On the night of Jan. 20, 1956, a Lahaina woman witnessed an orange-flame-colored unidentified flying object let out a “muffled roar” before hovering off the coast of West Maui.

The account by the 56-year-old woman was investigated by the U.S. Air Force, which concluded that it was an airplane. The reported sighting by the woman, whose name and address are redacted, appears in the once-classified Air Force Project BLUE BOOK, which investigated UFOs and their possible existence from 1947 to 1969.

The report by the Lahaina resident and thousands of others are searchable online for the first time after being released by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and compiled recently by individual researchers.

Approximately 130,000 pages of files make up the database on the website Fold3. The records are available for free at www.fold3.com/title_461/project_blue_book_ufo_investigations.

At least 40 of the more than 10,000 cases were reported on Oahu, Kauai and the Big Island. The Lahaina sighting was the only one documented on Maui during the 22-year study.

Each case relates to one sighting or a group of closely related sightings, according to the Fold3 website. Cases were drawn from UFO witnesses, the Air Force, newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as photographs and physical evidence.

“Some reports were submitted by letter or telegram, but most reports of sightings were submitted on an Air Force questionnaire, which contains the name and address of the observer, the date and hour of the sighting, and a description of what the observer saw,” the Fold3 website said. “Each case file contains a control sheet which summarizes the sighting report and shows the Air Force explanation and conclusions for the sighting.”

The West Maui sighting, referred to as Project 10073, occurred around 11:15 p.m. and lasted about 25 minutes. Lt. Col. Harold Bullock, deputy for operations with the Air Force, prepared the report and interviewed the retired Lahaina resident who made the sighting.

The woman first observed the object “through a screened window, while resting with the house lights out,” Bullock wrote. The object was about the size of a quarter and came “fast” from a distance before slowing to a hover.

The object flew in and out of a valley on Molokai about 10 miles away from her and stopped again before it “faded out in the distance,” Bullock wrote.

Bullock described the woman as “mature, sincere, intelligent and respectable.” He said she had read the book “Flying Saucers Are Real” but stated that she “does not believe in it.”

The woman said she was unable to identify the object and contacted the Civil Aeronautics Authority, the predecessor of the Federal Aviation Administration. She noted that she had reported six UFOs earlier that year and four in 1952.

Bullock wrote that the object’s size and flight path described by the woman “leaves little doubt that object (light) was actually an aircraft.” The Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army and civil aircraft including jets, helicopters and others were based in Hawaii and a local flight could have been in the area at the time.

No navigation logs were kept on local flights, Bullock said.

“Observer was surprised that a dime held at arms length would cover the moon (near half phase). This discounts considerably her estimate of the size of the UFOB,” Bullock wrote. “It is my opinion (that) observer has been seeing exhaust and/or navigation lights of local aircraft. Diffusion and refraction of such lights passing through the dense atmosphere close to the Earth’s surface accounts for observer’s generous estimates of size and color.”

Bullock added that it would be “impractical to check air traffic for even this one sighting,” and that every pilot flying at the time would have to be interrogated in order to prove that the object was an aircraft.

However, he said, the CAA had no record of any flights at that time.

Since its declassification in the 1980s, Project BLUE BOOK has only been available on microfilm in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It was not until recently that the files were released under the Freedom of Information Act and compiled into image files by a person who goes by the nickname “Xtraeme,” according to the Huffington Post.

Those images were later converted into searchable PDF files by John Greenewald, who released the collection on his website “The Black Vault.” However, due to copyright claims by Ancestry.com and its subsidiary Fold3, the files are now available on the Fold3 website, according Greenewald.

Of the 12,618 UFO sightings recorded in the program, 701 remain “Unidentified.” The final conclusions of the study were:

* No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to national security.

* There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge.

* There has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” are extraterrestrial vehicles.

* Chris Sugidono can be reached at csugidono@mauinews.com.