Honolulu, T.H., January 1951January 1951

On the evening of January 7, 1951, a man sitting in his parked car at a drive-in theater in Honolulu watched a large mass of muddy orange flames move rapidly across the sky toward the west. The witness estimated the object was between two and three thousand feet high and roughly four miles out over the ocean. He had about ten years of military service, two hundred hours of flying experience, and normal vision. He was familiar with aircraft and said the flames resembled an oil fire blown by strong wind.

The object moved at extraordinary speed in an arc, passing through three clouds before disappearing. The witness could not see any solid body beneath the flames, only the fire itself. He estimated the mass of flames was eight to ten times larger than the wing span of a four-engine aircraft he saw approaching Honolulu at the same time. He noted that a conventional fighter jet would have needed about five minutes to cover the same distance the object traversed in just seconds. The flames appeared to fan out lazily behind something he could not discern, as though they were moving slower than the main body. He heard no sound. The sighting lasted only seconds but covered a sixty-degree arc of sky.

After the movie ended, the witness drove to Honolulu Airport and asked airline and weather personnel about the object. No one had heard any reports. He called two local newspapers and received no information about other sightings. He also called the 14th Naval District Intelligence Office at approximately 3 a.m. on January 8. No other reports of this sighting appeared in local news or other agency records in the Hawaiian area.

The Air Force summarized the sighting as "probably balloon" on its case record card, though the full case file notes the witness said the object did not look like a meteor and did not move like one either. The complete case file, comprising 7 pages, is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.