But this woman, with her friendly face and hazel eyes, is a mystery to everyone around her. Who is she and where did she come from?

The answers are lost inside her damaged mind — perhaps forever.

For five months, officials on O'ahu, Kaua'i and Maui have listened to her fanciful story and tried to learn her real name.

She told them it was Ah and she was an intergalactic space traveler.

They gave her a last name: Doe.

A plea for public help contained everything authorities knew about Ah.

She's 60-something, maybe 70, Caucasian, stands 5-foot-7, weighs 112 pounds, has gray hair and a slight accent that may be Canadian.

Until officials learn more, though, she will remain institutionalized at the Mahelona Medical Center on Kaua'i — a ward of the state with no future outside the quiet facility in Kapa'a.

"We don't know what to do," said Claire Ueno, who handles missing persons cases for the Kaua'i County Police Department. "It is very difficult. We have no birthdate, no nothing to go on. Just that she was a Jane Doe, (a) homeless elderly female from Honolulu."

Cases like this are rare in Hawai'i, although Deborah Smith has seen this twice before while working as a crisis case manager for Safe Haven, a Honolulu group that shelters the homeless mentally ill.

Ah was sitting on a lawn chair along Kalakaua Avenue, wrapped in a blanket, when Smith met her on Jan. 1, 2003. It wasn't long before Smith developed a rapport with the woman.

"We did outreach to her for a long time," Smith said. "She was homeless the entire time we knew her."

Ah lived under a tree on the grounds of the Department of Agriculture offices on King Street.

"When I met her, the cops already knew her as intergalactic Annie," Smith said. "From her accent and her very precise speech, I would think she is upper middle class, East Coast. She comes across as educated. She is very polite. She is quite a lady."

Life on the street can be brutal, though.

Smith said 99 percent of homeless women have been beaten or sexually assaulted. In some cases, it is so traumatic to be who they are that they simply stop being that person, Smith said.

It could explain Ah's state of mind.

Ah was taken to The Queen's Medical Center in March, thin and sick.

She wasn't eating and suffered from what Smith suspects is emphysema. She didn't even have enough strength to walk.

At first, Ah was so dehydrated, police could not get prints off her fingers.

When they were able to get them, police ran the fingerprints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which stores more than 47 million prints from people with a criminal past.

The FBI also checked them against the millions of prints the federal agency keeps of military personnel, government workers and citizens with special national security clearance.

And authorities checked lists of missing persons.

At every turn, they found no answers.

In the meantime, Ah got healthy. Still, psychiatric medication did not lesson her delusions, Smith said. And without proper identification, Ah was ineligible for Social Security, welfare or medicare.

Worst of all, perhaps, she had lost whatever ability she had to care for herself on the streets. So the courts appointed her a public guardian and her doctors found a bed for her at Mahelona, a state facility that provides long-term care for people with mental health problems.

That's where Ah met Mary Frances Graham, a social worker with the Kaua'i Community Mental Health Center.

"Your heart opens up so much when you see her," Graham said. "She has dignity. She is tall and lanky. She will ... say I am feeling much better and I am gaining weight."

Graham visits Ah every week. She brings her friend cigarettes. Ah reads all day, reads everything she can get her hands on, Graham said.

"Ah is perfectly happy where she is," Graham said. "She thinks she is very safe. But she still can't tell us who she is."

Exactly what is wrong with Ah's mind isn't clear. Her psychiatrist at Mahelona, Dr. Harold Goldberg, said it is most likely schizophrenia. But without her medical records, he can't say for certain.

"The longer it goes on, the less likely it is that she is going to come back and say: 'This is who I am," Goldberg said. "It's sad. It's really terrible."

There's a certain fatalism among those who want to help Ah. Everything they've tried has failed.

"You would think somebody wants to know where she is," said Andrew Nagata, who serves as Ah's public guardian from his office on Maui. "But sometimes in these situations, they tend to alienate family and family wants to forget. Hopefully, this is not that kind of case."

Nagata, a public guardian for 11 years, thinks the people in Ah's life have forgotten about her.

Without a bit of luck, a break in the case, Ah could spend the rest of her life at Mahelona.

"Maybe somebody from a church she visited or a homeless shelter might actually know more than we do," Nagata said. "All you need is one decent lead and you can find the family. We hope for that."