Santa Sighted over Christchurch, says NZ Herald

Mark Honeychurch - 25 December 2023

I’m lying, they didn’t actually say that - but they might as well have done. What they did do was run with a headline of “‘Doughnut-shaped disc’: Is this a UFO over Christchurch?”. As far as I’m concerned, if they’d seriously suggested that Father Christmas may have flown over Christchurch in a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer it would have been no less ridiculous than what they actually did, which was suggest that aliens decided to expend huge amounts of energy, effort and time crossing light years of space in order to very visibly visit New Zealand’s South Island. This kind of credulous reporting is not the kind of content that serious news outlets should be generating!

The story the Herald wrote is about Christchurch resident Nicholas Glasson’s video from the 22nd of December, where he captured footage of a “freaking weird thing, a doughnut-shaped disc” and then sent it to the Herald. Glasson told the Herald “it almost felt like something was watching me, and I watched it all the way home and had to film it. I still can’t believe my eyes.”

Thankfully, since the article’s release, the clickbaitey headline has been replaced with a more down-to-earth “Man claims UFO sighting in Christchurch: Stardome astronomer says likely drone or balloon”. This is accompanied with some actual expert opinion, from astronomy educator Josh Aoraki at the Auckland observatory:

“I can’t identify what it is from the blurry video but it seems to move like a drone to me – we get videos like this every now and then. However, something to note about the video is that it was shot during the day, so it is something within our atmosphere and it seems to be fairly close to the ground. This rules it out as a satellite or meteor, which can only be seen at night and are outside of our atmosphere, so we can’t really offer anything more than that as it is not an object in space. Most likely not aliens, unfortunately.”

What a great take - ruling out what it can’t be, but not pretending to know what it is when there’s not enough data to be sure. And the summary that it’s probably not aliens is a nice sound bite to end with. Of course, the Herald doesn’t end the article there, but continues to muddy the waters by mentioning other recent weird sightings that are also probably not aliens. Sigh.