The Christmas holiday season back in 1978 spawned a remarkable UFO display in New Zealand. It became known as the Kaikoura lights. These events came at the end of an extraordinary year for UFO reports in the Australia New Zealand region, in particular, the disappearance of Melbourne pilot Frederick Valentich, in the direct wake of a UFO encounter over Bass Strait in October 1978, was a world wide media sensation. The Valentich story remains unresolved to this day. The Kaikoura events caused a similar sensation. The story haunted the lives of those that participated. The prosaic explanations appeared to fall short of explaining the mystery.
It wasn’t until late October 2020, while reading journalist Ross Coulthart’s book manuscript - his “deep dive” investigation into the UFO phenomenon (due out in 2021), that I was saddened to learn of the passing of New Zealand born journalist Quentin Fogarty. Quentin had played a prominent role in the Kaikoura lights story. I got to know him back in 1979 as the events became a world wide controversy. We kept in sporadic contact.
Quentin Fogarty even shared with me an intriguing “UFO crash retrieval” type tale (or a tale of a saucer shaped experimental vehicle), he had heard from a journalist friend, who was one of the alleged participants. Quentin told me that sometime during the seventies the TV crew camera man known to him had allegedly been at Salisbury, in South Australia, as part of a media contingent, apparently involved in a corporate film, or some such similar project, for the RAAF. During their presence at the facility they wandered off without a military escort. They came upon a hangar which housed a saucer type of craft. Their examination of it was cut short with the arrival of military security who hurried them away very quickly and pressured them to not disclose what they had seen. Such stories are of an apocryphal nature and do not invite a lot of confidence. In isolation they are just provocative stories. When such stories start to pop up on a regular basis, it is reasonable to ask what is going on. Are these tales legitimate or are they the stuff of "urban legends"?
The last time I spoke with Quentin was on 23 March 2016. An e-book version of his book had appeared and he was still intrigued about aspects of the event. A New Zealand researcher, apparently then a professor living in China, had sent him an enhanced frame from the Kaikoura footage. Quentin had the impression that this process could provide an extraordinary degree of image resolution, that yielded great detail. Given what I understood about the circumstances of the filming, I thought perhaps this may have been spurious artefacts, results of the process, rather than enhancement of previously unnoticed detail. If there is anyone that can elaborate on this aspect I would be pleased to learn more.
The Kaikoura light mystery, was an early echo of the long fight for scientific validity of the UFO phenomenon, strikingly revealed some solid science that suggested that the affair was “the world’s first verified film encounter with an unidentified flying object” (from the subtitle of Quentin Fogarty’s 1982 book “Let’s Hope They’re Friendly”). In this sense, the New Zealand sightings prefigured the debate and controversy that has nested around the 2004 USS Nimitz UFO/UAP encounters, which dominates current UFO/UAP debate. Anyone, seriously interested in the UFO controversy and debate, would greatly benefit with a deeper understanding of the UFO mystery, that would develop from understanding what has gone before. Understanding UFO history, gives a long and sustained argument for UFO reality.
“Quentin Edward Fogarty September 28, 1946 - July 5, 2020
New Zealand-born Quentin Edward Fogarty, the journalist known as the UFO reporter, has died suddenly in Melbourne.
“The 73-year old Fogarty was found dead at his St Kilda home by emergency services in early July after being alerted by his children, who couldn’t raise him. He was due to go on a long bike ride with his youngest son, Sam.
“Fogarty will be remembered for the Kaikoura UFO incident off the coast of the South Island of NZ in 1978. The incident remains the world’s first verified film encounter with a UFO.
“Fogarty was working for Channel 10 Melbourne and was with a film crew on board a freight aircraft which filmed several bright objects that were also tracked on radar.
Three months after that flight, at a press conference in New York City, a group of American scientists said the light sources captured on film could not be explained by conventional means. This was despite the sceptics who said it was Venus, squid boats, or radar returns from a field of cabbages.
“Fogarty, who started his career at Dunedin’s Evening Star wrote a book about the experience, Let’s Hope They’re Friendly.
“He was always convinced that enhanced computer analysis of the film might get closer to finding what he saw that night and was working on this project at the time of his death.
