Eileen Morland went out to milk the cows one morning in the South Island town of Blenheim in 1959.

She returned home about 80 minutes later with an extraordinary story.

She claimed a large craft descended from the sky and hovered above her.

Her statement was full of astonishing detail.

She saw two men inside the craft wearing silver spacesuits.

One of them was missing his left hand. Local Air Force

officials took her claim seriously. They assigned an investigator who interviewed Morland

and found her to be credible, and they found others in Blenheim who had seen similar lights.

Her story felt like a modern New Zealand myth, and like all myths, it expressed the peculiar anxieties of its time. Her story chimed with

Cold War paranoia, atomic fears, and worries over the accelerating technology of 1950s New Zealand. Understanding her

story could reveal something about a strange moment in New Zealand history. It also exposed how

the military would lie to keep her story secret in the decades that followed. What had Morland seen? What had happened to her since?

Was she still alive? Could she cast new light on her incident? After decades of secrecy,

this is her story.

Music is her story.

This is somewhere in the skies with Brian Sprague. This is somewhere in the skies with Brian Sprague. That's right. Blenheim, New Zealand was booming.

The farming town had doubled from about 6,000 people in 1945 to 12,000 in 1961.

The Moorland family was part of that population boom.

Eileen Morland, her husband Frederick, and their five children, had moved to the town by

1943.

They purchased a nine-acre farm on the corner of Old Renwick Road in Coleman's Road in the western suburb of

Springlands in the mid-1950s. They lived in a modest white wooden house with a red-tin roof and a brick

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