The January 19, 1910 Invercargill, New Zealand encounter — Mayor Charles Stephen Longuet, a vicar, and a policeman reportedly watched a cigar-shaped object hover over the city.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO ENCOUNTER REPORT
The 1910 Invercargill, New Zealand Mayor’s UFO Encounter
Just after 11 PM on January 19, 1910, in the southern New Zealand city of Invercargill, a small group that reportedly included the sitting mayor, a vicar, and a policeman watched a cigar-shaped object hover low over the city. A door on its side opened; a man’s voice shouted something in a language none of them recognized; the door closed, and the object accelerated away. The mayor’s identity checks out against the historical record — Charles Stephen Longuet really was Invercargill’s mayor at the time — which gives this case an unusually verifiable anchor point among the many undated or vaguely-attributed reports in the 1909–1910 New Zealand airship wave.
Date: January 19, 1910
Sighting Time: About 23:00
Day/Night: Night
Location: Invercargill, New Zealand
Urban or Rural: Urban
No. of Entity(s): 1 (visible in the doorway)
Entity Type: Craft occupant
Entity Description: Undocumented beyond a man’s voice, shouting words in an unfamiliar language from a lateral door
Hynek Classification: CE-III
Duration: Undocumented
No. of Object(s): 1
Description of the Object(s): A cigar-shaped object with a lateral door
Shape of Object(s): Cigar-shaped
Size of Object(s): Undocumented
Color of Object(s): Undocumented
Distance to Object(s): Undocumented
Height & Speed: Hovering at roughly 90 feet altitude, then accelerated away
Number of Witnesses: Several, reportedly including the mayor, a vicar, and a policeman
Special Features/Characteristics: A door opened, a man shouted in an unrecognized language, then the door closed before departure
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Source: Vallée, Jacques, Magonia Database; independently corroborated in at least one other
period UFO catalog
Summary/Description: A group reportedly including the Mayor of Invercargill, a vicar, and a policeman watched a cigar-shaped object hover over the city. A door opened on its side; a man shouted words in an unfamiliar language; the door closed and the object accelerated away.
Witnesses: Reportedly including the Mayor of Invercargill (Charles Stephen Longuet, confirmed to have held office 1909–1910), a vicar, and a policeman, among others
Related Cases: Likely connected to the broader 1909 New Zealand phantom airship wave documented elsewhere on this site (Oamaru, Kaitangata, Kelso, Gore, and other 1909 entries)
DETAILED REPORT
The account, as preserved in Jacques Vallée’s Magonia Database and independently corroborated in at least one other period UFO catalog, describes a cigar-shaped object hovering at roughly 90 feet altitude over Invercargill. A man appeared at a lateral door in the object’s side and was heard shouting words in an unfamiliar language. The door then closed, and the object accelerated away and was lost from view.
This case sits within a larger, well-documented context: the New Zealand phantom airship wave of 1909, which ran from July through a final reappearance in September, produced dozens of sightings across the South Island, many with named witnesses and contemporary newspaper coverage (see this archive’s dedicated 1909 page for the Oamaru, Kaitangata, Kelso, Gore, and other entries in that wave). The Invercargill case, dated to January 1910, appears to be either a late continuation of that wave or a related early-1910 event following the same general pattern — a low-altitude, cigar-shaped object with apparent occupants, observed by multiple witnesses at night.
Mainstream historical treatment of the broader New Zealand wave is notably cautious. A 2020 retrospective by the Southland Museum, writing about the 1909 sightings generally, concluded plainly that “New Zealanders struggled to explain the phenomenon in 1909, and an explanation has never been found. The likeliest is that most people saw nothing at all, and were influenced by current events and the exaggerated reports of others.” That assessment is offered as the most probable general explanation for the wave as a whole, not as a specific finding about the Invercargill case — no source reviewed for this page identifies a specific mundane cause for the January 1910 Invercargill sighting itself, the way the Caerphilly Mountain case’s evidence was specifically traced to a car part.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
Invercargill — A Verifiable Mayor, an Unverified Newspaper Source
- The mayor’s identity is confirmed: Charles Stephen Longuet held the office of Mayor of Invercargill from 1909 to 1910, matching the case’s dating exactly. This is a genuine point in the case’s favor — the named official credential is not an invented detail.
- No primary newspaper citation has been located for this specific case: despite searching period New Zealand newspaper wave coverage, this search did not turn up an original Southland-region article specifically describing the mayor, vicar, and policeman encounter. The case is corroborated across at least two independent secondary UFO catalogs, which is meaningfully better sourcing than a single-catalog citation, but it falls short of the direct newspaper sourcing available for several of the July 1909 wave cases documented elsewhere in this archive.
- The broader wave has a widely-accepted general explanation that this specific case does not inherit automatically: historians studying the 1909–1910 New Zealand wave generally point to mass suggestion and misperception, amplified by extensive press coverage of the concurrent British and American airship scares, as the most likely overall explanation. That’s a reasonable default hypothesis for any individual case within the wave, including this one — but it remains a general explanation for the pattern, not a specific finding about what the mayor, vicar, and policeman actually saw that January night.
- Presented with calibrated confidence: this case is neither debunked (like Caerphilly Mountain, where the physical evidence was specifically identified) nor confirmed by primary contemporary sourcing (like several other 1909 New Zealand cases). It sits in between — a real official’s name attached to an account that current research cannot fully verify or specifically explain.
The Invercargill case has the kind of witness credential that makes a report worth taking seriously — a real, verifiable mayor, in office at exactly the right time. It doesn’t yet have the primary-source newspaper backing that would make it as solid as the best-documented cases in the 1909 New Zealand wave, nor does it have a specific identified explanation the way Caerphilly Mountain does. It remains an open case, honestly labeled as one.
“Several witnesses among them the vicar, the Mayor, and a policeman saw a cigar-shaped object hovering at 30 meters altitude. A man appeared at a lateral door and was heard shouting some words in an unknown language. The opening closed, and the object accelerated and was lost to sight.”
Vallée, Jacques, Magonia Database, on the January 19, 1910 Invercargill, New Zealand encounter
