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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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# Random Notes Sailors Do See Flying Saucers The A DUNEDIN astronomer claims that flying saucers are very nuclli open to doubt because there have never been reports of them from sailors, astronomers and scientists. This is a somewhat general assertion in view of the fact that at 9.10 pm. on August 25, 1951, Dr. W. I. Robinson, professor of geology at Texas, Technological College; Lubbock, with two colleagues, Dr. A. G. Oberg, professor of chemical engineering, and Professor W. L. Ducker, head of the petroleum engineering department at the college, all saw a flying saucer. Suddenly all three saw what they described as about 80 luminous beads arranged in crescent shape rate across the sky from horizon to horizon in a few seconds. Professor Ducker subsequently declared he had seen 12 flights of these luminous luminous objects up to the end of November, 1951. As for astronomers not seeing flying saucers, the discoverer of the planet Pluto, Gliese Tombaugh, saw one in the summer of 1948 of Las Cruces, New Mexico. His wife and mother likewise saw the phenomenon, and they all agreed it was a solid, ship of a kind they had never seen before and bore a resemblance to a long rocket-like ship, oval in shape, trailing off at the rear into a shapeless luminescence. As for sailors not seeing flying saucers, it would seem that they have been seeing them for years, anyway, from 1870 onward. On March 22 of that year, the British bargue Lady of the Lake was sailing in mid-Atlantic. Captain Frederick Banner and his crew observed in the half-light in the sky a grey, circular object, rigid in outline, coming up against the wind. It finally settled down right in the winds eye, before it became lost in the darkening sky. A sketch made by the captain and published later by the Royal Meteorological Society reveals that the strange object is almost identical with drawings made in, the last few years of flying saucers. On February 28, 1904, naval Lieutenant Frank Schofield, of the U.S.S. Supply, reported three curious meteor-like objects, the leading one of which had an area of "about six acre," and was egg-shaped. The three were travelling in ethelon. They were sighted at 6.10 p.m. and all three made near ap, proaches to the surface of the water and then soared away from the surface, "in a most remarkable manner." It would seem that flying saucers are not a new phenomenon. Sailors, scientists and even astronomers have reported seeing them for the past 60 years. This makes the claim that was declared "curious and curious."
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