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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.
# FLYING BAUCERS a craft of the "City of Adelaide" squadron passed by. I casually looked up at them and sighted beyond them on the same vector a white circular object. Having a pair of cheap field glasses handy (3/30) I followed the course of this object which was travelling in a wide clockwise circle until 1007 when it faded into a smoke haze in a south-East direction near the Adelaide hills. In the meantime I called my wife who also saw the object clearly with the unaided eye. An estimation of the size of the object is that it would be approx. the same as a normal aircraft of the L25 class at an altitude of 2C to 25 thousand feet. It was travelling either at a varying speed or else its path was not horizontal. An estimation of its maximum velocity, insofar as I could keep the glasses steady, was from 60 to 80 diameters per second, which if it were of the same size as a normal aircraft would place it in the 3000 m.p.h. class. There was no vapor trail or coloured tail evident, and the object itself was matt white, exactly the same as the moon which was then visible. No shininess was evident. The object proceeded north for about 30 seconds, then slowed until it appeared stationary. Then two smaller objects of the same colour appeared to fall away from the larger object, both describing smooth diverging arcs. I lost sight of these as they went beyond the angle of my glasses. Of course these may have been of the same size as the first object but higher up. The larger object then moved off South-Easterly and was lost in haze over the Audeaide nills at 1007. At 1012 I again picked up an object with the naked eye, making a wide anti-clockwise circle over the city. On the Southernmost sweep this object was joined by another identical in size and shape, colour, which was moving in the opposite direction. They swept together in two smooth converging fires and appeared to become stationary at a distance of about 10 diameters. This was also seen by my wife, with the naked eye. Then suddenly both parted in diametrically opposite directions, one making due South and the other due North. I followed the Northerly one, and after about one minute of forward travel it appeared to slow and gradually shrink in size, until it disappeared at 1020 directly overhead. I conclude that the object was in a vertical climb at this time. No further objects were seen in spite of considerable searching. I would say the objects were spherical as in spite of the curves negotiated at an aparently high velocity, there apoared
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.