Solomon Islands UAP Waters: Dragon Snakes, Iron Bottom Sound, and the 2010 Malaita “Crash”

The Solomon Islands sit on the edge of some of the deepest and most complex plate boundaries on Earth. The surrounding trenches reach down to 6–9 km, where the Solomon Sea plate dives beneath surrounding plates in a seismically active subduction system.

At the same time, this region is layered with:

• World War II naval battles that turned Savo Sound into what is now called Iron Bottom Sound, littered with dozens of wrecks.
• Indigenous legends of flying lights, underwater beings, and giants. (Everand)
• Modern testimonies of trans‑medium UAP that appear to rise from or plunge into the sea, especially near Guadalcanal and Malaita. (Scribd)

This investigative article focuses on three tightly linked clusters:

1. Wartime UAP over Guadalcanal and Tulagi
2. The Dragon Snake and alleged UAP bases of Guadalcanal and Malaita
3. The 2010 East Malaita “mystery crash” that some locals still frame as a UAP crash site

More recently The Age of Disclosure and Lue Elizondo mention Solomon Islands and a crash-retrieval operation that happened there, drawing new attention to this hotspot.

Wartime UAP over Guadalcanal and Tulagi

The Brickner formation, Tulagi, 12 August 1942

Marine Sergeant Stephen J. Brickner of the 1st Marine Division reported a remarkable sighting while in bivouac on Tulagi, west of Guadalcanal, on 12 August 1942 around 10:00. After an air raid warning, he saw a large formation of silvery objects overhead, high above the clouds.

Across multiple later retellings, the core details are stable:

• Around 150 objects
• Arranged in an ordered formation, often described as a rectangle or sets of parallel lines
• Metallic or silvery appearance, sometimes linked to the “foo fighter” phenomenon
  (WW2Aircraft Forums)

In one common summary, the formation is said to have been “15 craft long and 10 deep”. (Avalon Library)

No Japanese or Allied aircraft formations of that configuration are known from standard military records for that time and place. The objects reportedly maintained formation and then departed without engaging or being engaged.

The Guadalcanal floatplane collision story

A separate thread concerns a U.S. Navy floatplane that allegedly collided with something invisible near Guadalcanal. UAPsee’s case summary describes a 1943 incident in which a floatplane took off, climbed, and then suddenly exploded in mid‑air in view of personnel aboard USS Chicago, with no visible enemy aircraft or flak to explain the loss. (uapsee.com)

The primary sources for this story are hard to access and remain largely embedded in secondary or tertiary UAP compilations. Nonetheless, the pattern is consistent with a wider WWII narrative in which aircrews reported “foo fighters” and inexplicable aerial collisions over multiple theaters. (Project 1947)

Investigative note
For both Brickner’s formation and the floatplane case, we have:

• Multiple independent secondary references across languages and decades
• No publicly released primary wartime investigation
• No supporting radar, gun‑camera, or intelligence records in open literature

These are not crash retrievals, but they set an early baseline that something anomalous was moving through the Solomon Islands airspace during WWII, in patterns that do not map cleanly onto known aircraft behavior.

The Dragon Snake and the UAP bases of Guadalcanal and Malaita

Marius Boirayon and northwest Guadalcanal

In the mid‑1990s, former Royal Australian Air Force engineer Marius Boirayon moved to the Solomon Islands, eventually settling near Cape Esperance on northwest Guadalcanal. His narrative “The Dragon Snake: A Solomon Islands UFO Mystery”, first published in Nexus Magazine in 2003, describes repeated encounters with trans‑medium UAP off the village shoreline. (Scribd)

Key elements from his account:

• Locals warned him about a being called the Dragon Snake, described as a flying entity with piercing red eyes that had been feared for generations and blamed for disappearances and deaths. (Scribd)
• During night fishing, Boirayon and villagers observed a brilliant white, roughly circular object, estimated around 18 meters (60 feet) across, silently moving over the water about a kilometer away before submerging into the sea. (Scribd)
• After about ten minutes, the same object re‑emerged from the water, now brighter, and then flew inland over coconut trees toward mountainous terrain. (Scribd)
• Over roughly seven months, he claims to have observed similar objects more than 60 times, sometimes with binoculars, consistently entering and exiting the sea near the same location, which he later discovered coincided with a cluster of WWII wrecks including HMAS Canberra and USS Chicago in Iron Bottom Sound. (Scribd)

Boirayon’s sightings are classic USO (unidentified submerged object) behavior: high‑luminosity UAP, silently entering and leaving the ocean at high angles, apparently without splash, heat plume, or acoustic shockwave.

