Beyond the Veil Magazine

The Kaikoura Lights

Issue #22: October 1980

On 21 December 1978, a cargo aircraft flying over the South Island of New Zealand encountered something that pilots and passengers would never forget. They saw lights, strange, pulsing, intelligently controlled lights, that followed their aircraft for over an hour. And they filmed what they saw.

The Kaikoura Lights became the most significant UFO footage since the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film eleven years earlier.

The First Encounter

Safe Air cargo flight 7316 took off from Blenheim shortly after midnight on 21 December. Captain John Randle and First Officer Bob Guard were at the controls. Shortly after becoming airborne, Wellington Air Traffic Control informed them of unidentified targets on radar, northeast of their position.

The crew saw lights: brilliant, pulsing objects that appeared to pace their aircraft. The objects were tracked simultaneously on the aircraft’s own radar and by Wellington Control. They appeared, disappeared, and reappeared at different locations with apparent disregard for the laws of physics.

Captain Randle later described the lights as very bright with a pulsating quality. They would hover, then move at tremendous speed, then hover again. At no point did they behave like any known aircraft.

The Film Crew

An Australian television crew (journalist Quentin Fogarty and cameraman David Crockett) had been investigating UFO sightings in the region. Learning of the earlier encounter, they arranged to fly the same route on 30 December, equipped with 16mm camera and sound recording equipment.

What they captured exceeded expectations.

Shortly after takeoff from Blenheim, strange lights appeared again. Fogarty filmed continuously as the objects manoeuvred around the aircraft. Crockett operated a second camera. The footage shows bright, disc-shaped objects moving through the night sky, occasionally resolving into spherical forms with apparent internal structure.

Radar confirmed the objects’ presence. Wellington Control tracked the targets, which displayed capabilities no conventional aircraft could match: instantaneous acceleration, right-angle turns, and speeds estimated at over 3,000 miles per hour.

The footage was broadcast worldwide on 2 January 1979. Millions of viewers watched as the lights of Kaikoura performed their inexplicable dance.

The Investigation

The New Zealand government commissioned an investigation by physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a specialist in optical physics and UFO analysis. His conclusions were sobering.

Maccabee could not explain the footage. The lights were not aircraft, weather balloons, or any known phenomenon. Their behaviour was inconsistent with natural explanations. The radar returns confirmed that physical objects (not merely lights or reflections) were present.

Sceptics proposed alternatives. Some suggested the lights were reflections from fishing boats. Others proposed Venus, which was bright in the December sky. Still others suggested the crew had filmed Japanese squid boats, whose powerful lights are visible for miles.

None of these explanations satisfied the evidence. The radar returns could not be fishing boats. Venus does not move at 3,000 miles per hour. And squid boats do not make right-angle turns.

The Witnesses

The pilots who flew through the Kaikoura Lights were experienced professionals with thousands of hours of flight time. They were not given to fantasy.

Captain Bill Startup, who flew the December 30 film flight, was emphatic about what he witnessed. A veteran of thirty years in aviation, he maintained that he had never seen anything like the objects that night. They were real, solid, and unlike any aircraft he had ever encountered.

Quentin Fogarty, the journalist who narrated the footage, described the experience as both terrifying and exhilarating. The crew knew they were witnessing something extraordinary.

The air traffic controllers who tracked the objects on radar were equally emphatic. They had recorded targets moving in ways that no known aircraft could achieve.

The Aftermath

The Kaikoura Lights remain unexplained. Two years later, no conventional explanation has been found that accounts for all the evidence: the visual sightings, the radar returns, and the film footage.

The footage itself has been subjected to extensive analysis. Frame-by-frame examination reveals structured objects with distinct shapes and apparent rotation. The lights are not reflections, artefacts, or camera malfunctions.

New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority investigated and could reach no conclusion. The Royal New Zealand Air Force examined the evidence and offered no explanation. The case remains open.

Implications

The Kaikoura Lights represent some of the best evidence ever gathered for unexplained aerial phenomena:

• Multiple independent witnesses, including experienced pilots and air traffic controllers
• Simultaneous radar confirmation from both aircraft and ground stations
• Motion picture footage of the objects, taken by a professional crew
• Behaviour inconsistent with any known aircraft or natural phenomenon

If the Kaikoura objects were not aircraft, what were they? If they were natural phenomena, why do they not recur? If they were extraterrestrial visitors, why did they appear over a sparsely populated region of the South Pacific?

These questions remain unanswered. The lights of Kaikoura continue to pulse in the film archives, as mysterious now as they were on those December nights when pilots first saw them dancing over the mountains of New Zealand.

Readers with expertise in aviation, radar technology, or optical physics who may have insights into the Kaikoura Lights are invited to contact our research department.