It's 3 a.m. under an inky sky strewn with stars. To the east, the constellation Makalii (the Pleiades) rises, marking the Makahiki, the Hawaiian season of peace and abundance. All is quiet in Hilo save for some randy coqui frogs. Suddenly, a "very large, banana-shaped ship inside a radiant, flaming shield," appears to a local stargazer and hovers over the Saddle Road between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea before flying away.
Sighting 172492, submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center on October 19, 2022, lasted thirty minutes and was witnessed by two thousand people. Similar documented sightings from these latitudes—many inexplicable—date back to at least 1825, when British sailors on HMS Blonde observed an unusual phenomenon in the waters near Hawaii. "About half-past three o'clock this morning the middle watch on deck was astonished to find everything around them suddenly illuminated," wrote Andrew Bloxam, the ship's naturalist, in his diary. "Turning their eyes to the eastward they beheld a large, round, luminous body rising up about seven degrees apparently from the water to the clouds, and falling again out of sight, and a second time rising and falling. It was the color of a red-hot [cannon] shot and appeared about the size of the sun. It was only visible for a few seconds and after its final departure some rays of light were seen in the same direction." Being a man of science, Bloxam speculated that "it was probably a meteor or fireball. No sound was heard. It gave so great a light that a pin might be picked up on deck." Meteor it might have been, though one is hard-pressed to explain how a meteor might fall and rise—twice.
Reports of peculiar celestial activity over Hawaii, particularly on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii Island, continue two centuries later despite the very real, in some cases career-ending, stigma associated with so much as mentioning little green men. Physics-defying motherships, teardrops with tails and erratic, multicolored lights flashing along the coast: All have been sighted over Hawaii, but also in and around the ocean. The volume of odd reports by scientists, military personnel and citizen astronomers here and elsewhere is on the rise, forcing changes to traditional nomenclature. The term UFO, or unidentified flying object, with its historical baggage, is out. Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—which include unidentified submersible objects (USOs), anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs) and trans-medium craft able to move between water, land and sky—is in.
Most UAP sightings turn out to be banal cases of mistaken identity. Those dancing lights in the sky? Starlink satellites. Chunks of metal falling from the heavens? Space junk jettisoned from rockets and SpaceX craft. That specialized ship for harvesting Earth's water to hydrate other worlds? Military drone. Meteors, blimps, Chinese lanterns, solar glint and camera anomalies: All have been reported as UAPs and later identified.
Hawaii is something of a hot spot for UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) sightings. Some of that might have to do with the fact that people are actively looking.
ET-seeking tourgoers on Hawaii Island use lasers and night vision goggles to search for interstellar visitors—or just space junk.
Richard Wainscoat tracks near-Earth objects with the Pan-STARRS telescope atop Haleakala on Maui, the telescope that captured images of Oumuamua in 2017, the first confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system. Wainscoat clearly does not want to believe: There's a simple explanation for why so many sightings occur in Hawaii, he says, and it's not because the Islands are a magnet for interstellar or interdimensional beings. It's just that Hawaii is more remote and darker than almost anywhere else. "Hawaii has lighting rules that benefit astronomers, plus animal species like turtles and birds." As the state contact of the Hawaii chapter of DarkSky International, mitigating light pollution is one of Wainscoat's passions.
Not only is Hawaii dark, it's also militarized—military bases occupy about 6 percent of the state's area, including the Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii Island, a 170-square-mile military training ground (the largest in the Pacific) located between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Helicopters and bombers are common sights in these parts, and more than a few observant folks have mistaken high-tech military drones for UAPs. Nevertheless, past experience makes many locals circumspect (or downright suspicious) about official explanations. In the 1960s, US nuclear weapons systems were tested at Pohakuloa, contaminating these slopes with depleted uranium, while sarin gas was tested in nearby Upper Waiakea Forest Reserve. Military authorities denied both for over forty years.
Plausible deniability about UAPs began unraveling in 2004, when US Navy pilots filmed a trans-medium object exhibiting speeds and maneuverability beyond our current technological capabilities during training maneuvers near San Diego. The famous "Tic Tac incident," with accompanying video, was leaked to The New York Times in 2017, breaking the story about a secret US Department of Defense program investigating UAPs. More top-secret programs surfaced once other journalists started digging, including Kona Blue, an aborted Department of Defense initiative to reverse-engineer alien technologies and exploit "non-human biologics." (The code name had nothing to do with Kona, Hawaii—Kona Blue was just a smokescreen to conceal the program's highly classified activities—and it was scrapped ostensibly because no alien tech was ever found.) Cue damage control. Documents were declassified, congressional hearings with military whistleblowers were held and some heads rolled. This flurry of events fanned the flames of public interest ... and mistrust.
