New Yorkers gazed into the blue sky with bemusement as a skywriting plane carefully scribbled the phrase 'How happy Is the one who says, I am a Turk' in Turkish over Manhattan.

The phrase was coined by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, in 1933 and was until recently an oath which every Turkish child was obliged to repeat twice a week at school.

But the plane then went on to scrawl more controversial slogans in the sky, including several which denied the Armenian genocide in 1915.

A plane skywrites the phrase 'How happy Is the one who says, I am a Turk' over Manhattan. It may sound like an innocuous phrase but it is perceived as having sinister connotations for Kurdish and other minorities in Turkey

The plane wrote the URL of a pro-Turkish website which denies the Armenian genocide. Both sides admit that more than a million people died but the Turkish state has always denied the majority were killed deliberately and claims many died of starvation as a result of World War I

A young American dance group, wearing t-shirts embossed with the Turkish flag on them, were hired by the US-based Turkish Institute for Progress to entertain people at a Turkish festival in Brooklyn

These included '101 years of geno-lie' and 'Truth=Peace' and the URL of a website which is designed to 'counter Armenian misinformation' about the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during and just after World War I.

Luke O'Brien tweeted: 'Nothing screams 'we have nothing to hide' than a denial over Manhattan.

Last year Kim Kardashian launched an outspoken attack on President Obama for refusing to use the word 'genocide' as he marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians.

The reality star, whose father was of Armenian origin, has used her celebrity since 2011 to bring awareness to the genocide.

In 1986 a similar stunt set off panic in New York, when a skywriting display above a Turkish-American parade was mistaken for a warning of an imminent attack by Colonel Gaddafi's Libya.

Earlier this year supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio paid for skywriters to scrawl: 'America is great! Trump is disgusting' above the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.

Some Armenian-Americans responded angrily to the skywriting on Twitter. France, Russia, Canada, Argentina, Belgium and Italy have formally recognised the genocide but Britain, the US and Israel have resisted using the phrase genocide

One of the slogans simply referred to Russia and Armenia, who are traditional allies. During World War I the Christian Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire were seen by many Turks as a fifth column, who supported their fellow Christians, Russia, who were at war with Turkey

The words 'Turkey:Truth' were left above Manhattan by the skywriting plane. The question of where the truth lies in the arguments about the Armenian genocide have been exercising historians for decades

This slogan simply says 'Let history decide'. Whereas the Holocaust is universally accepted, there remains less clarity over the Armenian genocide

The skywriter also bafflingly spelt out the names of the Kurdish organisations PYD and PKK as well as the defunct Armenian ASALA terror organisation and appeared to link them to Daesh.

A young dance group wearing Turkish flag t-shirts perform 'peace choreography' in New York. The controversy over the Armenian genocide has embroiled none other than reality star Kim Kardashian, whose family are of Armenian origin