On the morning of December 31, 1978, I received an early-morning call from Neil Miller my chief-of-staff in the newsroom at Channel 0 (now Channel Ten) in Melbourne.
He was babbling, telling me one of our reporters and a freelance film crew had filmed UFOs from a freight plane in the skies over Kaikoura the previous night.
My friend - and fellow Kiwi - Quentin Fogarty was the reporter. I had sent him to recap another apparent encounter by two pilots 10 days earlier.
The objects were also seen by the two pilots, Bill Startup and Bob Guard, Quentin's cameraman, David Crocket, and his wife, Ngaire, the sound recordist.
They were also confirmed on ground radar in Wellington and Christchurch, and further confirmed by the plane's radar.
We also had 16mm film footage of the lights.
As news of the sightings spread through the media, Quentin was holed up in a Christchurch motel with his family, and I knew we had to get him back to Melbourne with the footage as quickly as possible.
Leonard Lee feels certain the lights were UFOs.
I was nervous the film might be confiscated before we could get our hands on it.
It was New Year's Eve and almost all the airline seats had been sold out.
Luckily, I managed to get him a first-class ticket on an Air New Zealand flight into Melbourne that night.
I was very nervous by then, concerned the film might be blank or unusable.
Later, I stood with Quentin in a darkened editing room as the film editor began spooling the footage through his machine.
And there they were: lights dancing and changing shape, lots of them - unidentified flying lights.
None of us slept that night as we worked into New Year's Day trying to pull together for international release a news story we knew nothing about.
Unlike other news stories we had absolutely no reference points for this, most of us having previously believed that UFO sightings were akin to spotting hobgoblins down the back of the garden.
Telephone calls were coming from all over the world.
The BBC asked us to feed them the story, and at one point I spoke with Walter Cronkite from the American CBS News, which was prepared to pay US$5000 for the film.
It was after the screening of a 30-minute documentary on the sightings that the sceptics - numerous scientists among them - started screaming at us from around the globe.
We had, they said, filmed Venus, Mars, Jupiter, squid boat lights, mating mutton birds, everything in fact except UFOs, whatever they were.
The media also seemed to turn on us and began slyly insinuating we had somehow hoaxed the whole thing.
It was then I decided the footage needed to be examined scientifically, so a judgment could be made as to what the objects were - or weren't.
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