Secret UFO files detail HB sightings

A famous sighting of a UFO over Hastings in 1955 features in secret files released yesterday by the Government.
In 1955 the The Daily Telegraph published a photo of what was described as a flying saucer seen over Hastings, an incident which was given wide publicity and reported overseas.
About 2500 pages of previously secret documents released by the Defence Force cover hundreds of accounts of what people saw, or believed they saw, and many were convinced they had been in the presence of alien visitors.
From mysterious lights in the sky to a reported sighting of a flying saucer taking off, New Zealanders have had an intense relationship with unidentified flying objects.
In addition to a sketch of a UFO spotted from the deck of a Government survey vessel in Napier, a letter sent from a Dannevirke man was also released, which details his November 1962 sighting of a "great saucer, coming down vertically, oscillating slightly while I kept contact telepathically and through the antennae of my finger tips".
Former Hawke's Bay teacher Suzanne Hansen, said her interest in Ufology was sparked by a "terrifying" incident on SH50 near Tikokino 25 years ago. A strange set of lights followed her car, before disappearing and reappearing over the top of the vehicle. "I realised a helicopter can't travel that fast ... a scientist from Canterbury University later contacted me and said it was possibly ball lightning. Yet ball lightning doesn't move like that, nor is it wider than the road."
Mrs Hansen, now the director of Ufocus NZ, said she often fielded calls from Hawke's Bay sightings.
The files also cover the 1978 Kaikoura mystery, New Zealand's best known and most compelling UFO event. A cargo aircraft reported strange lights following it and moving around it, and air traffic control detected unexplained objects on its radar that were not other aircraft because none were in the air.
Mystery remains, p2