Quentin Fogarty - Lets Hope Theyre Friendly: The Kaikoura UFOs. First verified film encounter with Unidentified Flying Objects.

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1: Christmas 1978

Chapter 2: Omens

Chapter 3: The Encounter

Chapter 4: Encore

Chapter 5: Cloak and Dagger Stuff

Chapter 6: On the Up, Going Down

Chapter 7: Down and Out

Chapter 8: Demons and Things

Chapter 9: Documentary-Makers

Chapter 10: Dreams and Schemes

Chapter 11: Good Morning America

Chapter 12: The Press Conference

Chapter 13: Homeward Bound

Chapter 14: A Critical Silence

Chapter 15: Maccabees Findings

Chapter 16: The Debunkers

Chapter 17: More Debunkers

Chapter 18: A Klassical Encounter

Chapter 19: Reflections 1982

Chapter 20: Reflections 2014

Appendix A:

The Valentich Story

Appendix B:

Letters

The Kaikoura UFOs

Lets Hope Theyre Friendly

Quentin Fogarty

With a foreword by Professor J Allen Hynek, director of the Center for UFO Studies

First published in 1982. This ebook edition was published in February 2014. It contains one additional chapter, Chapter 20: Reflections 2014, in which the author speculates on the origin of some of the objects observed and filmed off New Zealands Kaikoura Coast. Peoples titles are described as they were at the time of the original publication.

This book is dedicated to my family and to my many friends who stood by me when the going got rough, especially Steve Levitt and Andrew Flannigan.

Quentin Fogarty, 2014.

The Author

Quentin Fogarty is a respected journalist, film-maker and communications specialist who lives in Victoria, Australia.

On 31 December 1978, he was involved in a UFO encounter off the Kaikoura Coast on the South Island of New Zealand.

The story made headlines around the world and continues to generate interest among UFO proponents and sceptics. In 2008, NBCs Dateline program rated the Kaikoura sightings as one of the top 10 UFO events of all time.

Fogarty remains convinced that no satisfactory, mundane explanation has yet been advanced to explain the sightings.

Lets Hope Theyre Friendly is the remarkable story behind the worldss first verified film encounter with Unidentified Flying Objects.

The data could indicate that intelligence was involved (OI Other Intelligence). For example, the event when flying south when the radar target doubled in size and stayed that way while you looked out the window and saw a light apparently traveling with the airplane, and the associated radar targets before and after no natural phenomenon could account for this and there were no other aircraft, hence could be (probably is ) evidence of OI.

Dr Bruce Maccabee, PH.D, September 2013

NOTE: Colour images from the original UFO film, such as the Lazy Eight image above as well as other material pertaining to the Kaikoura sightings can be viewed at www.kaikouraufos.com

Preface

Early on the morning of 31 December 1978, a number of extraordinary events took place off the New Zealand coast. An Argosy freight aircraft, carrying a television film crew, became involved in a series of UFO sightings that were to make headlines around the world. What made this case so special was the fact that several of the bright objects were filmed and a number were also tracked on radar.

Those on board the aircraft that morning were Quentin Fogarty, a journalist employed by a Melbourne television station, Channel O (since renamed Channel 10); David Crockett, a freelance cameraman, and his wife, Ngaire, a freelance sound-recordist, both from Wellington, New Zealand; Dennis Grant, a New Zealand television journalist, and the flight crew, Captain Bill Startup and First Officer Bob Guard, both from Blenheim, New Zealand.

Three months after that flight, at a press conference in New York City on 26 March 1979, a group of American scientists stated that the light sources captured on film that December morning could not be explained by conventional means. Those at the press conference included Fogarty; Dr Bruce Maccabee, the scientist who headed the inquiry into the case; Professor J. Allen Hynek, director of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS); and John Acuff, the former president of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).

Dr Maccabee, an optical physicist specialising in laser technology, then worked as a civilian scientist for the United States Navys Surface Weapons Center at White Oak, Maryland. He was also a consultant to NICAP and it was in this capacity that he carried out his investigation into the New Zealand sightings.

Maccabee spent three months on the case before releasing his findings and he travelled to Australia and New Zealand to interview all the witnesses. In addition, he subjected the original film to an exhaustive study and carried out computer-enhancement analysis on copies of the film. He then referred his findings to a further 20 scientists and experts in the fields of optics, physics and radar and they agreed that the light sources could not be explained by any known means.

NICAP, which over a period of 22 years had investigated 20,000 reported UFO sightings, was for the first time prepared to endorse a film as showing a genuine unidentified flying object.