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Kaikōura and the Lights Filmed from the Air

added01 September 2026

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.

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-42.40000, 173.68000

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