December 2008 sees the 30th anniversary of one of the most famous UFO sightings of all time, which took place near the New Zealand town of Kaikoura. It spawned almost unprecedented media comment, generated great public interest in the whole UFO phenomenon and, in Britain, was instrumental in The Aetherius Society beginning what it claimed to be “the largest nationwide campaign ever staged to bring the true facts about Flying Saucers to the British public.”
It is not often that a plane takes to the air with the express purpose of filming a UFO, but such was the case on December 30, 1978, in New Zealand. Captain Bill Startup piloted an Argosy freighter, with Bob Guard as co-pilot. On board were an Australian television film crew from Channel 0-10 tasked with capturing a photographic image of a UFO.
There had been UFO sightings in the area since the 21st, and they had been picked up on radar. The Argosy headed out over the Pacific Ocean, and it was here that they had their first sighting of a UFO. One of the film crew, Quentin Fogarty, saw a row of five bright, pulsating lights which grew from pinpricks in the sky to the size of a large balloon. Then the pattern was repeated, with lights now appearing over Kaikoura, between the aircraft and the ground.
Air Traffic control at Wellington radioed the plane to say that they had detected an unknown object following the Argosy. The pilot made a 360 degree turn, in an attempt to come face to face with it. Wellington again radioed to say that the ‘target’ was ’in formation’ with the plane - and getting larger.
Finally, the crew made visual contact with it. Startup turned off the plane's navigational lights, and a large, bright light became visible. The TV crew filmed the object for 30 seconds. When the Argosy eventually landed at Christchurch the UFO was still visible on radar.
The Argosy and her crews took to the air the following night, and soon had two UFOs in view. A television cameramen observing one of them through his camera, said it was a spinning sphere, with lateral lines running around it. Towards the end of the flight the two lights were still visible and producing radar returns at Wellington ground control.
The TV film went out all over the world, after the BBC led the news with it. Over the ensuing days ‘experts’ of every conceivable persuasion appeared, all of them with competing views on what the phenomenon was - from the planet Venus, to the lights of Japanese squid-fishing fleets and “half a million mutton birds flying inland to mate”. The last of these gave rise to great hilarity in The Aetherius Society’s UFO campaign (which began soon after) when Dr John Holder remarked that, considering the phenomenal speeds of some of the lights, “They must have been pretty desperate!” It is interesting to note, however, that the Royal New Zealand Air Force put planes on full alert to confront the craft, if necessary.
The Aetherius Society quickly moved into top publicity gear, with a campaign and series of meetings that built on an initiative begun a few months earlier following the release of Steve Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The campaign slogan—
“Flying Saucers are real.
“Flying Saucers are friendly.
“Your government knows this.”
— was a virtually direct quote from a Message Transmission received many years previously through the yogic mediumship of the Society’s founder, Dr. George King. It certainly caught the mood of the time, as world governments floundered in the face of public demands for the truth about UFOs.
Within a few days the Society was able to announce, “Already one leading national newspaper has referred to The Aetherius Society as: ‘The world's top authority on Visitors from Outer Space.’”
In the UK, on January 18th, 1979 the House of Lords spent three hours 20 minutes debating the following motion put forward by the Earl of Clancarty (otherwise known as the UFO author Brinsley le Poer Trench):
"To call attention to the increasing number of sightings and landings on a worldwide scale of Unidentified Flying Objects (U. F. O. 's) and to the need for an intra-governmental study of U. F. O. 's and to move for papers."
The motion was passed.
Before the debate The Aetherius Society had been contacted by the Earl of Kimberley, one of the principal speakers, and helped to prepare the outline of his address to the House Of Lords. Lord Kimberley also appeared at a packed public meeting organised by the Society in central London, where he amused the audience by remarking that the government was giving the public “the mushroom treatment—and if you don’t know what that is, it’s being kept in the dark and fed on horse manure.”
A further 47 public meetings followed nationwide in England, many of them attracting very large audiences. In conjunction with this campaign of public meetings went a petition to Her Majesty’s Government asking for the release of UFO information. This had been launched in the House of Lords shortly before the UFO debate. It eventually ran to over 20,000 signatures and was handed in to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Aetherius Society representatives appeared on 77 radio and television shows around the country.
Kaikoura was the first time a UFO had been seen simultaneously by trained observers, tracked by radar and filmed by a professional cameraman. Thirty years on, the sightings made on board the Argosy on December 30th and 31st 1978 have still not been “explained away”. The only explanation that fits the facts is the obvious and world-changing one: extraterrestrial visitors.
