The New Zealand Phantom Airship Scare of 1909

1909. Only 27 airships were known to have flown anywhere in the world that year. None of them in New Zealand. Fear of German Zeppelins travelled all the same. News of Blériot's Channel flight on 25 July reached the country by cable within two days.

Sunday 11 July. 22:30. Over the Wangaloa Hills near Kaitangata, John Boyd and others watched a light for about 30 minutes. Boyd was a 32 year old Benhar farmer, and the press called him "absolutely unimpeachable." The light moved about the hills, he said, "sometimes swooping down from a height of 2000ft to about 1000ft and even lower." It moved "with as much ease, and even grace, as a bird on the wing." The Clutha Free Press printed the story on 13 July. The wave had begun.

Friday 23 July. Noon. At the school in Kelso, West Otago, 23 schoolchildren and one adult looked up. The object came over the hill on the east side of the school and sailed across the plain to the gorge. It remained stationary for a few minutes. Then it turned, came back, rose higher and sailed away towards the Blue Mountains.

The children described something shaped like a boat, with sharp angular bows and a tapering stern. Entirely black. A short pole or mast. A revolving propeller at the rear. Some saw the figure of a man seated in the craft. Cyril Falconer saw the propeller reverse as the vessel made a sudden swerve.

A Special Reporter from the Otago Daily Times questioned the children one at a time. Each drew the craft before seeing anyone else's drawing. The drawings showed a "striking resemblance." The reporter called the scene "nothing short of dumbfounding."

The reports kept coming. Rev. Thomas Paulin saw a light travelling very fast towards Mount Wendon before it faded out. At Norwood, Thomas Potter watched it pass "about 80 feet from the ground," travelling dead against the wind. In the Waikaka Valley, north of Gore, two dredgemen saw "two figures sitting in air machine." At Waipawa, a horseman's horse became restive. Passing over his head was a large torpedo-shaped structure, and one of the crew "shouted out to him in an unknown tongue." At Whanganui, a witness saw two large wings "which made a hissing sound."

The pranksters came too. At Temuka a crowd gathered beneath an airship that turned out to be a candle in a hollowed turnip. At Waihi, someone found a tissue-paper kite device. At Gore in early September, hundreds saw a dark cigar-shaped object that was later put down to thousands of starlings. Venus and Mars were blamed for the night lights. The Evening Post mocked the "Hot-air" ships.

Sixty years later, George McDuff, one of the Kelso children, denied having seen anything: "imagination, based on what we were reading at the time." Robert Bartholomew, writing with Bryan Dickeson, framed the wave as a moral panic driven by fear of German Zeppelins.

No government, police or military inquiry followed. The newspapers were the only investigators. Dickeson argues that the northern papers lumped genuine Southern reports together with hoaxes, and that the original Southern accounts should be read before anyone judges the wave. Tony Brunt of the Auckland University UFO Research Group gathered the sightings in 1967. The Kelso drawings, printed on 31 July 1909, still sit at the heart of the case.