3 February 2025
The "Canterbury Panther" is often described as a large, black, panther-like creature said to roam the rural South Island. It has become a subject of curiosity and intrigue for many, but when subjected to closer scrutiny, the story seems to unravel. Skeptical analysis of these sightings suggests that the mysterious panther may be nothing more than a combination of mis-identifications, myth-making, and the power of suggestion.
23 December 2024
Maybe it's the day drinking, uni students on summer break, or NZ tourism has gone intergalactic, but it seems that December is prime UFO time for New Zealand. So, for the next couple of issues of the newsletter, we're going to focus on otherworldly things, starting with three December UFO events:
24 January 2023
I guess the biggest news this week is that our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is resigning, and that she will be replaced by Minister Chris Hipkins. However, I'm not sure there's much of skeptical interest that I can say about this news. I think Ardern did a good job steering us through tough times, and obviously I'm dismayed about the vitriol she's had hurled at her from the conspiracy cheap seats. I don't know too much about Hipkins, but again he seems competent, and he's been working to remove Religious Instruction from schools - which I see as a positive step for an increasingly irreligious and secular country like ours.
15 August 2022
NASA recently held a press teleconference where they announced that they will be investigating UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This is a new term being used instead of UFOs, given that UFO suffers from both not being very descriptive (Unidentified things people see in the sky might not be Flying, and they might not be Objects - planets, clouds and aurora are often mistakenly thought to be mysterious objects, but none of them are flying; and the Northern and Southern aurora aren't objects, just cool light shows caused by solar particles), and having a lot of baggage attached to it - when people read UFO, they instantly think aliens. Here's NASA announcing their project:
1 August 2012
All children are psychic, according to one of the stranger items to appear in the NZ Herald (30 May) for a while.
1 November 2005
Could it be that visitations from flying saucers, which have been so frequent over the last 60 years, are now on the wane? Or is something more sinister going on? British UFO-watching clubs, it seems, may have to close because of a lack of sightings, and dwindling interest (The Guardian, 11 August).
1 May 2000
Readers of NZ Skeptic will have seen R.E. Bartholomew's article "The Great Zeppelin Scare of 1909" in last autumn's issue, no 47. This covered the same event as one of the chapters in this book. Several other chapters describe similar episodes which occurred in other times and other places, and in a final section all these are woven into a coherent story. Each chapter is supported by a copious list of references, most of them newspaper reports pubished during the development and decay of the case concerned.
1 August 1999
READERS of NZ Skeptic will have seen R.E. Bartholomew's article "The Great Zeppelin Scare of 1909" in last autumn's issue (No. 47). This covered the same event as one of the chapters in this book. Several other chapters describe similar episodes which occurred in other times and other places, and in a final section all these are woven into a coherent story.
1 August 1997
THE world was 2.9% weirder in 1996 than in 1995, according to the Fortean Times, and weirdness is likely to increase up to 2000 with "pre-millennial tension".