The Kaikoura Lights

In December 1978, aircrews flying Armed Forces-adjacent cargo routes along New Zealand's South Island coast reported strange lights near Kaikoura, some tracked by Wellington radar. On December 31, an Australian television crew flew the route to investigate and filmed lights that appeared to pace and maneuver around the Argosy freighter, while radar intermittently confirmed unidentified returns. The footage made global news within days.

The December 21 events began the flap: crews reported lights that followed and departed, with radar correlation. The New Year's Eve flight, carrying reporter Quentin Fogarty and camera operators, encountered lights on both legs, including a bright object that reportedly tracked the aircraft for minutes and appeared on the plane's own radar as well as Wellington's. Film captured brilliant, pulsing light sources; the crew described one as a giant lit orb.

Sixteen millimeter film, multiple crew and journalist witnesses, and the rare triple correlation claim: airborne visual, airborne radar, and ground radar in overlapping periods.

The Royal New Zealand Air Force and a government-commissioned scientific review attributed the sightings to a combination of squid-fleet lights (the fishing fleet's massive lamps reflecting off clouds and sea), the planet Venus, Jupiter, and unusual atmospheric propagation causing spurious radar returns. The report closed the official file.

The official mix satisfies most skeptics: the region's squid boats generate documented sky-glow, holiday-season planets were brilliant, and anomalous propagation is real. Plasma physicist Peter Sturrock's and optical analyses kept parts open, and participants (Fogarty, Captain Bill Startup, who wrote a book) rejected the explanation for the pacing behavior and the radar correlations' timing. The case remains Australasia's flagship film-plus-radar argument.