Woman who sparked Taylor Swift hunt speaks out

Maggie Shipstead says she had no idea her tweet about Taylor Swift would make international headlines.

The American author who sparked a nationwide hunt for Taylor Swift with one tweet has spoken out about the incident, apologising to the pop star.

Maggie Shipstead made news headlines November 22 when she was boarding a flight to New Zealand and posted a tweet after seeing Swift at Los Angeles Airport.

It's like the old saying goes: when you see a Taylor Swift at the airport, you will have a pleasant flight to New Zealand.

— Maggie Shipstead (@MaggieShipstead) November 22, 2015

By the time Shipstead had landed in New Zealand, news sites, including the NZ Herald, had run stories suggesting Swift was potentially in the country.

Shipstead has written about the incident in a story headlined, "I'm sorry, Taylor Swift: My one tweet set off a worldwide search for a 'missing' pop star from Los Angeles to New Zealand" on Salon.com.

In it, she says she's a "sporadic and halfhearted tweeter, wary of engaging, reluctant to put myself more in the path of the internet than is strictly necessary".

But by the time Shipstead had landed in New Zealand, she'd found herself at the centre of a news story.

Fans and reporters were messaging her about Swift's whereabouts - even though Shipstead had no idea what Swift was doing at the airport, or where she was going.

"I was starting to feel like someone who has confidently picked a suspect out of a police lineup, only to be confronted with exonerating evidence later," Shipstead writes.

"It certainly was weird and, no, I had not meant for this to happen."

A day later, Swift's New Zealand visit to shoot her latest music video had been confirmed. She has since departed to perform in Australia, but returned to take a road trip around the South Island with her family.

Shipstead said she was in New Zealand as part of a magazine travel assignment, which would take in Antarctica and the Cook Islands.

- nzherald.co.nz