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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.
“Hill”41 pages
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he has gathered date from 1907 lack to the late eighteenth century. Of all the baffling reports that the Air Force has received since 1947, when"flying saucer" entered the language, some of the hardest to explain have been these concerning the Lubbock Lights. That is the name that has been given to mysterious groups of luminous lights or spots which several responsible citizens of Lubbock, Tex., repeatedly saw travel noiselessly across the night sky in 1951 at tremendous speed and in distinct flying formation, usually V-shaped. ## SEEN BY NAVY IN 1904 When Unger readxthe first reports from Lubbock, he immediately remembered an experience reported to the U.S. Monthly Weather Review in 1904 by Lieut. F.H. Schofield, aboard a navy supply vessel at sea. Shortly after six o'clock on the morning of February 28, the lieutenant and two members of his crew were staggered to see what appeared to be three meteors hurtling towards the ship in a tight little group from the northwest. "At first", Schofield reported,"their angular downward motion was very rapid and their colour a rather bright, glowing red. But as they approached the ship they suddenly soared upward at an angle of 45 degrees and passed through the clouds. After rising above the clouds there angular motion became less and less until it ceased, when they appeared to be moving away from the earth at an elevation of 75 degrees and in a west-northwest direction". The larger moteor, Which Schofield said looked as large as six suns, was egg-shaped and led the formation. The two others were perfectly round, one appearing to be the size of two suns, the other the size of the sum itself. When they shot away from the ship in the direction which they had come "there was no change in there relative positions". When the newspapers, beginning in 1948, told of terrifyingly bright green fireballs that hundreds of people in the Southwest had seen flash across the bare hills in straight, silent, horizontal flight, Unger recalled a strikingly similar account that he had come across in an old issue of a magazine called The Observatory. The writer, a professional British astronomer said the most remarkable experience he had ever had took place one clear evening in the autumn of 1802. "A great circular disk of light suddenly appeared low down in the east-northeast, as though it had just risen, and moved across the sky, as smoothly and steadily as the sun, stars and planets move, but nearly a thousand times as quickly" he wrote, as it moved, in "a steady, uniform progress from east to west", it lengthened out. When it crossed the meridian and passed just above the moom, its form was that almost of a very elongated ellipse, and various observers spoke of it as 'cigar-shaped; like a torpedo', or a spindle or shuttle. Like the distinguished German rocket designer, Dr. Walther Riedel and Dr. Maurice A. Biot, a top U.S. aerodynamicist, Unger is convinced that flying saucers ,"cigars", and unexplainable lights in the sky at might are all evidence of visitations from some other world/The objects may not be manned; they may be radio-controlled; pilotless craft rigged up with some other worlds notion of television to record
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