The files, dating from 1954 to 2009, include drawings of flying saucers and alleged samples of alien writing. The files include details of New Zealand’s most famous UFO sighting when strange lights were filmed off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978.

An official report from the time said natural phenomenon could explain it.

Although the incident made international headlines at the time, the military report suggested it could be lights from boats reflected in clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus.

Following the release of the files, New Zealand Air Force spokesman Kavae Tamariki said the military did not have the resources to investigate UFO sightings and would not be commenting on the documents’ contents.

The story originates from a publicity-hungry American lab technician turned UFOlogist, Robert Hastings. Hastings worked as a lab technician before retirement and now devotes himself full-time to pushing the UFO Disclosure agenda via books and lectures. He appears to have no particular expertise other than an obsession with proving a link between UFOs and nuclear weapons.

Hastings feels it is his “patriotic duty as an American citizen” to break the international cover-up and bring The Truth to the attention of the public. Let’s be clear what Hastings believes: according to the Daily Mail, he claims “Earth is being visited by beings from another world who for whatever reason have taken an interest in the nuclear arms race”.

Alvin Lawson, an English professor at Cal State Long Beach who spent decades studying unidentified flying objects and questioning the beliefs of people who said they had been abducted, has died. He was 80. Lawson died Sept. 8 at Western Medical Center in Anaheim from complications of pneumonia, said his daughter, Leslie Dirgo.

Over the years, he developed “a personal kind of fascination” with UFOs, his daughter said. Lawson taught a class on the subject at Cal State Long Beach, started a telephone hotline about UFOs and became convinced that people who said they had been abducted actually were using memories of their birth to describe encounters with extraterrestrials.

“Do I think there are unidentified flying objects, things that people can’t explain what they are or why they’re there? Yes,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1996. “Do I think little green men are inside abducting people? No.”

With an Anaheim doctor, William C. McCall, Lawson used hypnosis on people who said they had been abducted. Lawson started becoming more skeptical of the accounts, and he and McCall decided to hypnotize people who made no claims about space aliens. They were asked to imagine being abducted so the accounts could be compared to reported abductions. Lawson was struck by the similarities.