Dr. Robert Zelkovsky, a Kapa’a chiropractor, and Janice Bond, a vocal anti-smoking advocate from Kaua’i, both like to think they are rational people. But they said what they saw in the nighttime skies over Kaua’i a week apart recently defies
Dr. Robert Zelkovsky, a Kapa’a chiropractor, and Janice Bond, a vocal anti-smoking advocate from Kaua’i, both like to think they are rational people.
But they said what they saw in the nighttime skies over Kaua’i a week apart recently defies logic and reason. The sightings could have been UFOs, but they just don’t know.
On the evening of Oct. 5, Zelkovsky and his girlfriend saw a bright orange object in the sky and disappear while they were at Anini Beach.
On the evening of Sept. 28, Bond said she was driving on Kuhio Highway from Anahola to Kapa’a with her two grandsons when she saw a “blue fireball, huge” in the sky, fall and disappear.
The latest sightings coincide with an Oct. 8 sighting of a bright blue ball the size of a house in Kealia by Kapa’a resident Kimberly Garner and her 15-year-old son. Garner said she too is a rational person and that there was no explanation for what she saw.
Three days before Garner’s sighting, Zelkovsky said he and his girlfriend drove to Anini Beach and rested.
At 9:25 p.m., Zelkovsky said they saw an orange object appear in the sky in the distance. “I thought it was a plane with red, warning lights. I thought it was a plane that was heading toward an airport, (possibly the Princeville Airport),” he said.
Zelkovsky said the object “was coming toward us, low in the sky and in a horizontal path” and that “at some point I thought it was going to fly overhead. The object maintained its direction for ten seconds, he said.
Zelkovsky said he wanted to document the object’s flight, and went into his car to pull out a digital-still camera.
While he continued looking for the camera, he said he saw the object in the final stages of “breaking up.”
His girlfriend, however, saw the object move from a horizontal path to a vertical path bound for the mountains as it broke up.
The couple called the NASA station on Kaua’i and the planetarium at the Bishop Museum O’ahu to see if either had received reports on what they had seen.
“They didn’t report any sightings, but it was not something we imagined,” Zelkovsky said. “We talked about it and we described the same thing.” The couple later explained away the sighting as space debris.
A week before the sighting by Zelkovsky and his friend, Bond said she was driving back to Kapa’a on Kuhio Highway following a family luau in Anahola.
At 8:30 p.m., Bond said she was “coming down the hill by Kealia Hill” when she saw “a blue fireball, it was huge” in the sky high over Kapa’a town.
As quickly as it was sighted, the object fell from the sky and disappeared, Bond said.
She said she called radio station KQNG to see if anybody had reported seeing what she saw. Bond said she was told no had.
Bond said she then called the dispatch division with the Kaua’i Police Department, which gave her the same answer the radio station had: no.
Bond said the sighting left her mystified until she read the Garden Island story about Garner’s sighting and after she spoke with a pilot on a return trip to Kaua’i from Oahu on Oct. 15.
The pilot told her that pilots commonly see “blue lights” in the sky and that they are probably meteors or parts of satellites entering into the earth’s atmosphere.
“They gave a logical explanation, but it was the first time I had ever seen something like this,” Bond said.
Bond said she wants to get in touch with Garner to talk about their experiences, as a way to flesh out what they both saw.
More and more people are seeing these things,” Bond said. “They should at least report it.”
Staff Writer Lester Chang can be reached at Lchang@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 225).
