2001-09-05 - Honolulu, HI - Light

11:15 pm. Looking South from the Halekulani Hotel on Wikiki beach, 6th floor. I had arrived earlier that day with my wife, and had NOT been drinking. The hotel balcony is only about 300 feet from the ocean. I first noticed a disk shaped object hovering what appeared to be 30-40 feet above the beach. At first I thought this was a seagull sized bird flying in place against the ocean breeze. This seemed unlikely, since it was 11:15pm and the wind was barely blowing. My next thought was that this faintly outlined disk shaped object could be a kite. The object was bobbing and moving like a kite would from my vantage point. 5 seconds later this object moved to my right about 10 degrees behind a palm tree and shortly thereafter re-appeared to the right of the tree. This convinced me that this was not a kite since the object moved too fast and started to ascend slightly. The object continued moving in a slightly ascending trajectory to the West (my right) This movement covered roughly an additional 20 degrees. Somewhere near this phase of the sighting, the object emmitted a dim red/orange continuous glow, and that's what I tracked for the remainder of the sighting. As the object moved across the sky to the right, it suddenly reversed directions and started moving East in a relatively straight line. Now I knew that this was like nothing I had ever seen in my life. The object then moved in a counter clockwise circular motion, followed by another pass from left to right. Finally the dim light stopped for a few seconds and then went straight up and slightly to my right. After this point, the light became dimmer and dimmer in the black moonless sky. I called my wife out to see, but she could not pick up the very faint light at this point, roughly 45 degrees off the horizon. This episode lasted 30-45 seconds. The next morning I repositioned myself on the balcony in order to guesstimate how far away this object was. Clearly, the object. depending on it's size, was between 1/8 and 1/4 mile away at the early stages of the sighting. (Well below the horizon) This would make the object size about 20-30 feet across. I am college educated, and I know what airplanes, helecopters, sattelites, and shooting stars all look like in the night sky. I did not hear anything; my encounter was only visual. All these signs tell me that this object was definitely out of this world. Needless so say, I could not fall asleep for several hours.