(Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii - Feb 6, 1995) -- Windward Oahu is a beautiful place, a location often used as a setting for scenic postcards showing Hawaii's natural beauty. The area around Kaneohe is dominated by the Koolau Mountains, sheer velvet green cliffs rising to a height of about 3,000 feet. Nestled in one of the valleys (Haiku Valley) is the Coast Guard Omega Station.
The Omega Station itself is an interesting bit of construction. It consists of 4 miles of cable, which acts as a huge antenna. The cables are stretched from the top of one 3,000 foot peak above the valley to another peak about 3/4 of a mile away. So when you look up, there is this huge latticework of cables hanging off the mountains. The Omega Station sends out signals to aircraft and boats around the world. The signals are used to give very accurate position readings. There are eight Omega Stations around the world, in Hawaii and North Dakota in the United States, and also in Australia, Japan, and Norway. The signal emitted from the Omega Station is extreme low frequency, around 10.2 Khz.
Several miles directly east of the Omega Station is a peninsula that juts out into Kaneohe Bay. This is the home of Marine Station Hawaii, formerly called Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station.
Kaneohe town is a residential area with a large mall (Windward Mall), apartment buildings and condo complexes, schools, parks and churches. One of the main highways from the Honolulu side of the island to the Kaneohe side is the Likelike (pronounced lee-kay lee-kay) Highway, which passes very close to the Omega Station and then tunnels through the Koolau Mountains.
This is the area where people have been seeing orange discs and odd lights for the past week or so.
I work for KITV, the ABC television affiliate in Honolulu, and I live at a condo complex in Kaneohe, one mile east of the Omega Station. From my front door I can see the beautiful Koolau Mountains and the cables of the Omega Station draped off the cliffs.
On Wednesday, February 1, I overheard a phone conversation in the newsroom. A producer was talking to someone who was obviously reporting a UFO sighting. I heard her say to the caller, "So you saw this disc over the bay, near the Marine Base?" It sounded rather interesting to me, so I got on the phone and talked to the caller. His name is Philip and he and his brother Steve had seen an orange disc fly past their apartment, out over the bay toward the Marine base. They reported they could see a row of lights pulsating around the disc. And they say when it got out over the bay they could see several smaller craft dropping out of it and flying off. Steve says one of the things that dropped out flew around and went back into the larger disc. Steve also reports that he saw orange lights the night before, on Monday January 30.
Both Philip and Steve sounded like sane, normal people, although they were quite excited. I felt that they had seen something but that maybe they were embellishing it a bit. We did not do a news story about the incident, but I told them to call me at home if they saw anything else.
I was at home that evening (Wednesday, February 1) when Philip called me and said they had seen two orange lights in the sky, coming out of the north toward the direction of the Omega Station. They had a video camera and got some tape of one of the lights. I have a copy. On the tape it suddenly winks out and disappears. This sighting occurred just after dusk, around 7 to 7:30pm.
After his call, I went out and walked around looking at the sky. It was a beautiful clear night. I did not see anything other than stars, and the planet Mars which was above the eastern horizon.
That evening a number of people who belong to a kennel club were training their dogs in a park. They reported seeing strange orange lights floating around in the sky, and one girl says she has a video tape of them. I have spoken to her, but don't have her tape in my possession yet.
At 11:20pm I left my house to drive into Honolulu. I was heading toward Honolulu, past Haiku valley and the Omega Station. Suddenly I noticed two very bright orange lights floating above the highest mountain peak, directly above the Likelike Highway tunnel. I pulled my car over and jumped out.
I have seen helicopters flying at night, and I have seen airplanes and airplane landing lights. This is not what these were. The lights were very bright and very orange/amber color, like the amber turn signal on a car. The lights were sort of "floating," not darting or moving rapidly. I would say they were about the speed of a fast helicopter. They were at an angle a few hundred feet above the mountain peak. I could not discern any shape or structure, so I could not say they were "discs." Then I saw lights drop out of one of the objects. Very rapidly, one-two-three, balls of light were ejected from the bottom. Then the object itself blinked out and disappeared. The other one continued floating along, toward the ocean. In about 30 seconds or so, small dots of light began ejecting from this one -- again very fast, faster than something would fall due to gravity, one-two-three. Then the orange object itself blinked off, then on, then off. I want to say that it sped upward and away at extremely high velocity, although I really can't be sure about that. At any rate, it disappeared. After the balls of light dropped out of both of the objects, the balls of light faded and disappeared.
In talking to people around Kaneohe for the past two days, I have found a number of people who have seen the strange lights or know someone who has.