Mount “Dragon” and the inland waterfall lake

In conversations with local chiefs, Boirayon was told that the Dragon Snake “lives” in a lake beneath a waterfall high on an unnamed mountain inland from his village. On a topographic map he identified a candidate mountain, which he dubbed Mount Dragon, with a small lake at the headwaters of a river system. (Scribd)

The chiefs described this lake as the Dragon Snake’s home, reinforcing a picture of a trans‑medium entity or craft using both a seafloor location and a mountain lake as hubs or portals. Boirayon later extended this to argue for:

• A “waterfall‑lake UAP base” in northwest Guadalcanal
• Parallel bases on the central east coast of Malaita and on central Small Malaita, where he also claimed to have witnessed activity. (Everand)

Museum drawings of non‑human beings

One of the most striking details in Boirayon’s testimony is a visit to the Solomon Islands Cultural Museum in Honiara, where he reports seeing a booklet with around 14 hand‑drawn depictions of small, large‑headed beings compiled from local eyewitness accounts. (Scribd)

The described morphology resembles global “grey” archetypes. If accurate, this suggests that some islanders were interpreting encounters with non‑human intelligences long before Boirayon arrived, and that the cultural memory had already been curated into a local ethnographic resource.

Giants, Ramo ruins, and underwater lights

Boirayon later expanded his work into the book Solomon Islands Mysteries: Accounts of Giants and UFOs in the Solomon Islands, which mixes USO activity with accounts of giant, Sasquatch‑like beings inhabiting remote mountain ranges and interacting violently with villagers, including alleged abductions and cannibalism. (Everand)

He also discusses:

• Ancient ruins and undeciphered scripts that he associates with a lost “Ramo” civilization
• A possible connection between giants, underground facilities, and UAP activity
• Reports that the UAP may be interested in rare blue‑silver gemstones in the region. (Solomon Giants UFO Update)

These elements have since been amplified in alternative media, cryptid forums, and appearances on programs such as Ancient Aliens: Aliens and Forbidden Islands and related spin‑offs, which explicitly frame Guadalcanal as a candidate site for an underwater alien base linked to giants. (ancientalienpedia)

The 2010 East Malaita “mystery crash”

Official timeline

On 9 September 2010, Solomon Times Online reported that the Ministry of Aviation was investigating eyewitness reports that a “light plane” had crashed into Leli Island near Atoifi and Kwai‑Ngongosila, East Malaita. Witnesses in Ogwau village described an aircraft trailing smoke before descending toward the island. (Solomon Times)

Within days:

• The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force conducted an extensive search of the area, including coastal and inland sweeps.
• Radio New Zealand Pacific reported that police found nothing to indicate any plane had crashed. (RNZ)
• In a parliamentary session, the MP for East Malaita acknowledged that the incident occurred in his constituency, noted that unusual sightings had long been reported in the area, but confirmed that investigations had not identified a crash. (parliament.gov.sb)

No missing flight, distress signal, or debris field was ever linked to the incident in public sources.

Local reinterpretation as a UAP crash

Two letters to the editor in Solomon Times Online show how quickly the event was reframed within an existing UAP narrative.

