161 lines
8.7 KiB
Plaintext
161 lines
8.7 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: NEW ZEALAND SIGHTING REPORT. INTERESTING FILE: UFO1540
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is taken from "The Unexplained" No.5.
|
|
|
|
"Late in the evening of 30 December 1978, an Argosy freight plane
|
|
set off from Wellington, New Zealand. Its skipper was Captain Bill
|
|
Startup, who had 23 years' flying experience behind him, and the
|
|
co-pilot was Bob Guard. On board were an Australian TV crew from
|
|
Channel 0-10 Network; reporter, Quentin Fogarty; [working at the
|
|
present on a nightly current affair show...Marty] and cameraman
|
|
David Crockett and his wife, sound recordist Ngaire Crockett. Their
|
|
purpose was to film UFOs, for there had been reports of 'unknowns'
|
|
during the preceding weeks in the region of Cook Straight, which
|
|
separates New Zealand's North and South Islands.
|
|
They were spectacularly successful in the quest, so successful in
|
|
fact that, after the story had appeared in hundreds of newspapers
|
|
and clips from the films had been shown repeatedly on television
|
|
around the world - the BBC, for instance, gave it pride of place on
|
|
the main evening news - critics and droves of debunkers lined up to
|
|
try to explain what the television crew had seen, in terms ranging
|
|
from the sublimely astronomical to the ridiculously absurd.
|
|
The Argosy had crossed Cook Strait and was flying over the
|
|
Pacific Ocean off the north-east coast of South Island when the
|
|
excitement began. The television crew was down by the loading bay,
|
|
filming 'intros' with Quentin Fogarty, when Captain Startup called
|
|
over the intercom for them to hurry to the flight deck: the pilots
|
|
had seen some strange objects in the sky. According to Ctockett,
|
|
they had already checked with Wellington air traffic control for
|
|
radar confirmation of their visual sighting.
|
|
Fogarty stated that, when he reached the flight deck, he saw a
|
|
row of five bright lights. Large and brilliant, although a long way
|
|
off, they were seen to pulsate, growing from pinpoint size to that
|
|
of a large balloon full of glowing light. The sequence was then
|
|
repeated, the objects appearing above the stereet lights of the
|
|
town of Kaikoura, but between the aircraft and the ground.
|
|
|
|
Crockett, who was wearing headphones, received a call from
|
|
Wellington control, warning the pilots that an unknown target was
|
|
following the Argosy. Captain Startup put his plane into a turn to
|
|
look for the unidentified object but the passengers and crew saw
|
|
nothing. Control, however, was insistent: 'Sierra Alpha
|
|
Eagle....you have a target in formation with you....target has
|
|
increased in size.' This time, lights were seen outside the plane;
|
|
but because of interference from the navigation lights of the
|
|
plane, Crockett was unable to film. So First Officer Bob Guard
|
|
switched off the navigation lights, and every-one saw a big, bright
|
|
light. The plane was now back on automatic pilot, so Guard gave up
|
|
his seat for Crocket, who obtained a clear shot of the object with
|
|
his hand-held camera. Crockett has since explained that this
|
|
changing of seats with the camera running was responsible for the
|
|
violent shake seen at that point in the movie film they made.
|
|
After this, Startup decided to put the plane into another
|
|
360-degree turn to see if they could spot the obfects again, but
|
|
they had now lost sight of the UFOs, although Wellington control
|
|
said their echo was still on the radarscope. Although there was no
|
|
room for a camera tripod to be mounted on the flight deck, the
|
|
unidentified object stayed steady enough for Crockett to be able to
|
|
keep it dead centre in his camera viewfinder for more than 30
|
|
seconds.
|
|
As the plane approached Christchurch, the fuel guage went into a
|
|
spin, but the captain said that this occasionally happened and was
|
|
not necessarily due to interference by the UFO. At this point, they
|
|
were out of touch with Wellington control. Christchurch control,
|
|
however, had the object on its radarscope but later, when Captain
|
|
Startup and American investigating scientist Dr Bruce Maccabee
|
|
asked to se the radar tapes, the Christchurch supervisor replied
|
|
that they had been 'wiped' clean as part of routine procedure.
|
|
The Argosy landed at Christchurch and journalist Dennis Grant
|
|
joined the team in place of Dave Crockett's wife, Ngaire. They left
|
|
on the return flight at about 2:15 a.m. on 31 December 1978.
|
|
|
|
Go to PART 2.
