I think this is something of a distortion. I'm still all consumingly busy just now so I haven't been able to give the material at the link you included more than 10 minutes time. So if someone else wants to do a more detailed analysis it would be appreciated.
I'm no technical expert, but I'll give it a try Mr. Wolf.
Firstly, it's somewhat confusing as to what the post in question actually is. It's not a Blogpost, rather it appears to be a reprint from a now defunct website. While it never states who the author is, it is an article from ~2000 re-hashing the Kaikoura-lights that includes the aforementioned "articles" in Applies Optics. The "articles" were as, Z.D.Wolf pointed out, really just Letters to the Editor by Bruce Maccebee and this article talks about the history of letters in the first person.
So it's likely a Blogpost from ~2000 by Bruce Maccebee that includes a reprint of his article/letters from 1979, reasons the Kaikoura lights are not squid boats and how Bruce outsmarted the editors of Applied Optics by taking his article that was rejected by
Nature and getting them to publish it.
Maccebee is a long time UFO believer and has championed such sketchy cases as "The Gulf Breeze Photos". (bold by me)
External Quote:
Beginning in November 1987, The
Gulf Breeze Sentinel published a number of photos supplied to them by local contractor Ed Walters that were claimed to show a UFO.
UFOlogists such as
Bruce Maccabee believed the photographs were genuine; however, others strongly suspected them to be a
hoax.
Pensacola News Journal reporter Craig Myers investigated Walters' claims a few years later, criticizing the
Sentinel's coverage of the story as "uncritical" and "sensationalist". In 1990, after Walters and his family moved, the new owners of Walters' house discovered a styrofoam model UFO hidden in the attic. Myers was able to duplicate the object in the Walters photographs almost exactly using the model UFO found in the attic. Walters later claimed that the model UFO had been "planted" in the attic.
[1][2]
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Breeze_UFO_incident
As far as I can find he never recanted.
The reprinted Letters to the Editor are difficult to read, as they resemble old FAX copies that were scanned and uploaded. It's a lot of math about how bright the object must have been at a giving distance depending on the type of film used and how much light hits it.
/thecosmicreport.com/the-kaikoura-ufo-sighting/
Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to highlight passages in the article, so I'll just have to write out the sentence I noticed.
"For highly overexposed images it is difficult to estimate the illuminance on the film plane. On the other hand, smeared images are somewhat less over exposed and allow better estimates of the film plane illuminance."
Middle of 2nd paragraph, right hand column above the formula.
To a lay person this sounds like most of the film is over and/or highly overexposed and all this math is a lot of guess work.
There is then a rebuttal letter to his letter saying, yes it's a bright light, just like on a squid boat.
Maccebee follows back up:
Interesting here, is his diagram. It's hard to read, but I got that:
1. Plane takes off at 2:17
2 At 2:19, we get box A:
"Sector A indicates uncertainties in the remembered radar distance and radar/visual azimuth angle when the object was first seen." I'm taking this as, we're not really sure where we were looking or how far it was when first seen.
3. At 2:24 we get box B: "
The vertical arrows through Sector B indicate an added uncertainty in the time at which the radar target went off the scope..." More uncertainty.
4. At 2:30 the plane makes a full 90* turn to the right then so that the piolet can now see the light, before tuning back to the left and heading back on course.
5. Box E:
"The square area at E represents the estimated location of the object when last seen."
Seems like if the "uncertain" azimuth and distances of A and B were off by a little, they could have been looking at E the whole time, right?
The article goes on and on after showing these reprinted Letters to the Editor with more diagrams and drawings and reasons the light wasn't a squid boat. More interesting is his account of how he repurposed a rejected
Nature article into Applied Optics: (I've heavily edited some of this for brevity. One can always go read the whole thing)
External Quote:
HOW THE APPLIED OPTICS ARTICLES HAPPENED TO HAPPEN!
External Quote:
Sometime in the time period 1975-77 a Florida entymologist, Dr.
