Akualele Research Group Bulletin

History

The Akualele Research Group operated from Honolulu, Hawaii, holding monthly meetings in Waikiki (Sunday evenings, 7 to 9 PM at the Waikiki YMCA). Its bulletin was distributed through the North Jersey U.F.O. Group at Post Office Box 606, Morristown, New Jersey. Volume 1, Number 10 appeared on 22 December 1956; the numbering suggests the group had been publishing since early that year. Volume 2 began in January 1957 and ran through at least August.

"Akualele" is a Hawaiian word for flying fireballs or fire spirits, part of a tradition of aerial phenomena observation that predates Western contact. The group's editor chose the name deliberately, connecting modern UFO sightings to indigenous Hawaiian accounts of unexplained lights in the sky. The December 1956 issue opened with a report of a mysterious glow atop Mauna Loa that the U.S. Weather Bureau could not explain: no sign of volcanic activity, despite the mountain's summit being illuminated for two hours on a bleak, cold lava desert with no wood, no vegetation, no water, and no power source for miles.

The bulletin mixed local Hawaiian sightings with international material. The January 1957 issue carried a report from Suva, Fiji (via reporter Jack Thornton to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin) about British skippers in the Central Pacific whose ships lost all seaweed from their hulls within 24 hours of the 1956 Bikini atomic tests. It also included a sighting report from Mrs. Martha Stermer of Holualoa, in the Big Island coffee-growing district, who observed a bright hovering object off shore at 6:10 AM that went out "like a light being turned off, leaving a momentary afterglow."

The editor had visited the Mauna Loa weather station personally, riding in a four-wheel-drive truck with the observer on his regular Friday trip. He described the 11,200-foot station, the road conditions across rough lava terrain, and the twenty additional miles to Mokuaweoweo crater at the summit. This was hands-on field investigation conducted at altitude in remote terrain, not armchair theorising.

The bulletin referenced RCA's research on planetary radio interference (J.H. Nelson's "Short Wave Radio Propagation Correlation with Planetary Positions," RCA Review, March 1951) and even Ptolemy's Almagest in discussing the relationship between planetary alignments and communications disruptions. The intellectual range was wide, the tone was conversational and speculative, and the Pacific perspective was unique in American ufology.