What happened
On 21 December 1978 the crew of a Safe Air Argosy freighter flying from Blenheim to Christchurch saw strange lights around their aircraft, and Wellington air traffic control reported unidentified radar returns. Nine days later an Australian television team rode the same newspaper run to film background for a story, and got far more than they expected. Off the Kaikoura coast, captain Bill Startup called reporter Quentin Fogarty and cameraman David Crockett to the flight deck: lights were pacing the plane. On the return leg, shortly after 2 a.m., a large glowing orb and a line of smaller lights took station near the wingtip for about a quarter of an hour, while Crockett filmed on 16 mm colour stock and a tape recorder captured the crew's commentary. The aircraft's radar, in ground-mapping mode, showed a return where the light appeared to be. The footage aired in Melbourne that night and ran around the world, making Kaikoura one of the best-documented civilian sightings ever.
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The official explanation
New Zealand's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research argued that much of the film was distorted by shooting through the Argosy's window and that the main lights were most likely squid-fishing boats, whose banks of powerful lamps can look like hovering objects from the air. In 2000 former DSIR scientist William Ireland re-measured frames and argued that earlier calculations used the wrong lens focal length, and that some frames show parallel rows of lamps matching squid boats about 6 km away. Radar returns were attributed to temperature inversions and spurious echoes.
The anomalous case
Kaikoura combines independent strands that rarely appear together: two separate nights, professional pilots, a moving film from a professional camera, two contemporaneous tape recordings, airborne radar and ground radar. US Navy optical physicist Bruce Maccabee obtained the original footage, interviewed the witnesses in New Zealand and Australia, and calculated that the main light was extremely bright and perhaps 20 metres or more across, ruling out ball lightning; he disputed that squid boats were present and concluded the objects fit the definition of UFOs. A 1987 Journal of Scientific Exploration paper called the case unique among civilian reports for its documentary record. Captain Startup said the light tracked his aircraft, moving above, below and ahead of it, behaviour hard to reconcile with boats on the sea.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Kaikoura lights Wikipedia
- They're stealing our fish New Zealand Skeptics
Witness reports elsewhere
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