"Whenever something happens—the Chinese spy balloon fiasco or more recently the 'drones' over New Jersey—a whole new set of people enter the conversation. Then the government gets involved, and it becomes more complex sifting through the layers to figure out what's going on," says Michael Ressl, moderator of the r/UFOs Subreddit, a community of over three million representing the spectrum of enthusiasts, researchers and skeptics. The pseudoscience, partial evidence, disinformation and secrecy permeating those layers creates a fertile substrate for conspiracy theories.
The infamous "Tic Tac" UAP spotted off San Diego by Navy pilots in 2004.
For many Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), there are no theories, no sifting; connection to the stars is in their lifeblood. The Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant passed down for centuries and available in English thanks to Queen Liliuokalani, narrates the birth of the universe and all it contains. From the "slime which established the earth," to the original Hawaiians' descent from the constellation Makalii, the Kumulipo canonizes ancestral knowledge. The philosophy of universal interconnectedness is still actively subscribed to, particularly on Hawaii Island.
So it makes sense that if aliens were to make contact, they might phone Puna on the island's southeast coast, a remote and rebel off-grid wilderness where Native Hawaiian traditions persist and mix with New Age spiritual beliefs—and where they'd be welcomed with open arms and minds.
In 1990 a lava flow buried homes, sacred sites and the Kaimu black-sand beach in Kalapana on this stretch of coast of Hawaii Island. As lava chugged toward the Keliihoomalu family home, they prayed and chanted for the lava to divert. It did, barely skirting their home before continuing its journey seaward, leaving hundreds of acres of steaming new land in its wake. After the flow fizzled, the late Robert Keliihoomalu, a konohiki (headman) of Kaimu and a noble in the reinstated Hawaiian kingdom government—one of the political-administrative organizations of the sovereignty movement vindicated by President Bill Clinton's 1993 apology for US involvement in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom—had an idea for this new land.
Uncle Robert, as he was known, envisioned a welcome center and landing pad for "star ancestors"—the antecedents of the Hawaiian people who according to legend descended from the constellation Makalii—when they came to visit their Earth family and, hopefully, offer healing. "I feel in my heart they have the answer for us to better ourselves, not only politically, but physically and spiritually," Uncle Robert said at the Hawaii Star Visitor Sanctuary inauguration in 2014. His proposal for the HSVS at Kaimu in Lower Puna was approved by the other nobles and passed by the House of the Legislative Assembly of the Kingdom of Hawaii later that year, according to Garry Hoffeld, HSVS caretaker and liaison between Kaimu nobles and the kingdom government. To create the ET reception pad, three groups searched the lava field adjacent to Uncle Robert's for a mana-charged area, each independently settling on the same spot, says Hoffeld. They constructed a giant circle of lava boulders and an ahu (cairn) dedicated to Liliuokalani—surprisingly modest considering the HSVS' potentially world-altering purpose.
In Hawaiian mythology, the ancestors of humans came from Makalii, also known as the Pleiades. Residents of the Puna district on Hawaii Island, led by the late Uncle Robert Keliihoomalu, constructed the Hawaii Star Visitors Sanctuary in 2014 to welcome (or welcome home) any future interstellar travelers with aloha. PHOTO BY PHILLIPS PAYSON
The document establishing the sanctuary outlines a Hawaiian protocol for alien contact: Establish diplomatic relations with star visitors based on concepts of neutrality; promote cultural, educational and scientific exchange; and maintain a space where extraterrestrial technologies can be safely demonstrated and developed for the benefit of humanity. "My dad's idea to make a treaty with our brothers and sisters in the sky opens up a whole new era. We can share our aloha energy with them, and they can share their aloha energy with us; we can work together," says Sam Keliihoomalu, Uncle Robert's son, a Kaimu noble and signatory to the document establishing the HSVS.
Combining Island and alien aloha to benefit humankind is a potent concept falling within the chaotic Venn diagram of UAP science and research, the military-industrial complex, galactic diplomacy, New Age spirituality, Indigenous beliefs, billionaires with outer space aims and government psyops a la Men in Black. Competing agendas, economic interests and conflicts of interest muddy the waters, as do lack of transparency and incomplete data. In Hawaii they all overlap.
Some believe the Hawaiian Islands harbor secret underground bases for reverse-engineering extraterrestrial craft and performing autopsies on alien "biologics." Others posit that petroglyphs in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park are space/time portals or that the menehune, Hawaii's mythical race of small, industrious people, are alien ancestors. Meanwhile, galactic ambassadors fraternize with otherworldly civilizations through remote viewing and pursue close encounters of the fifth kind (peaceful human-ET contact). Maybe it's just the ayahuasca talking—one source admitted to frequently seeing alien craft while under the influence of this hallucinogenic brew used in ceremonies popular in East Hawaii.
