Sighting record / 1962
Saturday, 7 July 1962. Polar winter at Hallett Station, on Cape Hallett in Antarctica. The sun stays below the horizon. Just after 11:10 pm, seven of the 18 men on the station look up. Three yellowish-white lights are crossing the sky in a line. The middle one burns brightest. A grey haze trails around them. Near the northern horizon there is a sudden flash. The course does not change. There is no sound. Then the smaller lights sink into the auroral glow. "We have no idea what it could be," the station's scientific leader told the Christchurch Press. "It was too slow for a meteorite, but too fast for a satellite." A month earlier, the same station had watched a dazzling gold light hang between two mountain peaks.
Hallett Station stood on Cape Hallett, in Victoria Land, in the Ross Dependency. It opened in 1956 and was run jointly by the United States and New Zealand from the International Geophysical Year. In 1962 the US officer in charge was Lt. Paul E. Tyler, MC USN. The New Zealand scientific leader was C.B. (Claude) Taylor. Eighteen men wintered on the ice. The sun stayed below the horizon.