1952: The Grand Interplanetary Hoax

December 6, 2022

By AHNZ

By 1952 ripples of neo-superstitious beliefs rippled over the New Zealand cultural membrane. Mainstream Kiwis pushed back satirically at first but the fascination with UFOs in particular kept gaining ground. The Bayswater-Auckland ferry had a flying saucer joke hanging on a string. An Auckland University student theater advertised themselves with cardboard flying saucers. Others, though, were not laughing and they included a Civilian Saucer Investigation Group, est. October 1952. In November 1952 Prime Minister Sidney Holland was depicted (image, left) as travelling to see Queen Elizabeth and attend the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ economic conference via space ship!

All this was especially vexing to the serious young mind that wanted to rid the New Zealand consciousness of these silly fantasy conceits. But, how?

Students of Knox College, Otago University, hatched a project on 6 December, 1952, to make fools of them all. When the students’ exams were over they returned to their respective regions and implemented the hoax entitled ‘The Grand Interplanetary Hoax.’ With fake names the students wrote to their local newspapers and the Otago Daily Times to report UFO sightings. It would appear to someone connecting the dots that two very fast flying saucers, a green and a blue, had done a fly-by from Cape Reinga to Bluff.

See a map here: The Best Prank, University of Otago 1869-2019 ~ writing a history (2013)

New Zealand’s mainstream fell for it. This was before the Space Race but perhaps the youth generation that grew up with World War 2, black-out curtains, and atom bombs had some latent paranoia. Soviet Russia would come to absorb more of it later. Ian Flemming’s Casino Royale (1953) and his Cold War Warrior James Bond were on the way. To cure their paranoid countrymen the students told their Platonic noble lie aiming for what the psychologists call an Extinction Burst to cleanse the nation. Like most social engineering it appears to have achieved the opposite of the intended outcome. According to UFO researcher Peter Hassall the sightings per year came in their scores.

“Some skeptics have suggested the release of science fiction films may have sparked the 1952 UFO sightings. The Flying Saucer (1950), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Thing From Another World (1951) all featured flying saucers.” -Hassall (1988) p23

“The local daily had been irritating the instigators – all residents of Knox College – who bewailed its trivialisation of major world events and preoccupation with UFOs.” – The Best Prank, University of Otago 1869-2019 ~ writing a history (2013)

“Some of the brains behind the operation have gone on to be top-class academics, for example the professors of stotistics (Ross Leadbetter), medicine (John Scott and lon McDonald) and education lecturers (Russell Cowie and Ken Nichol). The hoax was eventually revealed by Ken Nichol and further detailed in the 1994 New Zealand Skeptics Journal by Sir John Scott Some received news of the deception with disbelief, others with disappointment but possibly the overwhelming reaction was a good of chuckle, it wasn’t the last time scarfies provided the New Zealand public with a dose of entertainment, nor was it the last.” – The New Zealand UFO Hoax, Tourist Class NZ (2021)

“Designed to cure the O.D.T. of flying saucerites and inoculate that worthy journal with a healthy degree of septicism…The saucers will be travelling by night…Give a ‘Normal’ fictitious address…Tell no one else of this scheme.” – Instruction sheet for Grand Interplanetary Hoax, Ken Nichol; p91 Gossett, New Zealand Mysteries (1996)

Every so often our population is exercised about UFOs. The major episodes have been the Kelso Aerial Mystery (1909), The Grand Interplanetary Hoax (1952), and Kaikoura UFO (1978.) Each represents a concept of anxiety toward a great power from beyond that our people must face.

In 1909 a crisis of the Fourth Turning was upon us that included powered flight, Total War, and a mini-civil war called The Great Strike Boogaloo. The new Dominion Victimhood Culture undermined and questioned the rationalism and materialistic grounding New Zealand had based itself on at the turn of the century.

In 1952 we were on the cusp of the new Cold War that was not yet articulated. We were pretty sure it involved high-tech metal flying things that lit up the sky (and Japan) and were only groping our way to comprehending this. The new Mazengarb Victimhood Culture feared, with some justification, the new Boomer generation that would transform New Zealand culture and economy into an alien one compared to its former self. In an act of Psychological Transference all these complex issues can be neatly placed into a UFO narrative for people starved of a divine superstructure or an emotionally and intellectually satisfying understanding of the world.

In 1978 we were on the cusp of a Third Turning unraveling that included a mini-civil war over rugby. The Woke I Care Victimhood Culture and Muldoonist Slave Culture periods were confusing and revolutionary. Fortress New Zealand was an artificial attempt to hold back modernity and keep New Zealand the way it was before Boomer culture overwhelmed it. Deep in denial of the coming storm and having procrastinated for years the anxiety sublimated into visions of UFOs again.

When an individual, or a population, faces a clear and present danger but does not engage their rational intellect what does the brain do? Deprived of reasoned patterns and starved of facts and news like the old proverbial mushroom (kept in the dark and fed bullshit) we all start building patterns around nonsense. They satisfy emotional fidelity, which solve our Search For Meaning Problem by giving us the existential ‘why’ by abandoning rational fidelity. New Zealand and New Zealanders are at their best when they have emotional an rational fidelity at the same time, reason and passion. In this way the UFO or other secular superstitious object is a result of minds fed too much on propaganda and too little on free exchange of knowledge.

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Note: Hoax Day, 6 December, 1952 is surely excellent timing to match up with 7 December, 1941. AKA Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Attack from the sky in the case of the Japanese and the UFO are not too distant in the unconscious imagination.

Image ref. The Flying Sorcerer, Sid Scales (1952,) ODT; p21 The NZ Files, Peter Hassall (1988)

Image ref. Te Awamutu Space Centre, Kihikihi. AHNZ Archives (2020)

Ref. The NZ Files, UFOS in New Zealand, Peter Hassall (1998)

Ref. Robyn Gossett, New Zealand Mysteries (1996)

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