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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.
“Headquarters”37 pages
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to be no haze over the path, except, possibly, near the end. Again, their high angular velocity (c0.2 radians/sec) would demand that, with speeds of known aircraft (assuming that the lights were seen directly, & not by reflection from cloud) they would have to be very low; but no motors were heard & gliders do not normally fly low over a city at night, carrying three large red-dish lights. Finally, enquires of Whenuapai (madeX June 30) show that no aircraft were in the air within 30 miles of Auckland at that time. Further one of us (Laird) is fairly definite that no stars between or near the light were occulted and the other thinks that he would of detected any such obscuration. Fire balloons, meteorological balloons, sparks from chimneys and other wind-borne objects are ruled out by the fact that they moved in a direction almost opposite to the wind at our level—if they were such objects at a higher level, with the wind reversed, their speed must have been large, from their rapid apparent motion; which would cause much turbulence, & this is commonly associated with cloud, apart from haze in the west and at low levels. As for meteorological balloons, they are rarely luminous: besides enquires at Mechanices Bay Meteorological Station reveal that no balloons were released by them that evening. They were not signal rockets or toy rockets, we are definite, for they left no trail, did not explode, were sizeable oval patches, and remained close together, disappearing simultaneously. We have never heard of & find it difficult to imagine any meteors or aurorae presenting such an appearance, while mirages seem unlikely, since the lights passed near the zenith. Further, the vertical temperature distribution, as measured between 4pm. & 5pm, that day reads as follows:- (Mechanics Bay Data) Altitude (in thousands of feet):- 0 4 6 10 20 Higher Temperatures (degrees Centigrade:- II I I -6 -22 Colder There is a weak isothermal layer around 5000 feet, but no evidence for a strong temperature inversion, such as would be necessary to cause mirages. The form of this report is based on suggestions on P.298 of "Flying Saucers" by D.H.Menzel,Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University. The configuration of the lights varied( as mentioned above), but their general pattern, as recorded by each of us was as follows:- This excellent report was submitted to C.S.I. on request and permission was granted for reproduction in this quarterly magazine. C.S.I. is most grateful and wishes to record sincere thanks to Mr Garry J Tee & Malcolm G Laird.
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.