Summary
In late 1978, several high profile UAP sightings occurred in New Zealand, the most famous of which was captured on film by a television news crew that was on board a cargo plane. Footage of the UAP sighting ran on Australian and New Zealand television and then around the world, inviting a host of theories and enduring debate of what was behind the apparent lights over the Kaikoura Mountains on the east coast of New Zealand’s southern island.
The lights
Tarmac, tower, radar and air
On December 21, 1978, at about 11:30 pm, Ian Uffindall, an officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, was patrolling an RNZAF base outside the town of Blenheim on the east coast of New Zealand’s southern island when he spotted from the tarmac a light in the sky that he initially took as an aircraft approaching to land.¹
The apparent plane, however, never landed, and so Uffindall went to the base’s control tower and observed the light through binoculars. The light reversed direction and became three lights, which then executed geometric maneuvers while shining beams of light on the ground, Uffindall later recalled to documentarian Paul Davidson in the film The Kaikoura UFO’s.²
The Blenheim base contacted air traffic control in Wellington, which is across the Cook Strait on the southern tip of New Zealand’s northern island.
Wellington air traffic controller John Cordry confirmed that the lights witnessed by Uffindall appeared as objects on Wellington radar and that the radar station had received multiple calls that night about the lights. Cordry contacted two Safe Air cargo planes that were airborne nearby and asked them to check out the area of the reported lights. (Safe Air, now called Airbus New Zealand LTD, is a freight airplane manufacturer and airline based in Blenheim that has long operated in close cooperation with the RNZAF.)³
One of the planes, an Argosy ZK-SAE called Merchant Enterprise,⁴ headed towards the given coordinates where its captain and pilot, Vern Powell, and its first officer and co-pilot, Ian Pirie, soon observed a bright object emerge from the clouds on the Argosy’s port side.
Pirie later told Davidson the object was “so close it was almost frightening.”
“It was the size of a house, burning in the sky,” Pirie said. “It was that sort of color and intensity … That’s what it looked like.”
Powell and Pirie observed the light for several minutes, during which time the “target” remained on both Wellington radar and the Argosy’s radar.
The crew of the second Safe Air plane also observed strange lights just before 2am.
These airborne sightings, which occurred over the Kaikoura Mountains running along the northeastern coast of New Zealand’s southern island, matched numerous sightings from the ground. Several news stories on the sightings ran the following day on television, newspaper and radio.
Channel O in the air
The news stories caught the attention of Lee Leonard, a news producer for Channel O, a television station in Australia.⁵ Leonard contacted a Channel O correspondent who happened to be in New Zealand at the time, journalist Quentin Fogarty. (Fogarty had reported on the October 1978 disappearance of Frederick Valentich, a pilot who reported a UAP while flying over the Bass Strait to Tasmania just before apparently vanishing.) Fogarty and Leonard arranged to film a television news segment within the Safe-Air Argosy Merchant Enterprise as it retraced the now-famous route over the Kaikoura Mountains.
On December 30, 1978, at 11:46 pm, the Argosy took off from Wellington with Fogarty, freelance camera operator David Crockett, and David’s then-wife sound recordist Ngiare Crockett on board.⁶ Fogarty had never met the Crocketts before, and Fogarty and the Crocketts had never before met the Argosy crew of that night, Captain Bill Startup and First Officer Bob Guard.
A few minutes into the flight, just as Fogarty had just finished delivering an opening for the news story to camera, Startup allegedly called the Channel O crew to the cockpit. Startup, Guard, Fogarty and the Crocketts witnessed several lights that first appeared as “pulsating … pinpricks of light that would grow into great globes of light,” according to Fogarty.⁷ The Argosy’s cockpit made for cramped viewing and David struggled to capture the lights on film without knocking the camera’s film magazine against switches on the cockpit ceiling. Reportedly, one light was stronger and apparently larger than the others. The smaller lights seemed to “dip away,” according to Ngaire,⁸ and then reappear closer to the larger light.
At one point, the Argosy flew over one of the lights, Startup and Fogarty recalled.⁹
Throughout the sighting, Wellington radar confirmed objects that corresponded to the lights. At one point, Wellington informed the Argosy that the largest object was tailing the plane. Startup banked the plane to come around and face it.
Ngaire, in recalling the night to Davidson, said that the interior of the Argosy, all the way through the cargo hold, lit up as though it were daytime. She recalled it as the brightest light she had ever seen.
The flight landed in Christchurch at 1:01am on December 31. David, as he disembarked, put his hand to the hull of Argosy and felt a static charge in the metal, he said recalling the night to Davidson. Ngaire said she felt sick to her stomach.