1. The letter “Plane Crash?? UFO CRASH!” by Andrew S. of Suva argues that since no debris was recovered and no aircraft type could be confirmed, the event should be treated as a crash of an unidentified flying object. He calls the site a “real UFO crash site in Malaita” and invites readers to consider the many previous sightings of anomalous lights around Malaita, Makira, and Guadalcanal. (Solomon Times)

In its second half, the same letter pivots into explicitly speculative territory, suggesting the “crash site” might be an entrance to an undersea tunnel leading to a hollow‑earth realm inhabited by giant humanoids. This is clearly presented in a tongue‑in‑cheek style, but it ties the event back into the giants and subterranean themes that Boirayon popularized. (Solomon Times)

2. A follow‑up letter, “Another Mystery on Mystery Island”, notes that the reported crash location coincides with what some locals regard as one of six UAP base entrances on Malaita. The writer states that residents have seen such phenomena “for centuries past” and that they refer to them as Dragon Snakes, while “white man” terminology is unidentified flying objects. (Solomon Times)

Facebook posts and community “Fact Files” about the event recirculate witness descriptions of a small aircraft trailing smoke and crashing into the sea, then juxtapose this with the absence of wreckage to imply something more exotic. (Facebook)

Investigative assessment

From a strictly evidential standpoint, the 2010 Malaita event rests on:

• Multiple eyewitness reports of something that looked like a small aircraft or fiery object descending
• Official searches that found no wreckage or impact site
• No matching missing aircraft in open records

The minimum safe statement is that an unidentified aerial event occurred, but its nature is unresolved. The leap from unresolved incident to “confirmed UAP crash” is not supported by publicly available physical data. What is strongly documented is how rapidly the incident was absorbed into an existing Dragon Snake and base‑entrance narrative. (parliament.gov.sb)

Underwater UAP hotspot narrative

Even outside dedicated UAP circles, the Solomon Islands are increasingly referenced as a marine hotspot for anomalous phenomena.

• Vice’s 2023 feature on the relationship between UAP and water lists the Solomon Islands alongside sites like Lake Titicaca as places where locals “constantly speak of odd objects entering and leaving its waters”, with stories stretching back to Indigenous lore. (VICE)
• Hangar 1 Publishing’s overview of oceanic UAP hotspots likewise highlights the Solomon Islands as a place where residents believe in an underwater base, similar to narratives from Mexico’s Miramar Beach or off Malibu. (Hangar1publishing)
• TV programs and social media channels associated with Ancient Aliens and The UnXplained promote the idea that documented eyewitness accounts of strange aerial and underwater lights around Guadalcanal and Malaita support the existence of a hidden underwater alien base. (YouTube)

These treatments are dramatized and often selectively quote sources like Boirayon, but they mirror a genuine pattern of local testimony: persistent sightings of luminous objects entering or exiting the sea, especially near Iron Bottom Sound and the coasts of Malaita. (Scribd)

Cultural, religious, and anthropological layers

The Solomon Islands UAP narrative sits at the intersection of several knowledge systems.

Indigenous cosmology and Dragon Snakes

For many villagers, Dragon Snakes are not “craft” in the technological sense. They are powerful, sometimes malevolent beings that inhabit mountains, caves, and underwater realms. They are blamed for disappearances, deaths, and other misfortunes, and have been part of oral tradition for at least several generations according to local elders referenced in Boirayon’s accounts. (Scribd)

In this lens, the 2010 Malaita event is not a unique “crash” but merely another manifestation of long‑running spirit activity that happens to resemble a modern machine.

Christian reinterpretation

In the “Another Mystery on Mystery Island” letter, the author explicitly connects Dragon Snakes and subterranean beings to New Testament passages (Acts 2:18–20), framing anomalous signs in the sky and earth as indicators of end‑times prophecy. (Solomon Times)

This Christian framing coexists with Indigenous cosmology and sometimes merges with it, creating a blended worldview where Dragon Snakes can be both spirits and advanced non‑human intelligences, both local guardians and eschatological signs.

Giants and hybrid narratives

Accounts of giants on Guadalcanal and other islands are well documented in local folklore and have been collected in cryptozoological compilations. (Cryptid Wiki)

Alternative researchers then tie these giants to:

• Alleged underground or underwater UAP bases
• Megalithic ruins and unknown scripts
• The idea of hybrid or non‑human lineages interwoven with island history

These ideas are highly speculative, but they show how UAP, giants, and subterranean worlds have fused into a single mytho‑technological complex in the Solomon Islands discourse. (Solomon Giants UFO Update)

Weighing the evidence

Convergences

Despite the mixture of folklore and high strangeness, several converging features stand out across independent sources:

• Persistent reports of luminous objects entering and exiting the sea around Iron Bottom Sound and Malaita
• Concentration of activity near deep bathymetric features and historically violent battlefields with large amounts of metal on the seafloor
• Long‑standing Indigenous nomenclature (Dragon Snake) aligned with modern UAP narratives only after outsiders connected the dots (Scribd)

From a UAP research perspective, this region fits the pattern of a trans‑medium hotspot that has been active for at least eight decades and probably longer.

