriarch of this community and part of the Hawaiian sovereignty group Lawful Hawaiian Government. The
Sanctuary’s Declarationstates the group’s belief that, “Hawaiian tradition recognizes Na Huihui o Makalii (the constellation of Pleiades/Seven Sisters) as the place from which, according to legend, the first Hawaiian people came to Earth.”
As unusual as a landing pad may sound, it’s not so far-fetched for an island with the most spectacular views of space. The night sky glitters like a field of gemstones, with planets and radiant stars filling every dark void. The Milky Way galaxy is clear and defined. Satellites are visible, orbiting above at a smooth and steady pace. And when the bright International Space Station makes an appearance, it catches the observer’s eye.
In the Puna district of the Big Island, the Hawaii Star Visitor Sanctuary was dedicated in 2014 as a place where visitors from space can land.
Christine Hitt/SFGATE
With a strict lighting ordinance protecting its dark skies, the Big Island has become a hot spot for sightings of unidentified flying objects, and they are vastly underreported. It’s a place where UFO enthusiasts gather to review the sky, and local UFO investigators study the phenomena regularly.
Reported sightings
Hawaii has seen UFO sightings since at least 1947, when submarine base sailors reported seeing a “flying saucer” fly by “like a streak” over Pearl Harbor, according to a 1977 article in The Honolulu Advertiser.
From Waikiki to Maui and Maunakea, countless sightings have been reported since. In 1959, The Indianapolis Star reported that a veteran airline pilot flying from San Francisco to Honolulu saw “one intensely bright white light followed by four smaller lights” east of Honolulu. “Suddenly the object made a sharp right turn at a speed inconceivable of any vehicle we know of and the light suddenly disappeared,” he said.
Newspapers have reported UFO sightings in Hawaii since at least 1947. The above 1973 sighting, reported by the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, was by “three Hilo firemen and an air traffic controller.”
newspapers.com
Later, in 1973, Hilo firemen reported a UFO to the Hilo Airport, which verified there were no flights. “It looked like a large star, but like it had artificial lighting. When we trained our telescopes and binoculars on it, it looked oval in shape, with red lights around it,” the lieutenant reported, as quoted in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. “... After 10 minutes, it suddenly shot straight up to the sky.” And a little over three years ago,
a large blue UFOwas seen over Oahu and dropped into the ocean. The Federal Aviation Administration told Hawaii News Now that there were no missing or overdue aircraft.
But sightings outnumber those reported in the news. As I was leaving the Big Island on a predawn morning flight, I mentioned to my driver, a local, how amazing the stars are at night, without saying anything about UFOs.
He then told me that while out stargazing, he saw what appeared to be a satellite merge with another object, then split into three and speed off in different directions. A witness to abnormal behavior for what was supposed to be a satellite, he told me it spooked him.
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During a Big Island UFO tour, Thompson and her guests spotted a cigar-shaped object in the night sky.
Lisa Thompson
Unexplained sightings aren’t that unusual in Hawaii, especially on the Big Island.
“There are sightings just all the time,” Lisa Thompson of
Big Island UFO Tours told SFGATE. “People don’t report it here because it’s either such a normal thing or they don’t know where to go.”
Thompson, who has a Ph.D. in organismal biology and anatomy, has lived on the Big Island for three years. She has collected a plethora of stories from Big Island residents.
“One of my guests, he’s a local nighttime fisherman, and he and his brother, they were several miles offshore in the middle of the night, pitch-black ocean like 2,000-3,000 feet deep, and all of a sudden, it was like 3 in the morning, that ocean just lights up all around them. No explanation for that,” said Thompson.
Another resident said while fishing nearby, “a massive white light craft comes up out of the water right in front of them,” startling them so much they left their gear and drove away. Other people, she said, have seen UFOs going into the mountains, and into and out of the water.
The known objects
On the Big Island UFO tour, guests meet Thompson at a location in Waikoloa Village, where she educates them on the behavior of known objects, such as drones, satellites, planes and helicopters. Satellites, for instance, move in one direction across the sky at a consistent speed, without changing direction.
The Big Island UFO tour meets Lisa Thompson at a location in Waikoloa to view the night sky.
Lisa Thompson
The tour continues with guests looking up at the night sky using advanced Gen 3 military night vision goggles, which, she said, are 100 times better than the naked eye. “We will see things that start out looking like satellites, but then they’ll do something that satellites don’t do or can’t do, like change direction, change the amount of light that they’re giving off,” said Thompson. “We’ve had zigzags, wobbles, there have been some close enough where we’re able to see kind of shape, like the triangular craft is one that we’ve seen a few times where it comes closer.”
Thompson said they check sightings against satellite tracking and constellation apps to identify whether it is a known object or, in fact, unknown. They take photos and videos when they can. “Sometimes we will have things start happening before we even get the goggles out,” she said.
Thompson said her best personal experience was on March 7, 2023, when she saw a bright light above the tree line near her home that “looked like it was a very, very big, pulsating star.” She checked her constellation app and made sure it wasn’t a star or planet, and knew it wasn’t a satellite because it was not moving. It stayed there for 30 minutes, she said, brightening and dimming.
