The Christchurch Colour-Changing Sphere: Oisin Lavelle's Footage

Christchurch, June 2016. Oisin Lavelle, managing director of a Christchurch building company, lived in Lower Cashmere, a suburb at the foot of the Port Hills in the south of the city. On Monday night, 13 June, he was on his deck letting his dog Rollo out. That was when he noticed a bright light in the sky to the south-west.

He described it as a brightly lit perfect sphere. At first its lights kept changing through a wide range of colours. Then the colour spectrum narrowed. Up to three dark lines moved across the sphere like rotating bands, perhaps gyroscopically.

He watched it for two hours. He kept filming to see what it would do. Then, at about 12.40am, it sped away. It left to bursts of bright orange light, which silhouetted a dark shape against it.

Tuesday night. It reappeared. Lavelle drove nearer for a better look and saw three such objects, brilliant with lights of different colours and rotating dark bands. Accounts differ on the detail. One summary says the colour changes appeared coordinated in a second sighting involving two objects.

After reviewing his footage, Lavelle said he could see it was not a drone, or a jet, or a satellite, or reflected light, or anything else he knew. He admitted he thought he was losing his mind. The way the objects moved and changed colour, he said, was like nothing he had seen or heard of before.

Stuff and The Press published the footage, and Michael Daly framed it as the latest in a record of unexplained Kiwi UFOs. Readers answered with sightings of their own. Some asked not to be named, for fear of people's reactions. One group described an April 2016 encounter in Christchurch's Botanic Gardens. A huge, orange-coloured spherical object with flickering light. It spun. Then it shot off suddenly into the distance.

The Press put questions to the New Zealand Defence Force, to Airways Corporation, which runs the country's air traffic control, and to the Christchurch Adventure Park, then under construction on the Port Hills. None of them knew anything about the objects. There was no formal investigation.

Graham Palmer of the Hawke's Bay Astronomy Society pointed to a star. "The star Sirius is in the southwest sky for a couple of hours after sunset. It often flashes vivid colours due to turbulence in the atmosphere." The three objects of the second night, he thought, were probably the three stars of Orion's belt. Witnesses pushed back. A star did not explain why the objects moved, or shot off and then reappeared.

On 19 June, Mark Honeychurch of NZ Skeptics proposed a planet and a handheld camera. Jupiter, Mars and Saturn were all in the evening sky. The flicker was likely an optical effect of the atmosphere, and the motion of what he called a coloured blob moving erratically looked consistent with camera movement. With no reference points in the frame, the object might not have been moving at all. Other readers suggested drones, lanterns or reflections.

The case earned an entry on Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in New Zealand. Scott C. Waring posted enhanced frames on UFO Sightings Daily, suggesting a crewed craft or a remote drone. UFOCUS NZ's 2016 log has no June entry. What hung over south-west Christchurch for those two hours was never formally identified.