|
|
|
|
|
|
* SLMR 2.1a * If I look confused, it's because I'm thinking.
|
|
|
|
--- FMail 0.92
|
|
* Origin: ** NASA & STS: "It was only ice" ** (1:363/81.1)
|
|
* Tossed by SFToss v1.02 on 92/10/21 02:46:38
|
|
===========================================================================
|
|
BBS: Fortean Research Center
|
|
Date: 10-19-92 (00:12) Number: 3093
|
|
From: DON ALLEN Refer#: NONE
|
|
To: ALL Recvd: NO
|
|
Subj: "The dancing lights" 2/2 Conf: (10) FIDO UFO
|
|
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
* Forwarded from "mufonet"
|
|
* Originally by Marty Wade
|
|
* Originally to All
|
|
* Originally dated 18 Aug 1992, 13:07
|
|
|
|
PART 2...
|
|
|
|
Early in this flight, the observers saw two more strange objects.
|
|
Through the camera lens, Crockett saw what he described as a
|
|
sphere with lateral lines around it. This object focussed itself
|
|
as Crockett watched through his camera, without adjusting the
|
|
lens. He said the sphere was spinning. Significantly, one of the
|
|
objects swayed on the Argosy's weather radar continuously for some
|
|
four minutes. Later, they all saw two pulsating lights, one of
|
|
which suddenly fell in a blurred streak for about 1,000 feet (300
|
|
metres) before pulling up short in a series of jerky movements.
|
|
Where the objects true 'flying saucers'? Many alternative
|
|
explanations have been put forward. The film perhaps depicted a
|
|
"top secret American military remote-control drone vehicle',
|
|
plasma or ball lightning, a hoax, meteorites, 'helicopters
|
|
operating illegally at night', mutton birds, lights on Japanese
|
|
squid boats, or 'reflections from moonlight via cabbage leaves'
|
|
(at Kiakoura); while Patrick Moore hedged his bets with a guess of
|
|
'a reflection, a balloon or even an unscheduled aircraft'.
|
|
|
|
One newspaper claimed the film showed the planet Venus,
|
|
out-of-focus because it was filmed with a hand-held camera.
|
|
Another offered Jupiter as a candidate, stating that an amateur
|
|
astronomer had enhanced the light values of the film by putting it
|
|
through a line-scan analyser, thereby identifying four small
|
|
points of light, possibly Jupiter's four largest moons.
|
|
But because the television crew were so vague about the
|
|
possibility of the lights relative to the aircraft as they were
|
|
filming them, it was impossible to make a positive identification.
|
|
One of the most exciting aspects of the incident however, is
|
|
that it appears to offer independent instrumental evidence of the
|
|
sighting both on film and radar. But even here there are problems.
|
|
Although both ground radar and the Argosy's own radar picked up
|
|
unidentified traces, the number of UFOs the television crew
|
|
claimed to have seen - about eight - conflicts with the 11
|
|
reported by ground radar. And the crew actually filmed only one
|
|
object. The radar controller at Wellington, Ken Bigham, was
|
|
dismissive about the whole affair.
|
|
"I managed to plot three of the echoes for 20 minutes or so
|
|
before they faded completely. They definitely moved, varying
|
|
between 50 and 100 knots (92.5 km/h and 185 km/h). I certainly
|
|
couldn't identify them as anything. It's pretty inconclusive. They
|
|
were purely the sort of radar echoes that constantly pop up. It
|
|
is not unusual to get strange echoes appering on what we call
|
|
primary radar. They usually amount to nothing at all."
|
|
Nevertheless, the Royal New Zealand Air Force was concerned
|
|
enough about the incident to put a Skyhawk jet fighter on full
|
|
alert to intercept any other UFOs that mighy appear in the area.
|
|
By the end of January, however, the fuss had died down and the New
|
|
Zealand Defence Ministry then stated that the unidentified objects
|
|
were 'atmospheric phenomena'.
|
|
So what is the truth of the New Zealand Affair? The film
|
|
appears to be genuine; and computer enhancement has not proved it
|
|
to be a fake. However, it seems almost too good to be true that a
|
|
television crew that had set out with the deliberate intention of
|
|
filming 'flying saucers' should come up with such spectacular
|
|
results. Yet it has to be assumed that the objects were real
|
|
enough to those who beheld them, and were not mere hallucinations.
|
|
The case remains on file, accompanied by a fascinating question
|
|
mark.
|
|
|
|
|
|
**********************************************
|
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
|
********************************************** |