Ah Dunedin. To many this southern city is synonymous with gothic architecture, unruly Scarfies and the University of Otago. Having been a Scarfie myself, I’ve seen my fair share of wild parties and dishevelled flats. Pranks provided some relief from the icy winters and endless assignments. In my first year at the halls of residence, my friends and I were on the tamer end of the scale: water bombs, fake spiders, chilli sauce… Once, a friend patted mashed potato into a small, empty pottle of vanilla ice-cream, re-sealed the tub, and presented to an unwitting victim. I watched incredulously as the trusting recipient downed several spoonful’s before realising something was wrong. ‘This tastes funny!’ Their brows twitched with confusion and the rest of us bit our cheeks in laugher.

Making mischief is nothing new at Otago. But you would be hard pressed to find a story that can compare to the planning, ingenuity and hilarious success of the New Zealand UFO hoax pulled off by students from Knox College in the 1950s.

It began with student shenanigans…

The year was 1952. Students at Knox College, the castle like fortress in North East Valley, were nearing their final exams and summer holidays. And they were craving mischief. Throughout the past few years, they’d noticed reports of UFOs in the Otago Daily Times (ODT), the local newspaper. Critical of the sensationalised reporting, they decided to “cure the ODT of flying saucerites and inoculate that worthy journal with a healthy degree of septicism” (typos in the original).

The instigators of the UFO hoax handed out pamphlets and recruited like-minded pranksters before agreeing on a chain of events. The overarching idea of the ‘Interplanetary hoax’ was this: on the 6^th of December, two flying sauces, one blue and the other green, would fly over New Zealand at supersonic speeds. Both would start in tandem and split before going their separate routes over the country. The students created a flight map and credible ETAs of the saucers at various regions.

Starting on the 6th, local newspapers started received reports from ‘concerned locals’ who had seen UFOs flying at frightening speeds. Sightings placed the saucer in the South at 11pm. As observations were pieced together by officials, they deduced that the saucers had travelled in a southerly direction and split up midway down the country. The press took the sightings seriously and it swiftly became a media sensation. 

The air shivered with anxiety and New Zealanders were on tender-hooks. One imagines that even the most sceptical, surly farmers probably let their eyes linger a little longer in the stars those weeks. Behind the hysteria, the Knox pranksters were stunned by the success of their scheme. They’d planned it well” by December they’d returned home to different parts of the country and each member was appropriately located to make reports to a local news outlet, detailing the time, shape and colour of the saucer(s). Additionally, while the students reported the sightings under false identities, these were not checked by news reporters.

The New Zealand UFO hoax is revealed…

The pranksters remained tight lipped for the next couple of decades, but eventually many began to feel uncomfortable that the sightings were still being taken seriously. Eerily, there is room for speculation. Clark (2013) comments that the pilots of a United States Air Force bomber travelling over the Bulk of Mexico saw UFOs on the night of December 6^th 1952, independent of the hoax.

Some of the brains behind the operation have gone on to be top-class academics, for example, professors in statistics (Ross Leadbetter), medicine (John Scott and Ian McDonald) and education lecturers (Russell Cowie and Ken Nichol). The hoax was eventually revealed by Ken Nichol and further detailed in the 1994 New Zealand Sceptics Journal by Sir John Scott. It wasn’t the last time Scarfies provided the public with riveting entertainment, nor was it the last.

References

Clarke, A. (2013). The best prank? University of Otago 1869-2019- writing a history.

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