Case · C-044

Kaikōura 1978: lights, radar and film footage seen from a cargo plane

Name: Kaikōura 1978: lights, radar and film footage seen from a cargo plane
Start: 1978-12-21
End: 1978-12-31
Location: Kaikōura coast and the mouth of the Clarence River (South Island)

Kaikōura coast and the mouth of the Clarence River (South Island) · New Zealand · Dec 21, 1978 – Dec 31, 1978

In flight Mixed witness types Radar Video

Disputed explanation

What happened: On the night of December 20–21, 1978, crews of Argosy cargo aircraft and Wellington radar controllers reported lights and radar echoes off the northeast coast of the South Island. On the night of December 30–31, a crew commissioned by a Melbourne television station, aboard another Argosy flight, filmed bright lights, while the aircrew reported contacts on the onboard radar; according to the Ministry of Defence, at the times when the largest light was being filmed the Wellington and Christchurch radars detected nothing corresponding. The RNZAF questioned the witnesses and worked with the DSIR, civil aviation and the meteorological service; the file, with interviews and technical analyses, was declassified and released by the New Zealand Defence Force in December 2010.
Proposed explanation: According to the RNZAF investigation and the Ministry of Defence statement, the observations stemmed from atmospheric conditions that favored anomalous propagation of radio and light waves, from a particularly bright Venus, from already-known spurious echoes of the Wellington radar and, for some observations, from the lights of Japanese squid-fishing boats or from vehicles and trains along the coast. The DSIR concluded that the brightness and size of the filmed image were consistent with an out-of-focus Venus; a former DSIR scientist later argued, in a text published by the NZ Skeptics, that the footage shows fishing boats about 6 km away. The physicist Bruce Maccabee disputed these conclusions in Applied Optics, and Captain Bill Startup and the journalist Quentin Fogarty maintain that no explanation accounts for the visual and radar observations together.
Official investigation: Royal New Zealand Air Force and Ministry of Defence (New Zealand); Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR)
Words of the document: the result of natural but unusual atmospheric phenomena

Official documents

Investigations of Unidentified & Radar Sightings East Coast South Island - December 1978 (AIR 1080/6/897 Volume 1), copia pubblica caricata su Internet Archive · New Zealand Defence Force - Royal New Zealand Air Force · 1978

Sources

Open in the interactive archive The whole section: Map of UAP and USO cases

UAPgrade's entries are compiled with artificial intelligence (three verifiers with opposing roles) and checked against the sources listed above: how we work. Have a document that changes this entry? Bring it to the Investigations Unit.