Wellington radar informed the airport at Christchurch that the objects remained in the sky over the Kaikoura Mountains and along the coast. Fogarty and David expressed a desire to go up again. Startup and Guard agreed. Ngaire, who was shaken by the experience, refused to get back into the Argosy.
Fogarty’s friend and fellow journalist, Dennis Grant offered to step in as sound recordist for Ngaire Crockett. The Argosy went up for a second flight at 2:16 am, and the film and flight crews once again witnessed the bright lights confirmed as objects on the Argosy’s radar and the radar in Wellington.
Guard, in recalling the second flight to Davidson, said that one of the lights looked like a “squashed orange” and that others were “going up and down at an incredible rate” that precluded them from being any aircraft that he was aware of.
The Argosy landed in Blenheim at 3:16 am.
Squid boats, Venus and more
Media interest, theories
Fogarty returned immediately to Channel O in Melbourne, Australia, to edit the footage into a news segment. At first glance “the film was extraordinarily disappointing,” Fogarty said later to Davidson, feeling that it fell far short of capturing what they had witnessed from the Argosy’s cockpit. Nevertheless, the resulting news piece, which aired on New Years Day, 1979, earned extremely high ratings, Leonard said.¹⁰ International media picked up the story.¹¹ According to Leonard, the US television network CBS offered $5,000 USD for the footage. Australian and New Zealand newspapers, radio and television followed up the story with interviews of Fogarty, Startup and Guard, who all refused to attempt a definitive explanation of what they had seen.
New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon ordered an investigation by the RNZAF.¹² The RNZAF put an Orion reconnaissance aircraft on patrol over the region, prepped Skyhawk aircraft to intercept any “targets,” and enlisted the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), a New Zealand government agency, and the Mount St. John Observatory at the University of Canterbury to provide scientific explanation for phenomena observed by eyewitnesses and radar operators.
Theories arose. Researchers at the New Zealand Meteorological Office and the Mount St. John Observatory suggested that the appearance of Venus and Jupiter with “mirage effects” accounted for the lights.¹³ Dr. William Ireland at the DSIR suggested the lights were from a Japanese squid boat on nearby Pegasus Bay.¹⁴ (Squid fishermen train powerful lights on the water around their boat’s hull to attract squid within netting range).
Maccabee’s reports
Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a Mutual UFO Network contributor and physicist specializing in optics at the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, traveled to Australia and New Zealand to investigate the sighting and footage.
Maccabee, who submitted his findings to the RNZAF,¹⁵ interviewed everyone who had been aboard either the December 21 Argosy flight, or the December 30 and 31 flights, and analyzed Crockett’s raw footage, Fogarty’s commentary along with the footage, the radar readings from Wellington and the Argosy on the nights in question, the transcript of communications between Wellington and the Argosy, and notes made by Dennis Grant, who had been on the December 31 flight. Maccabbee concluded that the appearance of Venus and Jupiter neither matched the sequence of events, explained the shape of the lights throughout the footage, were consistent with the way light “scatters” on film, nor explained the radar readings of objects tailing the Argosy at high speeds. Similarly, Maccabee said that squid boats were not, according to government fishery reports, on Pegasus Bay as suggested.
Furthermore, Maccabee later elaborated, unless the squid boats could fly at 1,400 feet at speeds exceeding 380 miles per hour, they could not account for the radar readings or barest facts alleged by the eyewitness.¹⁶ According to Maccabee, the proposed conventional explanations also failed to account for the apparent intensity of the lights witnessed from the Argosy.
In particular, Maccabee’s report focused on an “ampersand” trail of light left by an apparent UAP on a single frame of Crockett’s footage. The apparent movement occurred within 0.044 seconds, indicating a flying object with capacities of speed and maneuverability that were unexplainable through conventional means.
As for the size of the UAP captured on film, Maccabee analyzed certains frames depicting a “bell shaped” UAP at an estimated distance of 10 nautical miles. Accounting for the overexposure on the film, the effect of the camera’s 240 millimeter lens and the UAP’s brightness, which Maccabee estimated to be roughly equivalent to a 350,000 watt incandescent bulb, he estimated the size of the UAP to be about 100 feet wide.
Maccabee’s report also examined concurrent sightings over the nearby Clarence River. He concluded that Venus was a likely explanation for those lights.
Maccabee published a distilled version of his report in the May 1979 MUFON UFO Journal¹⁷ and debated Ireland over the “squid boat” hypothesis in the peer-reviewed letters section of Applied Optics.¹⁸
The Witnesses
Following the release of the story and amid the debate over causes, Quentin Fogarty, suffered a collapse due to “nervous exhaustion” and was hospitalized. Recounting the time to Davidson, Fogarty said that accusations that he pulled off a hoax hurt him deeply.