Gaps and limitations

Where the crash‑retrieval angle is concerned, the evidential gaps are significant:

• No declassified military or scientific documentation that confirms recovery of any craft or material in the Solomon Islands
• No sonar maps, ROV imagery, or metallurgical samples tied to a UAP object in public datasets, despite extensive oceanographic work in Iron Bottom Sound focused on WWII wrecks and unexploded ordnance.
• The 2010 Malaita incident remains a “missing crash” with no wreckage and no identified aircraft, but also no physical confirmation of a non‑human craft

In other words, the Solomon Islands data strongly support a long‑term pattern of anomalous aerial and underwater phenomena, but only weakly support concrete claims of crashed UAP retrievals.

Claims Taxonomy

Verified

• None of the alleged UAP crashes or bases in the Solomon Islands reach UAPedia’s Verified tier. There is no public physical evidence, open official confirmation, or multi‑sensor data in the sense used for modern military UAP cases.

Probable

• Brickner formation (Tulagi, 12 August 1942) as genuinely anomalous aerial event witnessed by numerous Marines, with a coherent structure and no plausible conventional match in the historical record. (sped2work.tripod.com)
• Dragon Snake sightings and repeated USO activity near Cape Esperance and Iron Bottom Sound, based on Boirayon’s sustained observations plus independent local testimony. (Scribd)
• The 2010 East Malaita “mystery crash” as a real unidentified aerial incident, though not necessarily a crash or a technology event. (Solomon Times)

Disputed

• Claims that the 2010 Malaita incident was a confirmed UAP crash, in the absence of debris or a recovered object. (Solomon Times)
• Assertions of specific underwater or waterfall‑lake UAP bases as literal facilities, rather than hypothesized hubs inferred from sighting locations. (Scribd)

Legend

• Narratives that integrate giants, hollow earth entrances, and lost tribes of Israel into explanations of Dragon Snakes and UAP. (Solomon Times)

Misidentification

• Some helicopter flights around Gold Ridge and the Guadalcanal highlands that locals initially associated with unusual aerial activity but were later explained as RAMSI training flights. (Solomon Giants UFO Update)
• The possibility that some “crash” reports, including the 2010 event, may involve meteors, experimental aircraft, or re‑entering space debris is real, but no specific conventional match has been documented, so these remain hypotheses rather than confirmed misidentifications.

Speculation labels

To separate data from interpretation, the following are explicitly speculative.

Hypotheses

• The Solomon Islands form part of a broader Pacific trans‑medium corridor where non‑human intelligences operate from deep‑ocean or subsurface infrastructures along major subduction zones and trenches. (eqinfo.ucsd.edu)
• Some Dragon Snake manifestations may represent autonomous probes or drones that cycle between seafloor hubs and inland lakes, rather than occupied vehicles.
• Persistent UAP interest in areas with dense WWII wreckage and unexploded armaments near Iron Bottom Sound could reflect monitoring of human war resources or exploitation of accessible metals and energetics.

Witness interpretations

• Villagers who interpret Dragon Snakes as spiritual or subterranean beings are mapping real anomalous experiences into their existing cosmology, not simply “mistakenly seeing aircraft”. Their frames of meaning are part of the evidence. (Scribd)
• The framing of the 2010 Malaita incident as an entrance to hollow earth or as a sign of approaching apocalyptic events is a powerful example of religious and folkloric processing of unexplained stimuli. (Solomon Times)

Researcher opinions

• Boirayon’s view that the Dragon Snake associated UAP are actively hostile and responsible for multiple deaths and abductions is based on collected testimonies, but it is still an interpretation in the absence of forensic evidence. (Scribd)
• Alternative researchers who link giants, UAP, and lost civilizations often extrapolate beyond the available data, blending mythic, cryptozoological, and ufological material into unified speculative frameworks. (Solomon Giants UFO Update)
• Journalistic work that treats water‑associated UAP as pointing to global underwater bases is an emerging narrative lens, not a settled conclusion. (VICE)

Conclusion

Taken together, the Solomon Islands do not yet offer a publicly verifiable crashed UAP case in the classic sense of Roswell or Trinity, but they do present one of the clearest long‑duration clusters of trans‑medium UAP and USO reports on the planet.

