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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
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From the way some professors of science go out of their way to explain away the saucer phenomena, we might conclude that they have something to hide, The trouble is, we the people do the observing of evidences, while those who have never seen a flying saucer make a show by denying the existence of such things. How stupid do they think we are? Let us not thus discredit the names of "science" by immature statements of more emphasis and less sense than the fanaticism of religion. Let us not conduct a scientific laboratory determination upon observations by declaring before-hand what the answer must not be. True science seeks the truth whatever and wherever it may be. by Lonzo Dove, Chief Astronomer IFSB. ## FOOTNOTE TO "SAUCERS" by Frank Scully--author of "Behind the Flying Saucers." Three years ago I seemed to act as umpire between the Saucerians and the Pentagonians and published my findings in a book that has since gone round the world. At least it has been published in ten languages and may even been published behind the Iron Curtain, for all I know. have My findings seemed to have poked holes in the Pentagonian position that believers in flying saucers were either (a) screwballs or (b) perpetrators of hoaxes. I left the Air Force with 34 sightings that had left them mystified. I sat in on a briefing of Air Force Reserve officers the other day and found that the Air Force position had changed greatly since that 1949 report of their project saucer. They no longer think that believers are victims of mass hysteria. They happen now to have 750 sightings which have them stumped and most of these were reported by their own technicians and were caught on their own radar scopes. In other words, they are a good deal nearer today the position I advanced in "Behind The Flying Saucers" in 1950. Meanwhile the front-runners for the earlier Pentagonian Line are left holding a fairly empty bag. Flying Saucers remain a most controversial subject and those who ridicle what others see are well within their rights, but they must stick to the subject and not throw mud on the private character of those who believe that these objects are not light reflections, mirages, or automobile hub caps. For myself, I believe that flying saucers, like girls, are here to stay. What they are doing may remain a mystery for a while, but their presence in our atmosphere is no longer open to doubt. I suspect that they are mapping our magnetic patterns and studying particularly our magnetic fault zones. Our earlier position that these space ships were magnetically propelled has not been assailed. That some of their ships grounded (not crashed) and could not take off again, would certainly make them wary of landing again until they were quite sure that magnetic conditions would make those take-offs no longer subject to chance.
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.