New Zealand · 21 December 1978

East coast of the South Island - Kaikoura, 1978

Documented

Wellington ATC called targets to an aircraft whose crew could see them, whose own weather radar painted one three to five times larger than a blip from a large fishing boat, while a TV cameraman filmed it in 16mm colour.

Where
East coast of the South Island - Kaikoura, Cook Strait
When
21 December 1978
Who reported it
8+ - Argosy freighter crews, Wellington ATC radar operators, an Australian TV crew, a reporter
Entities described
None reported
Handled as
INVESTIGATED / UNRESOLVED
Evidence class
GOV-1

The record

An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.

The document is attached to this entry.

What is not settled

The RNZAF file itself attributes a large share of the visual observations to Venus and Jupiter; later analyses attribute the film and radar to squid-boat lights, mutton-bird flocks and anomalous radar propagation. Radar returns were intermittent and partly uncorrelated with the visual objects.

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