“With the video, what you can see is the pulsing, but you can actually see the spinning part of the craft as well,” she said. “Whether you or your readers would believe it, it is a Pleiadian craft.”
Thompson said several friends have also captured the same type of craft from the Pleiades star cluster, here on the island with their phones.
Across the street from her home, Big Island UFO Tours owner Lisa Thompson caught a video of “double doughnut” rotating circles.
Lisa Thompson
In January 2023, a telescope on top of the Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island
captured a swirling shape in the sky, and the space community suspects it to be caused by a SpaceX launch that happened the same day. The difference between the two is that what Thompson captured wasn’t swirling, but rather, two rotating circles that did not break shape.
“I know that a lot of scientists are very close-minded to this, so I don’t really pay much attention to what they say,” Thompson said. “I know what I have experienced; I know what I have seen.”
The darkest sky
Richard Wainscoat, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, researches
Near-Earth Objects with the
Pan-STARRS telescopes on Haleakala, Maui. The Pan-STARRS team were the ones who
discovered Oumuamua, the first interstellar object found within our solar system. Now largely
considered a comet, its odd shape and peculiar acceleration have some researchers still
speculating about a possible artificial origin.
“I have an open mind. I saw one thing when I was a kid that I didn’t understand, but by the time I fetched someone else to see it, it was gone,” Wainscoat told SFGATE. “I think there can be stuff in the sky that we don’t even see and that would be subject for future research, but it’s a stretch to say that anything that we see is sort of extraterrestrial life.”
The most common objects people see moving in the sky are satellites, he said, which number in the thousands.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, the long series of lights that crawl across the sky like a train, also get mistaken for UFOs.
Some satellites rotate, which may cause one to look like a flashing light. “If you look at the sky with night vision goggles, you see a lot more. There are a lot of satellites that are just beyond what you can see with your naked eye,” Wainscoat said. There’s also
space junk reentering the atmosphere that can be mistaken for UFOs and, though rare, there are also
satellite collisions.
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Star trails over the Big Island, taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope.
andreaskoeberl.com/Getty Images
There are no electronic systems that monitor the sky every second, according to Wainscoat. Instead, it is scanned in intervals of around 5 to 15 minutes. “If there’s a short flash or something, it’s probably not going to be seen or not going to be recorded in those systems,” he said.
He also doesn’t think the Big Island is a ground zero for unexplained events, but rather it only appears that way because it doesn’t have as much light pollution as Oahu or Maui.
“People think there’s something magical about the Big Island but the thing that’s magical about the Big Island is the dark sky. It’s not that all these celestial phenomena are happening there; it’s that they are visible from there because the sky is dark.
“The darkest sky in Hawaii would be the Big Island,” Wainscoat continued. “It’s darker than anywhere in the United States,” he said, including the desert areas and even Alaska.
The 2 percent
When the New York Times published its article in 2017 about
U.S. military jets encountering unknown objects and the
existence of a Pentagon UFO program, it was a watershed moment for UFO believers. It was also a turning point for Richard Griffiths, the
Mutual UFO Network Hawaii state director, who had no interest in UFOs prior to that point.
“I was studiously ignoring it, like a lot of scientists,” Griffiths, a retired Carnegie Mellon University astrophysics professor, told SFGATE. After watching interviews with the jet fighter pilots and developing a keen interest, he became the Hawaii MUFON director in 2022.
MUFON is a civilian organization that was established in 1969 to study UFO phenomena after
Project Blue Book, a government program, shut down. It now has “over 7,000 members worldwide… in about 30 countries,” Ron James, the media relations director for MUFON, told SFGATE, and there are state chapters all over the United States.
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On the Big Island UFO tour, military goggles are used to amplify what can be seen in space.
Lisa Thompson
MUFON studies and documents reported sightings, and if warranted, puts boots on the ground to do further investigation. Its national database now contains about 150,000 sightings, but the organization said it is able to identify about 96% of the objects that are reported to it.
“One thing MUFON’s very, very serious about is making sure that we’re not misidentifying things that have logical explanations. We’re very happy that 94-98% of our sighting reports are explained, because we’re really focusing on the 2% that aren’t,” James said.
James said fewer and fewer people are nonbelievers. “There’s evidence that there’s been some sort of unidentified intelligence interacting with humanity for pretty much all of recorded history,” he said. “Certain aspects of the government are aware of this phenomenon and keeping it a secret. And the odds of there being life other than us, even in physical space are overwhelming.”
Griffiths, who lives on the Big Island where there are military bases like on the other islands, said he doesn’t believe the unexplained objects are experiments by the military, but rather, the UFOs are interested in watching the military.
Most of the UFOs reported to him come from Oahu and they are mostly reported by visitors, rather than residents. Often, it’s photos of sunsets with “internal reflections in their cameras.” However, he’s also gotten reports from fishermen and others over in Waikiki and on the west coast of Oahu of objects going into the water.
Griffiths knows, though, that not everyone reports to MUFON and there’s more that could be happening out there. So he continues his work on the Big Island, where distant towns are enveloped in darkness as the evening sets in, and the illuminated sky begins its nightly show, while residents and visitors stare up at the sky, hoping to catch another sign that something else out there exists.