A passenger on a Mokulele Airlines flight says an unidentified white object forced her pilots to swerve to avoid a midair collision over Hawaii on July 9.
Tami Dixon, a Molokai resident, was flying from Molokai to Maui when she said the object appeared as the plane exited a cloud bank. "Literally scared the hell out of me. Both pilots looked at each other and veered to the right," Dixon said.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board said they could not confirm that another plane or craft was in the area at the time.
Dixon said she suspected the object may have been a drone, though drone experts say that if air safety rules were being followed, a plane and a drone should never have come that close.
A spokesperson for Mokulele Airlines told the Daily Mail the company has no record of a near-miss involving one of its planes that day.
Dixon said the object did not appear to be a bird and was too small to have been another plane in the aircraft's path. She was reportedly on her way to undergo eye surgery. She said the small commuter plane had been flying through clouds that reduced visibility to zero, and that the object appeared suddenly once the plane cleared the clouds, prompting both pilots to take action.
Drone flight lanes
Timo Sullivan of Aloha Aina Drones said that if the object had been a drone, it would have had its own designated flight lane over Hawaii, making a collision unlikely. Sullivan told Hawaii News Now that the FAA sets clear guidelines for where aircraft can fly, comparing it to separate lanes on a highway that should never intersect.
The incident happened one day before the Pentagon released its latest batch of declassified UFO files, which included video of another strange white object nearly colliding with a US military aircraft at extreme speed.
The fourth tranche of files, released on July 10, also showed a similar encounter over the eastern United States in 2015, with a small object moving at speeds compared to a missile or jet aircraft.
Other Hawaii sightings
Hawaii is not among the most active regions for UFO reports, but nine sightings have already been submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center this year. Since 1960, NUFORC has logged more than 700 incidents in Hawaii, ranging from strange lights to objects described as orbs, triangles, diamonds and rectangles.
Lukas Nelson, son of musician Willie Nelson, said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in July 2025 that he and several other people watched orb-shaped UFOs streak over Hawaii in 2006. He said the group saw an orange orb float less than 200 yards over Maui, appearing to observe onlookers below before it accelerated away.
Then I swear it seemed like as soon as enough people saw it, it went whoosh. And then it went whoosh. And it moved like nothing else I thought possible at the time. It went out of the atmosphere. And it was crazy. Faster than any drone.
