UFOs in the Bay | Hawkes Bay News | Local News in Hawkes Bay

Hawke's Bay Today online editor and observer of strange phenomenon Peter Fowler rifled through 10,000 pages of declassified UFO files for evidence of alien life in Hawke's Bay. This is what he found.

Thousands of declassified New Zealand Defence Force files on unidentified flying objects (UFO) released just before Christmas and this month contain many references to strange objects in the skies above Hawke's Bay, which many attributed to being flying saucers from another planet.

But there is no evidence from the official signals, memorandums, meeting minutes, control tower and police reports that we have been visited by the Little Green Men.

It does, however, suggest unexplained things have gone on at night in the sky for many years.

Recorded UFO sightings in European times in Hawke's Bay go back to 1888 but the bulk of them, as least according to the top-secret Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) UFO files, occurred between the 1950s and late 1970s, at a time when, as a newspaper clipping from 1955 describes it, the world was "frightened by atomic bombs, amazed by phenomenal aircraft performances, becoming used to thoughts of space travel and living in an atmosphere of comic-strip nonsense".

The alleged "flying saucer" phenomena had developed a form of "mass hysteria".

Many of the files classified as "top secret" are clearly from people with a highly questionable state of mind, such as a "sworn statement" from a Dannevirke man who said he was "in contact with aliens, or, specifically, "Space and Zone Commander Zimar of HH Venusian Forces".

The man said he kept contact with the aliens "telepathically and through the antennae of my fingertips".

Most people would conclude if he had such supernatural powers and alien contacts he would be addressing letters from the White House and not Dannevirke, but volumes of those types of letters have been dutifully filed away as "top secret" in the RNZAF UFO filing cabinet for decades.

The files are not ordered according to what are clearly the rantings of fantasists and nutters and what are truly unexplained flying objects. Of the serious documents contained in the files, headings from some are blanked out, such as what appears to be an official report from 1962 which concludes numerous sightings over a couple of nights that year, including over Hawke's Bay, were "an aerial reconnaissance of New Zealand" which 25 years later was revealed as an elaborate hoax.

Scientists in the 21st century generally agree that the odds of there being life on other planets in our solar system and beyond are high, but the big question is whether that life is mindless bacteria or intelligent beings.

Within the 2009 documents released recently, former chief of defence Jerry Mateparae makes it clear the military is not "qualified to address questions on the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms". The NZDF believes that rational explanations can be found for UFOs such as aircraft lights or natural phenomena, and all such reports should now be referred to police.

What is needed, of course, is hard evidence of alien life. A space ship or alien body parts should do it. So far this hasn't been forthcoming and, until it is, we should continue to take claims of alien abductions and sightings of alien spacecraft with a grain of salt.