In 1982, Fogarty published Let’s Hope They’re Friendly, a book retelling the night in the Argosy and the fallout of the news story. The title quotes his own reaction, captured on tape by Ngaire Crockett, on hearing that the largest UAP was tailing the Argosy.¹⁹
Fogarty long maintained that while he did not assert that the UAPs were extraterrestrial in origin, the prosaic explanations advanced by Gilmore, Ireland and others failed to account for his experience. Fogarty died in July 2020.
Like Fogarty, Captain Bill Startup maintained that the mundane explanations fell short. Startup said that he was aware of squid boats, Venus and Jupiter, and knew what they looked like. “You can’t fly over Venus,” he told a television news reporter in 1979.²⁰ Startup published his own account in the book The Kaikoura UFOs.²¹
First Officer Bob Guard likewise refused to posit an explanation for the sightings, but struck a yet more skeptical note:
“Do I believe in UFOs? No I don't,” Guard told the New Zealand Herald in 2018.
"Would I tell anyone if I saw anything like that again? No I wouldn't. It's not worth the hassle," he added.²²
David Crockett, who characterized himself as a skeptic before his night on the Argosy, became admittedly obsessed with the footage and began work on a documentary on the subject of UAPs. He traveled to the United Kingdom and the U.S. to discuss his experience with “ufologists” and never returned to New Zealand. Crockett split with Ngaire, suffered a bout of depression, and eventually became a mango farmer in Hawaii.²³
Ngaire Crockett did not speak publicly about her experience for decades. She raised five children as a single mother.
“I have no idea what they were,” Ngaire told Davidson. “But they were definitely unidentified. They were flying, cause they were moving so quickly, and were obviously objects, because it was showing up on both radars. If that’s what a UFO is, that’s what it was,” she said.
“There was several of them, and it was scary,” she said.²⁴
Documents Release 2010, 2013
In 2010 and 2013, the New Zealand government released thousands of previously restricted documents on UAP reports from 1956 to 1989, a release which included documents pertaining to the 1978 sightings over the Kaikoura Mountains.²⁵
The bulk of the documents over the 1978 sightings is taken up with correspondence between New Zealand citizens, often school children, requesting information on the famous sighting and RNZAF public relations officer and other government officials politely responding that Venus accounted for the lights witnessed in the sky.
Elsewhere, the documents reveal other sightings from the same area in late 1978 and early 1979 made to the RNZAF, the New Zealand Meteorological Office and local police. The reports vary in specificity, and some allege encounters with extraterrestrials.²⁶
Amongst the detailed accounts is a report from an RNZAF officer who signs off as “G.R. Allin, Squadron Leader.” Allin describes multiple sightings from the RNZAF base near Blenheim in which he describes brightly lit aircraft with “belly spotlights” executing apparently impossible maneuvers over the area.²⁷
Ian Uffindall, the RNZAF officer whose December 21 sighting sparked the initial response of the Safe Air cargo planes, wrote letters detailing UAP sightings to RNZAF officials. After multiple letters, Uffindall ends the correspondence, saying that the RNZAF investigation has been “an insult.”²⁸
Uffindall later told Davidson that he suspected an extraterrestrial craft had crashed in the Kaikoura mountains and that the lights he and others witnessed was a “search and rescue mission.”²⁹
The documents also contain the RNZAF’s investigation on the causes of the Kaikoura UAP sightings.³⁰
For its investigation, the RNZAF compiled individual scientific papers, primarily from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In addition to the aforementioned theories over squid boats and Venus and Jupiter, the investigations give a thorough and technical review of visual distortions made possible by the glass of the Argosy’s windows. RNZAF Investigators interviewed RNZAF and Safe Aire personnel connected to sightings, such as Vern Powell, Startup, Guard and Uffindall.³¹
The investigators do not appear to have interviewed David and Nagaire Crockett or Quentin Fogarty.
The reports do not examine the footage filmed from the Argosy’s cockpit. (In 2000, William Ireland, DSIR researcher, alleged that Fogarty and David Crockett kept the footage from DSIR and RNZAF investigators in order to perpetrate a “cover-up” for their own media hoax.)³²
The report concludes that a combination of factors, including the appearance of Venus, Jupiter, the lights from a squid boat, and lights from cars and trains, all of which were reflected through a “disturbed atmosphere” and were erroneously abetted by “freak” radar anomalies, came together to explain the 1978 Kaikoura sightings. The report also concludes, however, that “evidence to date is inconclusive” in accounting for the full range of alleged phenomena, but that it “may well be explained in due course.”³³