Philip Callahan, read Dr. Frank Salisbury's book, THE UTAH UFO DISPLAY: A
BIOLOGISTS REPORT (Devin, Old Greenwich CT, 1974). After thinking about
the problem of identifying the UFO sightings reported therein, and, being an
entymologyst, he began to think about "bugs." He wrote:
After reproducing several short summaries of nighttime sightings
reported in Salisbury's book, Callahan wrote:
"The similarity between these descriptions and the sound and flight antics
of swarms of insects is startling."
This proposal is what I have named the "Buggy UFO Hypothesis" (BUFOH).
Callahan and Mankin submitted their paper to Applied Optics, a
scientific journal of the optics/lasers/imaging systems/ etc. trade. The
paper was submitted in December, 1977. I suspect that it would NOT have
been published except for the fact that it argued that the "optics of
insects" could solve at least part of the UFO mystery.
A press release announced the publication as an explanation for the ever-vexing UFO problem and immediately Dr. Callahan was a media celebrity,
Within 2 weeks of the publication of the BUFOH I had written my
rebuttal and sent it to the editor.
Several weeks later I got a letter from the Editor. He would not
use my letter, at least not yet. He said that to be fair to the subject he
was going to wait until all responses were in and then pick the best one.
So I was put on hold.
In the meantime the famous New Zealand sightings of December 1978
occurred.
...but the point of interest here is that by the middle of January I was deeply involved in the investigation and the BUFOH was far from my mind.
....and the fact that NATURE had reported some of the initial incorrect explanations for the NZ sightings, that NATURE would like an opportunity to correct previous errors by publishing some some
real data on the sightings. (I was wrong!)
In the middle of March I received a letter from the Applied Optics
editor. He wrote that there had been no other responses so he thought that
some version of my letter could be a rebuttal. I would have to rewrite it,
to make it shorter. I was pleased but was totally immersed in the NZ
investigation so I put aside rewriting my BUFOH rebuttal. Besides, I was
more interested in whether or not NATURE would publish the NZ article.
I was not to surprised when I received a rejection notice from
NATURE in early May.
Now a clever plot hatched in my mind. Suppose I made use of an
unintended "bait and switch?" My rebuttal to the BUFOH would be rather
"mundane" not directed toward a specific UFO sighting and not necessarily
right for an optics journal. But I had written a paper for NATURE which
made use of optics, photography, etc. to calculate the brightness of one of
the lights seen off the coast of NZ. I thouht that perhaps I could interest
the Applied Optics Editor in this, instead.
In early May, 1979, I rewrote the NATURE article to be more in line
with the Applied Optics "Letter to the Editor" format. I sent it along with
a cover letter saying that, although this did not respond directly to the
BUFOH, it nevertheless "...contains some physical data about an unusual
light source and, since the data are primarily of an optical nature, the
article is suited to your journal."
To my surprise and delight his response was positive and my letter
was published. It was the first, and so far as I know, to date, the only,
in-depth technical discussion of a specific UFO sighting to appear in a
mainstream, refereed technical journal.
Several months after my letter was published I was surprised to
receive from the editor a preprint of an article by two scientists in New
Zealand who had written a rebuttal to my paper. I was offered the
opportunity to respond to their rebuttal. Their article was published in
December, 1979 and my response was supposed to be published immediately
following their letter. However, my response ran into a few "minor
difficulties."
One of the senior officers of the Optical Society of America had not
appreciated the publication of my letter and had welcomed the letter by
Ireland and Andrews. This senior official criticized the editor for
publishing my letter and then advised the editor to reject my rebuttal. The
discussion would have ended there if it weren't for the fact that I could
claim Ireland and Andrews were wrong and I could "prove" it. I enlisted the
help of a well respected physicist who was an acquaintance of the senior
officer and he managed to pursuade the officier and the editor to publish my
rebuttal. You will note that at the end of my rebttal letter the editor
included a statment that closed the discussion.
And that's how three letters providing a technical discussion of a
single UFO sighting happened to appear in Applied Optics.
https://thecosmicreport.com/the-kaikoura-ufo-sighting/
That's enough for now, I got stuff to do.