Sighting record / 2010
Sunday, 18 July 2010. About 4 pm at Tuaran Beach Resort, near Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. A woman screamed. Guests were pointing at the sky. They went out to look. Jemas Dungil saw a round, blue object floating above them. A few moments later it turned green. It made no sound. Then it vanished in a blink of an eye. Dungil took one photograph. It ran on the front page of Harian Metro, and the story travelled to India, Indonesia, Romania and Italy. Local police found no one who knew anything about it. Sceptics wondered about a chandelier reflected in a window, or a clever piece of resort marketing.
Tuaran Beach Resort sits on a long beach lined with palm and casuarina trees in the Tuaran district of Sabah, on Malaysian Borneo. Kota Kinabalu is about 45 km away. July 2010 was already a strange month. On 7 July, Hangzhou Xiaoshan Airport in China had closed for about an hour over a reported UFO. When news came from Tuaran, the press called it the second sighting that month.