What happened
In 1909 no airplane had yet flown in New Zealand, and yet that winter the press was full of reports of a mysterious “airship.” The best-known came from Kelso in the Otago region, where in July a group of schoolchildren and an adult witness described a zeppelin-type airship flying low over the town in broad daylight. The “Otago Daily Times” published sketches based on the witnesses’ accounts. Over the following days, lights and the silhouette of the craft were reported in Waipahi, Clinton, and Gore – two dredge workers even claimed to have seen two figures on board. The wave then spread to other parts of the country and died out after a few weeks. In August, similar sightings were reported in Australia.
Witnesses
Schoolchildren and adult residents of Otago and Southland; most of the witnesses are known by name only from the press of the time.
Explanations and hypotheses
Researchers, including members of the New Zealand Skeptics society, link the wave to the contemporary fear of German zeppelins and to press reports of similar sightings in Great Britain. Some of the lights may have been planets, especially bright Venus, and others pranks or products of imaginations fueled by the newspapers. One of the Kelso schoolchildren admitted six decades later that he had seen nothing.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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