1979: Kaikoura UFO
January 4, 2022
By AHNZ
On New Year’s Day, 1979, Safe Air hosted a Australian reporter on one of their cargo flights from Wellington to Christchurch. TV station, Melbourne’s Channel 0, had heard about unidentified lights above Kaikoura air space for the preceding weeks and wanted the story covered. The ride-along was a success in terms of experiencing the unexplained lights, filming them, and making for a sensational international scoop.
Safe Air (est.1950) had been a private company but, as per usual, that could not be suffered and the Government purchased it 1972. So, the airline as well as the media at this point were very much under control of The State. The Government at this time was Robert Muldoon’s National 3.0 having won re-election narrowly only weeks before. In my opinion a very tight lid would have been kept on the UFO story if it had been generated within our ‘Fortress New Zealand’ on Muldoon’s watch. However, his powers did not extend over the visiting Australian media. Especially not so during Christmas/New Year’s break when the usual levers of power are on holiday hiatus. Once Melbourne media broke the international story it was out of the bag and New Zealanders had to be treated to the news too.
As far as the unidentified lights go my opinion is the Squid Boat Theory. During these years a Japanese fleet of hundreds of fishing boats visited New Zealand’s western coastline with free picking of anything they could take from beyond our 3 mile territorial limit. In an emergency the boats would visit New Zealand or sometimes our own boats would pay the fleet a visit for clandestine black market trade. To this day older people on the West Coast have in their back sheds various Japanese bottles, fish hooks, and various equipment salvaged from our beaches from those days. In order to lure the squid to the surface to be caught the Japanese used powerful lights. The same lights, of course, became a common nightly feature off the coast of places like Greymouth.
“They were a common sight in the early 1970s. On a clear night it would like a city of lights on the horizon.They used very powerful lights to attract the squid to the surface, and then a conveyor type belt with rubber fingers would be lowered into the water to lift the squid to the boats. Sometimes we found large glass floats and huge light bulbs on the beach.On occasion when a squid boat came into the Greymouth port they would be covered in black ink the squid exuded, and festooned with strings of the huge lights. From memory, they only came into port for urgent medical assistance, or other urgent supplies.” – Don Eadie, West Coast New Zealand History (2018)
“At the end of 1978, Australasia was in the grip of UFO fever. In October, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich disappeared while piloting a small Cessna 182 aircraft over Bass Strait while heading to King Island in Tasmania. Described as a “flying saucer enthusiast”, Valentich informed Melbourne air traffic control he was being accompanied by an unknown aircraft. Two months later across the Tasman, on December 21, Safe Air pilots Vern Powell and Ian Pirie spotted strange lights while flying from Blenheim to Christchurch.” – Crew remember the day UFO was spotted over Kaikōura 40 years on, NZ Herald (2018)
Kaikoura and Greymouth are on the same line of longitude on either coast of the South Island separated by 180km. With the right clouds acting as a mirror in the mesosphere at an altitude of 80km it would be a simple matter for an observer in north Canterbury to see lights from the West Coast. Using high school math (Pythagoras’ Theorem) the Japanese fleet’s bright light need only travel 240km or less to reach the eyes of an observer in Canterbury via some high cloud at, say, Springs Junction. There is plenty of such cloud at this time of year and more chance of seeing it for an observer high above the dust and mist of the lower atmosphere and especially if he is moving rapidly over a large sample of Canterbury sky as an airplane does. Because the cloud layer is not a uniform surface but changing and moving too the reflection it casts might move in abrupt jerking motions faster than any aircraft known to man. Think of how a small tilt of the wrist can make a reflection of your watch jump around a room. Such jolts and leaps are exactly the phenomena described by the observers. So, the Squid Boat Theory will do for me.
Muldoonist Slave Culture
Why were New Zealanders ready to get excited about Unidentified Flying Objects, aliens etc., rather than just say something like “Oh, nice squid boat light trick?” The Theory of Moral Cultures places 1978 New Zealand in the midst of one of our recurring Slave Culture phases. At times like these the mainstream does not rely on reason and evidence or scientific logic. Instead, they are superstitious and ritualistic. Prime Ministers Kirk and Muldoon were booming heavyweights whose road to power lay in being at the top of a dominance hierarchy. During these times New Zealanders don’t think for themselves they think by proxy and hold the opinions of their populist faction.
At the end of the Muldoon vs. Kirk Honour Culture period Kirk was dead and Muldoon was Leader. Exhausted, New Zealand collapsed into a dominated do-as-I’m-told Slave Culture. Ruthless Muldoon had us rationing our petrol with Carless Days, Wage and Price Freeze, luxury taxes, massive ‘Think Big’ state projects, “fiscal stimulation” market intervention, and “borrow and hope” budget blow-outs. And we let him. He was a boss and this is how Slaves were to be governed. As always, the Tarkin Effect applied: Muldoon had to be increasingly autocratic to retain the same grip on power.
Slave populations cannot be rational thinkers because the ability to accept hypocrisy and contradiction and absurdity on someone else’s whim are the essential virtues of Slave identity. When Muldoon says “Jump” anyone who said “Why?” instead of “How high?” was marked as an outsider or a downright pariah. New Zealand by 1978 had, thus, depleted its intellectual capital and independent thought down to a very sorry state. That left the door wide open to absurdities and tantrums. Now was the era of the Bastion Point occupation, Springbok Tour Civil War, the airport siege, and unionists holding the country to ransom (eg. 1978: Bloody Friday.) Absurdities such as Social Credit’s brain-dead economics gained political power while Feminism, Maori Radicalism, biker gangs, Billy Graham religious conservatism, and hippy-dippy spiritualist and drug culture (eg. Nambassa 1979) all came out of the woodwork.
In the context of what other things were going on in and around 1978 (ref. 1978: Looking Back on 1978) the belief in UFOs in North Canterbury were far from out of character and not the most absurd thing New Zealanders were willing to believe in. After a strong autocratic leader has played Simon Says with any population for a long time that population will emerge with its brain stretched out of shape and ready to believe in nonsense in some form from demons to witches to ghosts to aliens to Lizard People.
In an amusing addendum to the UFO story, Jim Kirk (Captain?) wrote an Official Information request to the Ministry of Defense in 2019 looking for a space ship!
Dear Ministry of Defence, I would like to request any and all information, including civilian and military reports, reports to the Minister of Defence, and any and all information shared between other government agencies and the Ministry of Defence, including correspondence, relating to unidentified aircraft in New Zealand airspace since January 1 2015.
Yours faithfully,
James Kirk.
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Image ref. Squid Boats off West Coast, Don Eadie, West Coast New Zealand History (2018)
Ref. James Kirk made this Official Information request to Ministry of Defence, FYI (2019)
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