“Fogarty described himself as an all-round media man. He worked for all the major TV networks in Australia – Nine, Seven, 10, the ABC and SBS. He claimed to be the first person hired to work for SBS when it was established in 1980. He won Australia’s most prestigious TV award, a Logie, in 1985 for his documentary Frontline Afghanistan.
“He made documentaries, trained hundreds of politicians and executives in media training and in his later career worked in issues management, corporate and government communications. He was a close friend of WWII war hero Sir Edward Dunlop and made a documentary retracing his journey on the Burma-Thailand railway.
“Fogarty had planned to move to Perth to be close to his eldest son, Dan. He had triple bypass surgery a year ago and had been told he was good for another 15 years.
“Q-Ball, as he was known, is survived by his former wife, journalist Sue Ahearn, sons Daniel, Ben, Sam and Jason and seven grandchildren. He had five sisters in New Zealand and a rascal of a brother on the Gold Coast in Australia.”
Here is my account of the Kaikoura UFO display from my 1996 book “The OZ Files” (pages 172-73):
UFO FALLOUT OVER NEW ZEALAND
During the early hours of 21 December 1978, two separate Safe- Air Argosy cargo planes were making flights between Blenheim, Christchurch and Wellington in New Zealand. Both flights encountered anomalous objects. The most spectacular incident involved the Argosy 2, when ‘a bright, flashing, white light, almost like a strobe’ passed in front of the plane at a velocity estimated to be 17,000 kilometres per hour. It disappeared after making a sharp right-hand turn. The plane’s own weather radar confirmed the existence of the object. Quentin Fogarty, a Melbourne TV Channel 0- 10 reporter on holiday with his family in New Zealand, was asked to do a story on the events of 21 December. He hired a local TV crew to accompany a flight from Blenheim to Wellington, and from Wellington to Christchurch, in order to gain background footage for the story. The flight from Blenheim to Wellington was uneventful.
The plane took off from Wellington at 11.46 p.m. Saturday 30 December and travelled out over Cook Strait, reaching a cruising altitude of about 4,000 metres and an airspeed of 215 knots. At a point just south east of Cape Campbell, unusual lights were seen in the direction of Kaikoura. Wellington radar began picking up targets that were in the vicinity of the plane. The first thing the TV crew noticed was four or five unusual lights near the town of Kaikoura. They were variously stationary and moving, and their number kept changing. The cameraman tried to film these lights but he described them as too far away, however he said they were just visible in the blow-ups that were eventually made. Other lights were seen, also recorded by Wellington radar, and at one point the aircraft did a 360 degree turn to confirm the presence of a light which appeared off the right wing. After this manoeuvre, they no longer had visual contact, however Wellington still indicated the presence of an anomalous object in the vicinity. The plane landed at Christchurch at 1.01 a.m.
When the Argosy took off for the final leg back to Blenheim, one member of the film crew refused to continue the flight out of fear of what had happened. A few minutes after take-off, the moon, travelling parallel to them. It was also described as a bright yellow white orange light. Captain Startup turned on the plane’s own radar and a strong return was obtained. The radar blip gave an estimate of the target size as being three to five times larger than the blip size of a fishing boat. All of those on board had a clear view of the radar screen and the object, and were able to satisfy themselves that the radar target and the object outside the aircraft correlated. The radar distance was initially 30 kilometres, but decreased as the plane reached cruising altitude. The decision was made to turn towards the UFO. It made an abrupt change in course and moved away.
The object was filmed and in Australia Channel 0-10 broadcast the footage on 1 January 1979, and it was briefly a media sensation around the world. Attempts were made by the Royal New Zealand Air Force to explain away the sightings, but these were discredited by meteorologists and other scientists. The mystery remains.
My references included:
Dykes, Mervyn,Strangers in Our Skies: UFOs over New Zealand, Taita, Lower Hutt, INL, 1981
Fogarty, Quentin, Let's Hope They’re Friendly!,Melbourne, Angus & Robertson, 1982
Startup, Capt. Bill, with Illingworth, Neil, The Kaikoura UFOs, Auckland, Hodder and Stoughton, 1980
Stott, Murray, Aliens over Antipodes,Sydney, Space-Time Press,
1984
In 1998 New Zealand researcher Peter Hassall in his book “The NZ Files – UFOs in New Zealand” also addressed the affair.
