Between December 21, 1978 and January 1, 1979, a series of unexplained lights was observed and recorded by multiple independent witnesses across the Kaikōura coast of New Zealand's South Island. The case became one of the most thoroughly documented multi-media UFO encounters in history, producing both television-broadcast film footage and confirmed Wellington Air Traffic Control radar returns.
The incident began on December 21 when the crew of a Safe Air Argosy freight aircraft flying north from Blenheim reported multiple unidentified objects pacing the aircraft, with corresponding radar traces at Wellington ATC. On December 30, Quentin Fogarty, an Australian journalist for Channel 0's 'A Current Affair,' chartered a similar Safe Air Argosy and flew the same route with a film camera. During a thirty-minute period over the Cook Strait and Kaikōura peninsula, the crew and reporter observed and recorded approximately 16mm of color film of bright, pulsating, multi-colored lights — some of which changed shape and size — that were simultaneously being tracked on Wellington radar. The pilots described one particularly bright object holding formation with the aircraft for several minutes. The footage aired on Australian and New Zealand television on December 31, 1978, producing an international sensation.
The United States Department of Defense, the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the Royal Australian Air Force all opened investigations. Skeptical analyses attributed the lights variously to Venus, lights of Japanese squid-fishing boats, and unusual atmospheric refraction. However, radar returns at Wellington ATC consistently correlated with the visual and film sightings — a correlation that conventional explanations have difficulty accounting for. Professor Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy optical physicist, published a detailed 1979 analysis concluding that several of the filmed objects could not be identified and that their luminosity and motion profiles were inconsistent with known natural or man-made phenomena. The Kaikōura Lights remain the most credible and evidentially-rich UFO case in New Zealand's history.