Which brings us to Hawaii's sacred geometry, the belief that certain designs are building blocks for the cosmos. According to this theory, when the apex of an imaginary triangular pyramid inside Earth is touching one of its poles, the other three corners touch near 19.5 degrees latitude north and south, creating stargates for intergalactic travel. The pyramids at Giza, the Sun and Moon Pyramids at Teotihuacan and Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea all fall along this latitude, giving rise to the hypothesis that aliens commute to our planet using portals on land and others below the ocean—lava tubes, for instance.
Most people—like those on Lisa Thompson's Big Island UFO Tour—look up, but some UAPs emerge from the ocean, while others are "trans-medium," traveling between sea and air. Theories about underwater installations and portals ringing Hawaii fuel the intrigue.
"Measured from the ocean floor, [Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea] are the tallest mountains on Earth and lie along this significant latitude. They are energy vortices, something I think is relevant to extraterrestrial civilizations and their behavior," says Michael Salla, founder of the Hawaii-based Exopolitics Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to galactic diplomacy and research. Part of the explanation lies in lava's ability to alter the magnetic makeup of rocks, affecting Earth's magnetic field; where there's lava, there are electromagnetic anomalies in the surrounding energy. Are the galactic shamans onto something?
Experts are divided. UAP data are often inconsistent or unreliable and exist across a dozen databases, with different reporting protocols. Some databases are run by private firms cloaked in secrecy, others by nonprofits vying for limited research funds and several by arms of the US government. As expected, some of the most intriguing, still inexplicable sightings are made by people who spend long nights under the stars, including fishermen, commercial and military pilots and Navy personnel. And those cases remain largely inaccessible, either because they are behind paywalls or are classified.
In 2023, NASA released its Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study, authored by a team of scientists, academics and commercial aeronautical and engineering executives. After analyzing over one hundred unclassified cases, the report states there "is no evidence that UAPs are extraterrestrial ... but a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena." The Department of Defense UAP investigative unit, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), found that up to 5 percent of the more than eight hundred reports they analyzed were "truly anomalous." The Mutual UFO Network, a civilian organization with its own analytical team and database, says 3 percent of thousands of investigated sightings are inexplicable: The Tic Tac, for example, traveled up to sixty times the speed of sound, zipped from sixty thousand feet to sea level in seconds and churned the ocean surface, seeming to come from underwater. Twenty years on, the Tic Tac is still categorized as an "unknown" object.
A watershed 2023 report by NASA didn't rule out potential extraterrestrial origins of some inexplicable sightings, calling UAPs "one of our planet's greatest mysteries." The American public agrees: 65 percent of ten thousand adults polled by the Pew Research Center in 2021 believe intelligent life exists on other planets.
Regardless of who slices and dices the data, there is no substitute for lived experience. Lying on a Puna lava field during the 2012 lava flow, local TV host Kawika Singson freaked out when he saw something zoom across the night sky. "It was made of plasma, bluish-green and had a softness to it, in the shape of a ship. I don't know what it was, but I know what I saw," he says. The key to having these experiences, according to Singson and others, is to keep an open mind.
Lisa Thompson, a galactic ambassador, channeler and "starseed" (aliens born on Earth to help guide humanity into a more enlightened age), helps regular Earthlings connect with their personal galactic and cosmic energies. While Thompson's infinity headline method sessions may be too dear (or daunting) for some, her Big Island UFO Tours are wildly popular. After sharing personal ET experiences and pointing out things typically seen in Hawaii's skies—helicopters, satellites—participants don high-tech military night-vision goggles to (hopefully) get a glimpse of the atypical.
And often they do. Tori Lucifora says on one tour, she saw many very fast and bright high-flying UAPs while donning the goggles, as well as "a colorful, shape-shifting plasma orb visible to the naked eye." James Gilliland, founder of the ECETI Ranch (Enlightened Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Trout Lake, Washington, "filmed twelve hundred ships in three months after moving to Hawaii Island." He says they follow him wherever he goes and respond to his incantation to "power up."
According to Gilliland, the best time for sightings is between 5 and 6 a.m. and "dark-thirty," a half an hour after nightfall on a dark moon. Other expert tips for catching images of unusual sightings: Learn to use your camera for capturing low-light images, disable all filters and use a tripod. Include landmarks for scale and location and, when possible, grab some video. Choose whichever reporting database best fits your philosophy, upload and wait for the analyses to pour in.
And be ready, because you never know: As celebrations wound down on the inaugural evening of the Hawaii Star Visitors Sanctuary, Hoffeld and about thirty other people witnessed "three orbs rise from the lava, fly across the sky and then, boom! They shot off into nowhere," he says. "Every night you see something you can't explain out here."