It was Dr Bruce Maccabee’s detailed analysis and field work that was the focus of the case for real UFO events at Kaikoura in 1978. Dr. Thomas E. Bullard in his 2010 book “The Myth and Mystery of UFOs” describes some of the difficulties Dr. Maccabee had in getting his research to the attention of mainstream science.
“The experience of Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist for the U.S. Navy, illustrates that the scientific gate seems barred to UFOs without even a hearing of the evidence. Multiple witnesses, movie footage, and radar tracking combined in UFO sightings at Kaikoura, New Zealand, in 1978 to create an intriguing case. He spent a month in New Zealand interviewing witnesses and analysing the data. When an article appeared in the Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physicsconcluding that refracted lights from Japanese squid boats were responsible for the sightings, Maccabee submitted a rebuttal that argued a strong case against mirages in favour of an unidentified phenomenon. The editor rejected his article, saying it contained no “real science,” in an apparent demonstration that a study based on extensive investigation did not merit publication if it arrived at an unacceptable answer, while a study based on nothing more than newspaper reports breezed into print as long as its results conformed to proper scientific opinion.”
More than a quarter of a century on, the 2004 Nimitz UFO encounters are running similar gauntlets, but some real science is slowly emerging, but much of it is emerging in specialised scientifically orientated associations, such as SCU – the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, rather than previously established conservative “mainstream science” bodies and publications.
Quentin Fogarty was a key participant of the main radar-visual sighting events of 31stDecember, 1978. During October 1979 he stayed with me in Sydney, while attending UFCON 4 – a national UFO conference, where he gave the keynote presentation – “The New Zealand UFO film” – describing the “complex affair” and enabling researchers to see the full version of the controversial TV UFO film taken on the flights that night.
Quentin Fogarty continued his focus on the Kaikoura Lights responding to critics with a report “The NZ Film: A Reply to the Debunkers” (see for example FSR (Flying Saucer Review) Volume 26, No. 2, 1980). I contributed an article to FSR entitled “A Re-viewing of the great nocturnal light” highlighting that “the affair provided researchers with an excellent scenario of events, characterising in sharp relief the problems that plague the whole UFO subject, and balancing the whole with a wealth of data.” (FSR‘s Silver Jubilee issue, Volume 26, No.1, Spring 1980).
In 1980 Quentin Fogarty had his book on the whole affair published – “Let’s Hope they’re friendly! The remarkable story behind the world’s first verified film encounter with an unidentified flying object.” There-in, he included an extract of an interview I had done with him, where he highlighted his feelings, during one critical part of that memorable flight.
“Whatever the case, I did experience something psychic, be it real or imagined.”
“I was on the right-hand side as we turned back on course (after turning towards the target north of Christchurch). Dennis (Grant) was behind Bill (Startup) on the left. I was further back as David (Crockett) was in the front filming. I was out of Dennis’s line of sight and I felt this strange vulnerability. I looked behind me. The lights were out on the plane and we looked behind us, Dennis and myself. We didn’t say anything. I had this dreadful feeling of something in the plane. Dennis felt it too. It felt like a warning. Maybe it was just a psychological feeling. I had the feeling, especially on the return leg, that we were being allowed to film. I was not thinking of spacemen, or extraterrestrials, or anything.”
I asked Quentin, “It was just completely foreign?”
“Yes. To me it was just that they were some sort of intelligence of their own, not having occupants or anything. Whatever they were, that was the entire thing. I didn’t have a feeling of anything inside them. It gets a little weird and wacky. I had another feeling at the time, which I have not written about, like they were collecting souls of the dead. I can’t explain this feeling. They were far more psychic than anything. I felt that there was something incredibly spiritual and emotional about it all, but I could not come to terms with it, I couldn’t work out what it was. Throughout the whole thing I cannot be convinced about an extraterrestrial origin, because it doesn’t feel right, for no other reason.”
"kaikoura_UFO" ex Stuff Co NZ 01 January 2014 & the Marlborough Express
Quentin Fogarty was a hell of a nice guy, who struggled with the human impact of the UFO experience, but did not shy away from telling the world of the UFO reality he felt he had confronted in the phenomenon of the Kaikoura Lights. To Quentin - a good life, and good journeying - I hope you found, or find, your answers.
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