UFO Sighting Over Hawaii: Flight Swerves to Avoid Mysterious White Object as Airline Denies Claim

A passenger on a small commuter flight in Hawaii says her plane was forced to swerve mid-air to avoid a UFO on 9 July, in an incident so abrupt it 'scared the hell' out of her and, she claims, visibly alarmed both pilots. The alleged near-miss happened as the Mokulele Airlines service from Molokai to Maui emerged from cloud, when a 'white something' suddenly appeared in front of the aircraft.

The reported encounter came just one day before the Pentagon released its latest batch of declassified UFO files, including footage of another fast-moving white object passing close to a US military aircraft. The Hawaii sighting sits in that awkward gap between official denial and eyewitness certainty, a space that has been steadily filling with newly public documents and years of quietly filed reports.

The passenger, Molokai resident Tami Dixon, told local media she was travelling to Maui for eye surgery when the object appeared without warning as the plane left a thick cloud bank that had reduced visibility to zero. 'Literally scared the hell out of me. Both pilots looked at each other and veered to the right,' she recalled.

Dixon said the object did not resemble a bird and looked too small to be another aircraft in Mokulele's normal flight path. She initially suspected a drone, but even that explanation has run into doubts from people who work with the technology every day.

UFO Sighting Over Hawaii Raises Safety Questions

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board both said they could not confirm that any other aircraft or registered craft were in the area at the time. A spokesperson for Mokulele Airlines, meanwhile, the company has no record of a near-miss involving one of its planes that day.

So, on paper, there is nothing there. No second aircraft, no logged airprox incident, no radar-confirmed drone. Yet Dixon insists that something white and solid enough to prompt a sudden evasive manoeuvre was directly in front of the cockpit windows as the aircraft cleared the clouds. According to her account, the pilots' reaction was instant: a sharp veer to the right to get out of its way.

If the UFO was a drone, it would have been operating in extremely sensitive airspace. Timo Sullivan of Aloha Aina Drones, speaking to Hawaii News Now, said legal drone operations should never bring a device that close to a passenger plane. 'The FAA establishes very clear guidelines of where aircraft can fly. Kind of like on a highway, you have your own driving lane,' he said. 'They should never actually interact or you should never have one car or aircraft entering another car's lane.'

That analogy only underlines the troubling part. If everyone was following the rules, Sullivan argued, the Mokulele flight and any drone should have been in completely different 'lanes' above Hawaii.

Nothing in the available reporting indicates that the object was tracked, recovered or identified after the incident. With no corroborating radar data made public and no photographic evidence from inside the cabin, the sighting remains, in the strictest sense, an unconfirmed account. As with many UFO stories, what we have is a collision between aviation bureaucracy and human memory, and no third element to settle the dispute.

UFO Files and a Long History of Hawaii Sightings

The day after the incident, on 10 July, the Pentagon released the fourth tranche of declassified UFO material, including video from the eastern United States in 2015. That footage shows a small white object racing past a military aircraft at a speed that analysts have variously compared to a missile, a jet, or something faster than any acknowledged human technology.

In fairness, the skies over Hawaii are not regarded as the world's busiest UFO corridor. Yet the state is hardly a blank spot. The independent National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), which collates civilian sightings worldwide, lists more than 700 incidents in Hawaii since 1960. So far this year alone, nine separate UFO reports have been submitted from the state.

Those accounts range from 'strange lights in the sky' to geometric shapes described as orbs, triangles, diamonds and rectangles, hovering or moving over the islands. They are raw, uneven and often impossible to verify, but they form a long-running backdrop to any new story like Dixon's.

Popular culture has layered its own mythology on top. The son of country music legend Willie Nelson, singer-songwriter Lukas Nelson, described multiple UFO encounters in Hawaii during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in July 2025, according to the report. He said that in 2006 he and several others watched orange, orb-like objects streak over Maui, with one floating less than 200 yards above them as if observing the group.

'Then I swear it seemed like as soon as enough people saw it, it went whoosh,' he recounted. The object, he said, shot out of sight and appeared to leave the atmosphere 'faster than any drone.'

The official US government position has long been that there is no physical proof of UFOs or alien life. Even the new wave of declassified material is couched in cautious language about 'unidentified anomalous phenomena,' not visitors from elsewhere. Yet the growing stack of cockpit videos, radar blips and shaken passenger stories, from Maui to the eastern seaboard, keeps nudging that line.

In the case of the Mokulele flight, nothing is confirmed yet, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. What remains is a commuter plane over Hawaii, a cloud bank, a sudden flash of white and two pilots, according to one passenger, forced to pick a new lane in the sky.