The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Guardian, of Ashburton, New Zealand, December 29, 1950.
See the case file.
For 19 years Mr Francis Chichester, airman, navigator and author, has pondered an apparently supernatural mystery. The flying saucer articles have given him food for deeper thought, states the "Sunday Express," London.
In 1931, Chichester, a New Zealander, astonished aviators all over the world by flying alone in a little open-cockpit Moth across the Tasman Sea. On the last lap of his dangerous journey he became, he thinks, the first man to see the weird objects now called flying saucers. Soon afterwards, in his book “Alone Over the Tasman Sea,” he recorded what he had seen. He told of flashes in an empty sky, moving erratically, coming and going with astonishing speed.
One object - "like a silver pearl" - Chichester took for an airship. It nosed up to his plane, then, in front of his astonished eyes, faded into thin air.
It is the now-familiar tale of seemingly tangible objects first flashing like heliographs, next drifting, next accelerating with lightning speed, and finally disappearing altogether. Chichester accepted the phenomenon as something which would never be explained. Now he is wondering again.
