The green lights that lit up the skies over Hawaii on the weekend are baffling researchers. Photo: Jake Asuncion//Screenshot
On first glance, the footage of dancing green lights captured by Jake Asuncion over the Big Island of Hawaii appear to be the Northern Lights. But the aurora borealis, as its also known, isn’t something anyone in Hawaii should expect to see.
Asuncion, who lives in Kona, captured the strange glowing lights two nights in a row as he was filming the sunset. While they were faint to the naked eye, his camera picked them up in greater detail.
The glow appeared about 15 minutes after the sun sank beneath the horizon on both nights. While it may look like aurora, a phenomenon generally seen in the skies over higher latitude regions that’s caused by solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, it’s unlikely that that is truly what the lights were.
“It looked very interesting—the green color looks like aurora,” Nick Bradley, a local astronomer with Stargazers of Hawaii, told Khon2 News, “but honestly, we don’t really get that in Hawaii.”
After reviewing the data from over the weekend, experts concluded that there wasn’t enough geomagnetic storm activity on the nights in question to produce an aurora. While it’s not impossible — an aurora was seen over Hawaii in 2024 — it’s extremely unlikely. The index used to track aurora strength was at a level 3-4, while the Hawaii aurora in 2024 was twice that.
Bradley went on to shoot down a few more theories, too. “Satellites look like small pinpoint lights moving across the sky — we see them every night. This doesn’t look like that,” he said, before ruling out meteor showers and the “green flash” that everyone hopes to see at sunset. Army officials in the area told reporters that they weren’t using any lasers on those nights, either.
So for now, researchers and viewers alike are confounded. But with any luck, the glow will appear again and give researchers more insight into what’s causing it.