From Brickner’s wartime formation over Tulagi, through Boirayon’s Dragon Snake encounters at Cape Esperance, to the unresolved 2010 East Malaita incident that official searches could not reconcile with a known crash, the pattern is consistent:

• Highly luminous, maneuverable objects operating above and below the sea near deep tectonic structures and WWII wreckage
• Communities that have integrated these phenomena into rich mixtures of Indigenous lore and Christian eschatology
• Modern media and researchers who have re‑exported these stories into global discussions of underwater UAP bases and non‑human presence in the oceans

For UAPedia, the Solomon Islands remain a high‑priority field region for any future multi‑sensor, multi‑disciplinary investigation that combines sonar, ROVs, magnetometry, ethnography, and archival research.

If you would like, the next step can be a focused case file just on the Dragon Snake waterfall‑lake base claims, or a technical proposal for how a modern survey team could actually test the underwater‑base hypothesis here.

References

Boirayon, M. (2003). The Dragon Snake: A Solomon Islands UFO Mystery. Nexus Magazine, 10(5). Retrieved from https://www.nexusmagazine.com (Scribd)

Boirayon, M. (2020). Solomon Islands Mysteries: Accounts of Giants and UFOs in the Solomon Islands [Ebook]. Adventures Unlimited Press. Retrieved from Everand. (Everand)

Brickner, S. J. (1942/2013). Marine Sergeant Spots Silvery UFO’s West Of Guadalcanal. In secondary compilations on WWII foo fighters. Retrieved from Before It’s News and related archives. (img.beforeitsnews.com)

Earthquake Information Center, University of California San Diego. (2018). Earthquake frequency in the Solomon Islands [Web article]. (eqinfo.ucsd.edu)

Lee, S. J., et al. (2018). Composite megathrust rupture from deep interplate to shallow splay faults. Geophysical Research Letters, 45(5). (AGU Publications)

Maharaj, R. (1999). Contamination Risk Assessment from WWII Armoury in Iron Bottom Sound Solomon Islands [Technical report]. Commonwealth Secretariat & UNDP.

Ministry of Aviation, Solomon Islands. (2010, September 9). Ministry of Aviation investigates mystery crash. Solomon Times Online. (Solomon Times)

Radio New Zealand Pacific. (2010, September 11). Solomon Islands police find no sign of a plane crash. RNZ Pacific. (RNZ)

Solomon Islands Parliament. (2010, October 4). Hansard: Mystery plane crash, East Malaita [Parliamentary debate transcript]. (parliament.gov.sb)

Solomon Times Online. (2010, September 10). Plane Crash?? UFO CRASH! [Letter to the editor by Andrew S.]. (Solomon Times)

Solomon Times Online. (2010, September 13). Another Mystery on Mystery Island [Letter to the editor]. (Solomon Times)

UAPsee. (n.d.). The Guadalcanal UFO Incident. Retrieved from https://www.uapsee.com (uapsee.com)

Vice. (2023, October 13). WTF is going on with the mysterious connection between UFOs and water? VICE. (VICE)

Yoneshima, S., et al. (2005). Subduction of the Woodlark Basin at New Britain Trench. Tectonophysics, 397(3–4), 211–224. (ScienceDirect)

Additional secondary and tertiary summaries consulted include UAP timelines, blogs, and discussion forums that reiterate the Brickner case and Solomon Islands legends.

SEO keywords

Solomon Islands UAP, Solomon Islands USO, Dragon Snake Guadalcanal, Iron Bottom Sound UFO, Malaita mystery crash, Guadalcanal wartime UAP, Solomon Islands underwater alien base, Solomon Islands giants and UFOs, Marius Boirayon Dragon Snake, UAP crash Solomon Islands