The Moreland Close Encounter, Blenheim

Blenheim, Marlborough, 1959. Eileen Moreland was 42, married to Frederick Moreland, with five children. She worked as a nurse aide at Lister Hospital and sometimes at Woodbourne, the RNZAF base just west of town. The family farmed 9 acres at Springlands, on the corner of Old Renwick Road and Colemans Road.

Monday, 13 July 1959. At 5:30 a.m. she went out to bring in the Ayrshire cows for milking.

"I was about halfway across the paddock when I noticed an odd green glow in the clouds directly above me." Two green lights broke through the cloud, "like eyes or big lamps". "My first thought was 'I shouldn't be here' and I made a dive for the trees."

A saucer-shaped glow descended with two rows of brilliant orange jets, greenish at their centres, sprouting from bands at its top and bottom. Two green lights beneath it sent shafts of light downward. About 15 feet from the ground, by her account, it abruptly halted and hung there. The air grew warm, and she heard a faint hiss and a low hum. Caught in the green light, she could not move.

On top sat a clear dome, lit inside with white light. Two figures sat within, one behind the other, in shiny suits like crinkled aluminium foil and large silver helmets. The rear figure, a little over 5 feet tall, stood and leaned forward on his hands. Then the jets shut off, reappeared at an angle and began to whirl. After a minute or two, the craft tilted slightly and shot vertically into the clouds with an almost unbearable screech, followed by a waft of hot, peppery air.

Her husband reported it that day, and she told police: "You may think I am mad, but I saw a flying saucer about 5.40 am this morning." Local police judged her "a rational and stable person". Within days her hands swelled, and brown patches appeared on her face. The peach trees beneath the hover point died. Then came the newspapers and trespassers, followed on 26 August 1959 by a poison-pen letter: "You have talked."

Flight Lieutenant Charles Milford Jennings led the inquiry at Woodbourne, under station commander Arthur Gainsford. Letters were handwritten so typists would not see them. Jennings found her "quite honestly convinced". The file held a detail kept secret for decades: one figure had no left hand, its wrist in a dark sheath. The classification rose from confidential to secret.

Wing Commander G. S. Martin concluded that "Mrs Moreland was hallucinating, or that her story is an imaginative exaggeration of a normal subjective experience". Venus shining through high ice-crystal cloud was offered as an alternative. For decades the Air Force kept the file closed. Most of it was released in 2010. Parts stay withheld until 2070.

It remains New Zealand's classic close encounter of the third kind. James E. McDonald interviewed her in 1967. He wrote that her sighting was "extremely difficult to explain in present-day scientific or technological terms."

UFOCUS NZ says J. Allen Hynek also spoke with her, and that the case contributed to the collapse of the George Adamski groups throughout New Zealand. Jacques Vallée catalogued it in Passport to Magonia. No hoax allegation appears in the record. Jennings destroyed his papers before his death in 1999, and his son Wayne remembered: "He believed her." Eileen Moreland died in 2016, aged 99.