Secret files 'shed light' on UFO mystery

Thousands of pages of freshly declassified secret UFO files could just be the beginning of fresh light on the subject, says the Western Bay woman who successfully lobbied for their release.
Pahoia resident Sue Hansen, who founded UFO research group UFOCUS New Zealand in 2000, said she began pushing for the Royal New Zealand Air Force to declassify the files after other countries, including Australia, did the same.
Two years after she first requested the files, the air force this week released more than 2500 pages dating back to the 1950s.
The files include reports of various sightings, correspondence between senior air force officials, newspaper clippings, ramblings and sketches of spacecraft, and details about New Zealand's most famous sighting - the "Kaikoura lights".
On December 30, 1978, a cargo aircraft reported strange lights following it and moving around it, and air traffic control detected unexplained objects on its radar that were not other aircraft because none were in the air.
But a report from the air force found the lights could be explained by "natural but unusual phenomena".
Atmospheric conditions at the time were conducive to anomalous radio and light waves, it said.
Another explanation was that the crew were looking at lights from fishing vessels or Venus.
Ms Hansen said the files proved the air force did investigate UFO sightings, which she said it had always denied doing.
She believed that when Government and air force officials could not explain incidents, the matters had been passed to "people in high places" to discredit them.
This year alone, there had been a large number of what Ms Hansen called "high credibility" sightings, or reports made by people such as police, air traffic controllers or airline pilots.
The UFOCUS New Zealand website listed eight sightings in the Western Bay this year, one of them reported by a "medical practitioner" who watched a light in the sky perform a 90-degree turn without any change in speed.
Among the declassified air force files from the past two decades was one logged on July 7, 1999, of a "very fast object" that descended over Tauranga from east to west at an angle of approximately 25 degrees.
Ms Hansen, who has been interested in UFOs since she saw an object in the sky that she described as an "orange, cigar-shaped burning object" when she was aged 8, was pleased the files would bring UFOs to the public's attention.
But she hoped New Zealand would not follow other governments that had closed down their sighting hotlines and stopped investigating reports.
Tauranga UFO and Paranormal Society spokesman Ian Lucas agreed.
"While all this is good news to UFO enthusiasts, I would still imagine that details of any really sensitive sightings would still remain undisclosed," he said.