A new book has revealed rare historical gems buried in New Zealand’s national archives, including a bizarre WWII plan to create a “tsunami bomb” and military files detailing supposed UFO sightings.
Author Ray Waru said he wrote Secrets and Treasures to highlight the material publicly available at Archives New Zealand in Wellington — where almost 100km of shelf space is crammed with historical artifacts.
“It was totally overwhelming at the beginning,” he said. “I knew I wanted to get in the important things, the Treaty of Waitangi [New Zealand’s founding document], the Declaration of Independence, the women’s suffrage petition and a few other things, but once you start digging, one story leads on to another and I’d just follow my nose.”
The suffrage petition Waru refers to contains 36,000 signatures and was dramatically unfurled on the floor of the New Zealand parliament in 1893 by supporters of women’s right to vote.
Stretching for almost 300m, the petition, currently undergoing restoration, proved successful and led New Zealand, then a British colony, to become the first country in the world to grant women the vote later that year.
Alongside notable historical documents, such as a letter written by explorer captain James Cook before his final voyage, are curiosities like “Project Seal,” a top-secret US-New Zealand attempt to create a doomsday device to rival the nuclear bomb.
The project was launched in June 1944 after a US naval officer noticed that blasting operations to clear coral reefs around Pacific islands sometimes produced a large wave, raising the possibility of creating a “tsunami bomb.”
Explosive tests carried out in waters north of Auckland led scientists to conclude that the weapon was feasible and a series of 10 massive blasts offshore could create a 10m tsunami capable of inundating a small coastal city.
“It was absolutely astonishing,” Waru said. “First that anyone would come up with the idea of developing a weapon of mass destruction based on a tsunami ... and also that New Zealand seems to have successfully developed it to the degree that it might have worked. I only came across it because they were still vetting the report, so there it was sitting on somebody’s desk [in the archives].”
Waru said the project was shelved in early 1945, despite the success of initial, small-scale tests.
“If you put it in a James Bond movie, it would be viewed as fantasy, but it was a real thing,” he said.
Among the other oddities in the archives are New Zealand Department of Defence records of hundreds of UFO sightings by members of the public, military personnel and commercial pilots, mostly involving moving lights in the sky.
Some of the accounts include drawings of flying saucers, descriptions of aliens wearing “pharaoh masks” and alleged examples of extra-terrestrial writing.
New Zealand’s most famous close encounter was when a TV crew recorded strange lights off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978.
However, in a disappointment for ET spotters, the military concluded the lights could be explained by natural phenomena such as lights from boats being reflected off clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS