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Xander Dixon/Archives New Zealand
Senior archivist Hannah Bremner with an example of a letter from the public, sent to the Meteorological Society in the 1970s, in which the writer details her sighting of a UFO. The decades covered by this folder perhaps marked the height of UFO fever; the American moon landing took place in 1969, Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977, and a series of supposed UFO sightings known as the Kaikoura lights were front page news in December 1978. Individuals of all ages, professions, and backgrounds turned their eyes to the skies, and joined the hunt for answers.
Deep in basements beneath Mulgrave St, archivist Shaun McGuire winches a cog that opens towering rows of what are known as stacks – giant shelving units weighing as much as buses and holding any type of archive you can imagine. The basements are filled with these units after a 1952 blaze at a Dixon St office saw a treasure trove of government archives incinerated. Back then, archives were erratically stored around the city, and the inferno led to the creation of a national archive to safeguard the country’s records.
MONIQUE FORD/Stuff
Archives New Zealand holds hundreds of thousands of physical records, equating to more than 271 kilometres.