A young woman who works at the Kaneohe Dominos Pizza was at the park with her dog. (She's the one with the second video.) She says her mother was with her and saw the lights also. She says they were orange, and dropped balls of light. I spoke to her mother, Gail Bailon, who says she noticed a light up against the mountain above the Omega Station. At first she thought the light was on the mountain. But it floated up, and then dropped balls of light. She says she could see a white ball of light flying around the larger one.
A man who works at Blockbuster video (which has a big window that looks out toward the mountains) says he saw several strange orange lights hovering near the Omega Station. He found them curious, but didn't really think much of it.
A man at the Safeway overheard me telling my experience to the checkout clerk and he told me that his neighbor had seen odd lights the other night.
On the other hand, when I called the Omega Station, the people on duty said they have heard nothing about strange lights in the area.
On Thursday, February 2, a number of us met at the park where the dog trainers had been. I arrived to meet Mark Viglielmo, the local MUFON representative. We arrived at the park at 7:00pm, just as it was getting dark. We did see something a little strange, two fast moving red lights along the ridge of the mountain, above the Omega Station. They were darting along, very quick, very erratic. One rose up above the other, and then quickly darted down, and then both flew off to the north. We did hear the sound of jet engines, and concluded that they were jet aircraft. There are fighters stationed at the Marine Base. However the more I think about the way they moved, the more I wonder. These were probably jets, although they could have been something else. The orange objects ejecting lights were certainly not jets or helicopters.
More people came to the park, and a group of us went up to a foothill at the base of the mountains and began watching the sky. We did not see anything unexplainable. At a little after 11pm, I saw a light appear over the mountain moving in roughly the same course as the strange orange lights I had seen the night before. I was excited for a moment, but quickly realized it was a white (not orange) light, and there were green and red aircraft lights on it. Then we heard the engine and rotor noise. So, a helicopter did fly around the area at an odd time of night. It was not a large military helicopter. It came over the mountain from the Honolulu side, flew the paths of the earlier orange objects, and then left.
I called the FAA and a representative told me the only aircraft flying from the Marine Base on the night of February 1 were four helicopters. All had landed by 10:30pm, so they could not have been the lights I witnessed at 11:30. The FAA also told me the Marine helicopters had been doing night vision training and were flying blacked out... no lights.
No more sightings were reported from Thursday to Saturday, but more and more witnesses to the Wednesday sightings kept popping up. By Saturday, February 4, I had enough material to do a news story for KITV (ABC) in Hawaii. I decided to conduct interviews Saturday night at dusk, from the locations. I already had two different home videos. One video shows one orangish light in the sky, which blinks out suddenly. The other video shows two bright orange lights. One is moving around the other. The problem with this video is the camera operator had it on auto focus and the camera constantly focuses in and out, trying to lock on to something.
I got home at 11pm Saturday after doing the late news and got an excited phone call from one of the primary witnesses. They had seen a number of the objects from a park midway between Kaneohe Bay and the Koolau Mountains (where the Omega Station is located.
From the park they saw the orange lights appear and slowly move around. And it seemed that the lights were to the WEST, toward the mountain. They drove up to a good vantage point on the mountain. At this point I arrived, and we saw two lights -- it seemed that they appeared from the bay to the EAST, out toward the Marine Base.
From this it seems that the lights may have been much closer and smaller than we first assumed. By moving one mile up to the mountain, the apparent location of the lights changed.
What I saw on Wednesday night was very bright, moving fast, and had balls of light discharge from the bottom. I could not think of how anyone could possibly hoax such a thing. For one thing, it seemed to be above a very steep cliff with lots of dense growth, a place you can only get to by helicopter.
But tonight's lights were different. Could they have been balloons with some kind of light source suspended? From what they did tonight, it seems possible. We will continue to investigate. And we need to review the video.
I will air a story about the sightings on KITV Channel 4 in Hawaii on the Sunday night (Feb 6) news at 5:00 and 10:00 pm. It will have interviews with about 6 witnesses plus 3 home videos.
Some final notes: A security guard at my condo complex (who patrols the graveyard shift) reports he saw an orange disc fly overhead. He says he could make out the round shape and the pulsating ring of lights around it. He will not at this time go public or be interviewed on TV. (I get this second hand from another security guard. I will soon talk to the primary witness, hopefully.)
The FOX television show "Sightings" has expressed an interest, and asked me if I would be interviewed.
In conclusion, I just want to say that when you see something like I saw last Wednesday night, you cannot describe it in words.
Original file name: .CNI - Hawaii UFOs.Allgire
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