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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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# SEEN FOR CENTURIES In 1872 long before there were any aeroplanes or plastic balloons, the Royal Meteorological Society of Britain received a strange report from the captain of the sailing ship "Lady of the Lake". While homeward bound for England from tropic ports, the vessel's crewmen had called Capt. Frederick William Banner's attention to an amazing sight in the sunset-stained sky. Captain Banner later described it in his log as a most curious-shaped cloud. It looked,he wrote like the sun or moon with a halo around it,it was circular,light grey and luminous. Furthermore it was behaving most unlike a cloud. It was moving against the wind,rising from a point in the southwest where no other clouds were at the time until it was nearly overhead. There it briefly hovered,and the astonished sailors saw that it had strange markings and a distinct tail,like a comet's. Captain Banner noted that "patches of cirro-cumulus seemed to squirt from the back". Then the frightening object headed downward toward the horizon, still against the wind, and disappeared into the northeast as darkness shut in. Capt. Banner sent a copy of his log to the Royal Meteorological Society. At the society's next meeting, January 15,1873,the report was read and after some discussion was dismissed as unexplainable. Similer sights still baffle scientists.Many of the flying saucers seen in recent years have turned out to be weather balloons. But, an Air Force spokesman admitted this spring "a number of reported sightings cannot be thus explained, and as long as this is true, the Air Force will continue to study the problem". While pondering this problem, Robert L Unger, who is now a technical writer for the Republic Aviation Corps., of Farmington L.I., began to wonder how long such strange things had been appearing in our sky. Unger flew B-25s in the Pacific theater of operations during the war, and later did graduate work at Yale. While there, he began prowling through the long history of "saucer stories". He reports now that he has found evidence that men have been seeing things which resemble saucers for at least 355 years. He has collected , he says, 300 such reports, as the one from Captain Banner that mystified the Royal Meteorological Society 80 years ago. ## MYSTICS WORK STARTED IT. The books of a man named Charles Fort, half scientific writer, half mystic; whodied in 1932, inspired Unger to continue this fascinating research, Fort had paged through hundreds of scientific journals, some of them dating from the sixteenth century, and extracted accounts of strange happenings in the sky that science had never been able satisfactorily to explain. Unger, beginning in 1948, followed in Fort's path, eagerly picking out the reports that sounded like current newspaper accounts of flying saucer sightings. he carefully tracked down every source, and found at least half again as many new ones. The 300 accounts
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