Let's Hope They're Friendly

Let's Hope They're Friendly is the remarkable story of the world's first verified film encounter with Unidentified Flying Objects. The encounter took place early on the morning of 31 December 1978, along the Kaikoura coastline of the South Island of New Zealand. A film crew on board a freight aircraft filmed a number of bright objects that were also tracked on radar.
Those on board the aircraft that morning were Quentin Fogarty, a journalist employed by a Melbourne television station, Channel O (since renamed Channel 10); David Crockett, a freelance cameraman, and his wife, Ngaire, a freelance sound-recordist, both from Wellington, New Zealand; Dennis Grant, a New Zealand television journalist, and the flight crew, Captain Bill Startup and First Officer Bob Guard, both from Blenheim, New Zealand.
Three months after that flight, at a press conference in New York City on 26 March 1979, a group of American scientists stated that the light sources captured on film that December morning could not be explained by conventional means. Those at the press conference included Fogarty; Dr Bruce Maccabee, the scientist who headed the inquiry into the case; Professor J. Allen Hynek, director of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS); and John Acuff, the former president of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).
In December 2013, Dr Maccabee confirmed with the author that “the data could indicate that intelligence was involved (OI — Other Intelligence). For example, the event when flying south when the radar target ‘doubled in size’ and stayed that way while you looked out the window and saw a light apparently traveling with the airplane, and the associated radar targets before and after — no natural phenomenon could account for this and there were no other aircraft, hence could be (probably is) evidence of OI.”