UFOs in Auckland?
2 April 2024
We recently received an email from an ex-member who's now living in the UK, asking if our members might be able to help out identifying an optical anomaly in a photograph his mother took in Auckland recently:
Articles tagged with "sky"
The Easiest Person to Fool
20 June 2022
I once met Katherine Smith, the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Natural Medicine (not a magazine I'd recommend reading - it'll make you angry!). We had an enjoyable chat, and as we were at a wellness and spiritual festival, WellFest, she had no idea I was a skeptic. She showed me her folder of photos and cuttings about the “synchronicity” she'd experienced in her life - a series of spirals, stretching from a spiral painting she made as a young child, through to photos she'd taken in the '80s with faint spirals in the background, and a recent picture of a weird glowing spiral in the sky she'd cut out from a newspaper. I told her that I recognised the sky spiral, that it was a picture from Norway of a Russian rocket booster. Of course she was having none of it - the spiral in the sky was a sign for her, part of a message the universe was sending her through a series of events too unlikely to be coincidence. And of course she wasn't interested in reading into this phenomenon any further - she'd decided what it was, and what it meant to her, and that was enough.
Why are You a Skeptic
3 January 2022
I can blame my skepticism on George Adamski.
UFOs over Melbourne?
14 April 2021
Disappointingly, despite the excitement, I'm sure many listeners will already have figured out what the rational explanation for this string of lights in the sky over Melbourne was: Elon Musk's Starlink, a company that is providing satellite based internet - with a few tens of thousands of satellites planned to be deployed over the next few years. There are valid questions about whether these devices are damaging to astronomy, and have the potential to clutter earth's orbit, but they're definitely not visiting aliens. If you are able to get out and see these satellites as they maneuver themselves into their operational orbits, I'd definitely recommend it. I saw them late last year, and it was an impressive sight - a real testament to modern technology.
The Origin of the Polynesians
1 August 2018
Unorthodox claims about the origin of the Māori go way back. Co-founder of the Polynesian Society and erratic polymath Edward Tregear claimed in 1885 they were “Aryan”, based on such unlikely things as the similarity between waiū (milk: from wai, water and ū, the breast) and whey (Old English hwǣg). What follows is even less persuasive.
UFO Spotted in Christchurch
19 June 2016
There have been multiple sightings of UFOs in Christchurch this week, prompted by footage recorded by Oisin Lavelle. The footage shows a coloured blob moving erratically.
Newsfront
1 November 2013
A Te Horo iridologist breached the code of human rights and failed, as a healthcare provider, to give a Feilding grandmother proper care, the Human Rights Comission has said (Dominion Post, 27 August).
David Lange vs the scholars
1 February 2006
Checking facts should be part and parcel of academic life, but too often it isn't done.
No Will for Bill?
1 February 2001
Another year, another millennium. We saw the old century out in a very quiet manner, watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001 with friends in Auckland. A few fireworks exploded from the top of the Sky Tower -- and then it was bed time. Given that this was the day when the old century really ticked over, there was far less hooplah this time -- the cockroaches were especially quiet.