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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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Mass
hysteria? Basically, it's a
collective delusional fear - witches, the devil, the end of the world -
typically affecting small, tight-knit communities but sometimes involving an
entire populace. Examples? Salem, the US village where at least 20 people and
two dogs were executed for practising witchcraft, is the classic case, and
the Nigerian vanishing genitalia epidemic of 1990 is a more recent instance. And in
New Zealand? Many cite the
outbreak of satanic, ritualistic and paedophilic accusations, of which Peter
Ellis was a victim, as an example of this phenomenon, but the best local
instance was the great Unidentified Flying Dirigible panic of 1908-09. The
flying what? Dirigible. Zeppelin,
or airship, a craft associated with the Kaiser regime, then the international
bogey du jour. What
happened? Despite no such craft operating
in New Zealand at that time, hundreds of people began seeing vast, glowing
dirigibles at night, at first in deepest Southland, but the panic really
started with the celebrated Balclutha incident. Things
happen in Balclutha? Yes, the
Clutha Free Press reported on the "phantom airship", a huge
illuminated object moving at great speed, whereupon sightings of the UFD
moved northward to Oamaru. Surely
people were sceptical? This from
the Otago Daily Times reporter: "All those scholars who saw the ship
were interrogated singly and independently and were asked to draw an
impression of what they had seen. The result was six drawings, the degree of
resemblance and unanimity of which was nothing short of dumbfounding to all
sceptics." What
happened next? Eyewitness accounts
of the glowing craft spread to Gore, Marlborough, Hawke's Bay, Wanganui,
Palmerston North, Waihi, Thames and Dargaville. Pretty soon, Unidentified
Flying Dirigibles were seen in Melbourne, and Goulburn, NSW, but apart from
one more visit to Gore, sightings of the phantom airship in New Zealand
ceased. Could
they have been UFOs? (Long
silence.) |
