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New Zealand Government Opens UFO Files
astroengine writes "Following hot on the heels of a series of international UFO sighting disclosures, the New Zealand government has joined the party and made public 2,000 pages of UFO eyewitness accounts dating back to 1952. Helpfully, the NZ newspaper The Dominion Post has scanned the documents and has made them available online. Among the accounts of alien encounters and strange lights in the sky is one of New Zealand's most famous UFO mystery: the Kaikoura sighting. But was it aliens? Probably not, but it makes for an entertaining read."
My bet is that the objects in the Kaikoura sighting were normal aircraft. Maybe somebody decided to try his hands at IFR flying without an appropriate rating. The radar data is consistent with a normal aircraft and the rapid movement on the film is obviously caused by camera shake.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So why no reports from before 1952? Roswell incident occurred in 1947. I imagine before this people just attributed "UFO"s to natural "unexplained" causes, but then Roswell got so much exposure that I guess it made more sense for people to take the easy way out and say it's aliens. We're still discovering amazing natural occurrences in our atmosphere.
I'm not saying a UFO have never stopped by to take a look, but 99.999% of reports are likely explained by natural causes.
I've never taken a serious interest in astronomy but on a few drunken star-gazing nights I've seen a few fast moving lights. I'd always put them down to "shooting stars" without giving it much more thought. While they were UFOs to me in the sense I couldn't identify them I recently discovered the site http://www.heavens-above.com/ that has excellent satellite pass predictions.
I set up a tripod a few weeks ago and took a photo of the ISS as it passed over at a good azimuth and altitude. It really suprised me how bright it was both in the image and to the naked eye. Now I often look at the site and wander out the back for a look at appropriate times. Depending on the background terrain and path it's taking I can see how a lot of man-made satellites could be mistaken for something extraterrestrial.
While NZ of course have an airforce I'd doubt there's a lot of cutting-edge new tech being developed there, but their clear skies and southern location would make it a good location for viewing those sort of passes. Much like here in Tasmania that's only a little further north.
if we consider ourselves members of a rational society, this shouldn't be news.
UFO reports should be public period. They are reports of phenomena that are unexplained to the observers. If everyone has access to those reports, than it's easier to find someone who can explain them. I really don't understand why these reports were secret in the first place (except for the names and similar stuff).
new sig
Does rule 34 work both ways?
If there is porn of it, it should exist. Right?
correct me if I am wrong here but a UFO is a pedestrian phenomenon. I am able to identify a great many things in the sky to some degree, but there will always be things i cant identify. In the widest sense of the word unidentified one could even say that every flying object is unidentified by someone. Even by the strictest definition there are numerous species of insect that are not know to science and are able to fly, and if that is not strict enough then there are occasionally strange objects in the sky that no one really knows what they are. What I am getting at here is that UFO DOES NOT MEAN ALIEN SPACESHIP. In fact if you saw an alien spaceship, and you were 100% sure that it was an alien spaceship, it would not be a UFO as you have identified it. Now that that is out of the way I think it is great that these reports are being made public, I don't even know why they would ever need to be secret. I find flying objects, unidentified or otherwise highly interesting and think that attempting to identify them is interesting and worthwhile.
Arguments like yours are why the scientific method is such a necessity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
.. are notorious for causing UFo reports. The float silently and flicker in strange ways and to the stupid that equals alien spacecraft.
These types of reports are typically kept secret because in addition to stories that are totally made up, they could be a source of intelligence on military aircraft. When testing new yet easily observable capabilities (i.e. VTOL), you don't want foreign powers reading your citizens' UFO sighting reports to judge how far along you are, or for that matter even to track down which airfields are being used to test prototype craft. In some cases depending on local geography and political relations, the reports might even contain information on craft of neighbouring nations.
Alphanos
The term's not stupid; it's the usage of UFO = OMGZ ALIENZ!!!11 that's the problem as you point out but their stupidity doesn't make the term stupid. Unidenfied flying object - I rather like it's functional efficiency.
The bulk of the readers can't reply right now. They've been abducted to be fitted with anal probes.
This article is about UFOs, not the TSA.
Really, I don't think life is nearly as interesting and exciting as you think it is. If you're getting that riled up over anything, it's time to take a moment and see if you've got all the facts. I used to get worked up over shit, too, until I discovered that the more I knew, the more apathetic I became. Now, I don't fight the apathy any more; I embrace it. There are no grand conspiracies, no illuminati, no NWO, and no alien coverups. And, even if there were, they'd be downright boring. This is the government we're talking about. They couldn't come up with an exciting conspiracy if their lives depended on it. The aliens would turn out to be horribly boring and a complete let-down. Life just isn't like comic books or pulp scifi novels. And maybe that's not even such a bad thing.
Japan has a serious tentacle problem even if it's not true.
"While NZ of course have an airforce"
Ummm ... well ... we sort of do ... kind of ... in fact here is what we have .. fear us!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_New_Zealand_Air_Force#Aircraft
No sniggering in the back row please!