Fact Check-Green lights in Hawaii sky came from satellite, predate 2023 fires

A night-time video showing streaks of green light in the sky over Hawaii predates the August 2023 wildfires in the U.S. state by several months.

The lights were filmed by Japan’s Subaru-Asahi Star Camera in January 2023 and emanate from a Chinese weather satellite launched in April 2022.

As wildfires raged in Hawaii in August 2023, social media users posted the footage with the baseless suggestion that it was evidence of “Directed Energy Weapons” that were used to ignite the fires. Examples are visible on Instagram (here) and TikTok (here).

The posts refer to a conspiracy theory that the fires were intentionally started by “Directed Energy Weapons” (DEWs) – a technology that fires high-energy lasers and microwaves at the speed of light, according to the US Government Accountability Office (here).

The 2023 wildfires in Maui, killed over a 100, making it the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century, Reuters reported (here).

The cause of the blaze is yet to be ascertained, more on this in a Reuters explainer (here).

There is no evidence that the blazes were caused using DEWs or laser weapons and the footage in the social media posts predates the disaster by seven months.

The video shows streaks of light appearing in a cloudy night sky over the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii on Jan. 28, 2023, captured by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The clip was posted by a YouTube channel run as part of the collaboration between NAOJ and local newspaper publisher Asahi Shimbun (here).

On a webpage dedicated to the telescope, the NAOJ said that the laser lights were from Dqui-1, a Chinese environment monitoring satellite launched in 2022 (here).

Unfounded claims of DEWs have been a major theme online amidst the wildfires. More fact checks on the topic can be seen (here) and (here).

VERDICT

Miscaptioned. Green lights captured over the night sky in Hawaii in January 2023 predate the August 2023 wildfires.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts (here).