The Ngātea Mystery Circle

Ngātea sits on the Hauraki Plains, about 18 km southwest of Thames and about 70 km southeast of Auckland. Bert O'Neill farmed there. The circle would appear on a run-off section of his land, near the southern boundary.

Around mid-August 1969, O'Neill noticed something from a distance. A very bleached patch among the taller ti-tree growths. On 4 September 1969 the patch was inspected. The mānuka was dead and still standing, dry and white, bleached a silvery colour. The ring was perfectly round and about 56 feet in diameter.

Then there were the marks. Three depressions formed a triangle with sides of 10 ft, 10 ft and 9 ft. Each was about 2 ft across and about 8 in deep. Two furrows ran from them in a V. The ground had been pushed down to the roots of the trees. It gave the appearance of some object with three long tripod legs coming down and landing with great force. No one saw it arrive. No one saw it leave.

By Sunday September 7 UFO investigators were on site. Kingsley Field, a Thames Star reporter, called the marks "unusual and obvious" and thought spray poisoning "very far-fetched". Tony Brunt of the Auckland University UFO Research Group was sure the circle was not a hoax. Harvey Cooke, president of the Tauranga Scientific Space Research Group, returned again and again to measure. He called the furrows "toes", estimated at least 20 tonnes of pressure, and concluded the site had not been made by humans.

Horticulturist John Stuart-Menzies brought a Geiger counter. "Some kind of short-wave high-frequency radiation has cooked the material from the inside outwards," he said on 6 October 1969. Another horticulturist, R. Chidnall, sowed seeds in soil from the circle. They sprouted and died within 48 hours. His control seeds grew normally.

A Victoria University team blamed the weed-killer 2,4,5-T, probably dropped from an aircraft 3 to 6 months earlier. The Institute of Nuclear Sciences found no radioactivity above normal background.

The DSIR had its own answer. Minister of Science Brian E. Talboys said the symptoms were consistent with death from a saprophytic fungus attack. He made no mention of the triangular grooves. The UFO investigators were angry. Saprophytic fungi, they pointed out, live on dead material. They do not kill it.

Ngātea was not alone. Harold H. Fulton counted nine circle sites across the North Island in 1969. At Puketutu, south of Te Kūiti, reeds on Charles Blackmore's duck pond were pressed into a circle about 25 m across. And at 7.30 pm on 4 September, two Straits Air Freight Express pilots reported a fluorescent blue pulsating light out the pilot's side window. Fulton wrote that a UFO was tracked by radar for 100 miles. No primary record of that sighting has been found.

Fulton called it New Zealand's biggest space scare. Media interest peaked during the campaign for the 1969 general election. Later writers weighed herbicide drift, passing animals and an elaborate prank. None closed the file. Cooke held to an extraterrestrial explanation all his life. In 2025 the US YouTube channel Unexplained Cases announced a documentary. The circle at Ngātea is still called unsolved.