5 case files, newest first.
Six days after Kelso, 23 children at an Invercargill school said they had seen the airship in broad daylight. The local paper printed two of their drawings. The Press Association's verdict went around the country: the drawings were “not a bit alike” and the children's testimony “need not be taken very seriously.”
In 1873 a Dunedin paper announced that a live moa had been seen “alive and in the flesh” in Southland. The runholder wrote in to say his shepherd hadn't said “moa” at all. Eighteen months later a Christchurch paper printed a letter about two moas roped near Browning Pass. They then “escaped,” and another paper called the whole thing a hoax.
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
At noon on 23 July 1909 schoolchildren in Kelso, West Otago, watched a boat-shaped “airship” circle over their school. A reporter got six drawings that he called “dumbfounding to all sceptics.” Within three weeks the scare had spread nationwide, and the papers were finding fire balloons, a lantern and a confessed hoax.
In the winter of 1905, Christchurch papers reported a masked man in a luminous coat frightening women at night. By October the scare had reached the Hutt, where a local paper investigated one sighting and found an old white cow in the moonlight.
