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This is a New Zealand Defence Force public release of RNZAF file AIR 39/3/3, "Flying Saucers," which covers 1952 to 1955 and was declassified in September 2010 under the Official Information Act. It collects sighting reports from the public and military personnel, press clippings, and a table of 1952 sightings. It also holds Carter Observatory opinions attributing some reports to meteors. A large part covers the inquiry into lights seen from National Airways Corporation Flight 108 on 31 October 1955, which the RNZAF could not fully explain as Venus.
“Christchurch”32 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
directed by living beings from all other solar system, or more than one other solar system, and I call this race of visitors "Uranides." I have taken the liberty of making up the word from the Greek word for heaven, "ouranos." We know too much about conditions on our neighbouring planets in our own solar system for us to argue successfully that the saucers can come from one of them. The only one that seems to be fostering life, even in the form of plant growth, is Mars, and its surface is not habitable by any creatures that we can imagine as having a brain more highly developed than our own, or a culture immensely broader than ours. With the planets of our own sun system ruled out, I suggest that the home base of the saucers may be a planet, or planets, revolving around another sun, or suns: Probably this other sun or star is one of those nearest to our own sun, which of course is a star. . Despite the immense distance between our own solar system (including the earth) and the nearest other solar systems, a journey from one system to another is theoretically possible once an unlimited source of power is developed. I do not, however, believe reports that some saucers are manned by beings resembling men, although we cannot prove this is untrue. I do not believe the visitors resemble any living beings known to us. Even if they come from a carbonate acid atmosphere and, in our eyes, might be the strangest creatures ever imagined, they still could, theoretically, think logically and develop a highly superior civilisation. ## No factual support Reports that saucer men have been seen who are "beautiful, human-like beings" have no factual support, I think, and probably that is fortunate for us. Creatures who could move around in our atmosphere without a kind of diver's outfit might be able to settle here. It is more comfortable for us to speculate that saucer men come from an atmosphere far different from our own and are so outlandish in appearance that they do not resemble us at all. If they do come from a quite different atmosphere, they might find it as difficult to exist on earth as we would,find it difficult to exist at the bottom of the sea. The Uranides, I think, have been examining the earth for centuries. People call their craft flying saucers and say that the phenomenon is new. It's far from that, for as long ago as December 9, 1731, there was evidence that we on earth were being visited by travellers that seemed to come from space.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 445 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.