Mystical places in New Zealand
2 legends · 1 city
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Kaikōura and the Lights Filmed from the Air
In late December 1978, over the east coast of New Zealand's South Island, the crews of Argosy freight aircraft saw bright lights accompanying them on several consecutive nights. Radar at Wellington confirmed returns. On 31 December an Australian television crew was taken aboard; the cameraman David Crockett filmed the lights on colour stock, and the footage went round the world — one of very few films of the phenomenon shot from an aircraft with simultaneous radar confirmation. The astronomer William Ireland offered an explanation: the lights of squid boats reflected off a temperature inversion, plus Venus. It accounts for some of the episodes and not others.
The Waitomo Caves
Limestone caves on New Zealand's North Island whose ceilings glow with the larvae of Arachnocampa luminosa, a species found nowhere else. Thousands of blue points above an underground river look like a night sky; they are in fact lures for prey the larvae catch on sticky threads. Māori knew the caves long before Europeans, and the chief Tāne Tinorau led the first survey into them in 1887.