ON Temuka beach, Rose Fraser has potted an alien. Says she: “I first saw it from a distance and I thought: ‘That’s a big white rock on the shore line … that wasn’t there four days ago’.” A new island? “I must admit, I thought: ‘Heck, this is an alien’. It looks like it’s got big ribs coming out of it, but it looks like they could be tentacles, so I don’t know.” So she did as anyone would do when faced with a magical discovery, a visitation from another planet. She lobbed a rock at it. She prodded it with a stick. It did not move. But it did smell. She then took a photo which found its way to Otago University’s whale experts. And they ruled that this blob was the stuffing from a sperm whale’s head. How it arrived on the beach? They say it crawled there…