Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 incident

Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 incident

Type	Case (pilot sighting with radar)
Date	17 November 1986, early evening (twilight)
Place	Over eastern Alaska, near Fort Yukon, en route to Anchorage
Aircraft	Boeing 747-200 freighter, carrying French wine from Paris to Tokyo via Reykjavík and Anchorage
Crew	Capt. Kenji (Kenju) Terauchi; co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji; flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba
Duration	About 40–50 minutes; reported over some 400 miles (640 km)
Investigation	Federal Aviation Administration, Alaskan Region
Proposed explanations	Jupiter and Mars; moonlit ice-crystal clouds; radar split image
Also known as	JAL 1628, Japan Air Lines Flight 1628

The Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 incident took place on 17 November 1986, when the crew of a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 cargo plane flying over eastern Alaska reported unidentified lights accompanying their aircraft for about 40 to 50 minutes. Captain Kenji Terauchi described "two small ships and the mothership", the largest "twice the size of an aircraft carrier". Early reports that the object had been confirmed on radar made the case world news and prompted an investigation by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).^[1][2][4]

The FAA later concluded that the radar return was a split image of the 747 itself and that it had no radar confirmation of any other object. The skeptic Philip J. Klass argued that the crew had seen the planets Jupiter and Mars and moonlight on ice-crystal clouds, while UFO researchers such as Bruce Maccabee disputed his explanation. It has been called one of the most celebrated cases in modern UFO literature.^[1][4][5]

The flight

Flight 1628 was a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747-200 freighter flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to Tokyo's Narita International Airport, with stops in Reykjavík (Keflavík) and Anchorage, carrying a cargo of French wine for Japan. It had a crew of three: Captain Kenji Terauchi, an experienced pilot based at the time in Anchorage; the co-pilot, Takanori Tamefuji, who was flying the plane when the lights were first seen; and the flight engineer, Yoshio Tsukuba.^[1][4]

The sighting

On the Reykjavík–Anchorage leg, at 35,000 feet over eastern Alaska — Wikipedia gives the time as 17:11, while Klass wrote that the incident began about 6:15 p.m. local time, in twilight with the sun about 11 degrees below the horizon — Terauchi reported three unidentified objects that were "flying parallel and then ... very close". After about six minutes he radioed the FAA's Anchorage air traffic control centre, which said it had a return on radar and advised him to take "evasive action". Terauchi descended and turned his aircraft in a circle, but reported that the lights were still with him afterwards. He said the objects followed the plane for some 400 miles (640 km), making rapid movements and sudden stops.^[1][4]

In the report he later wrote for the FAA, Terauchi said that a few minutes after the crew first saw the lights ahead and to the left, "most unexpectedly two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face." He generally described the amber-white lights as resembling the exhaust of jet or rocket engines, and drew a sketch of a giant, walnut-shaped craft. The 747's own weather radar showed an echo at roughly the bearing of the first lights, at a range of about eight miles; all three crew members agreed it was green, the colour for the weakest echoes, and the flight engineer described it as "not a dot, but streamlike".^[4]

Other aircraft

Controllers vectored two other aircraft toward the 747 to look for the objects. United Airlines Flight 1169, flying north from Anchorage to Fairbanks on a parallel airway, was steered slightly left to pass within a few miles. Terauchi switched on his landing lights to help, and the United crew easily spotted the 747 against the still faintly light sky, but saw no other luminous object near it, even when Terauchi said the light was "just ahead of United". A westbound U.S. Air Force C-130 transport bound for Elmendorf Air Force Base also offered to look, spotted the 747 and saw nothing else. Fairbanks FAA controllers saw only Flight 1628 on their radar.^[1][4][3]

After landing at Anchorage, the crew were debriefed, and FAA investigators judged them "normal, professional, rational, (and had) no drug or alcohol involvement".^[1]

Publicity

The incident became public after inquiries by Japanese news media in late December 1986. On 30 December the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a UFO with flashing white and yellow strobe lights had followed the jet across the Arctic Circle, and on 1 January 1987 that a veteran pilot whose sighting was "confirmed on radar screens" said the object was so huge that his 747 was tiny beside it. News media reported that the FAA had seen objects near the plane even after its evasive turns. Terauchi quickly became an international media celebrity.^[1][4][5]

FAA investigation

Under pressure, the FAA reopened its inquiry. "The reason we're exploring it is that it was a violation of airspace," its Alaskan Region spokesman Paul Steucke said. In early January 1987 the FAA conducted tape-recorded interviews, through an interpreter, with the three crew members, about six weeks after the event, and Terauchi submitted a written report. Klass later regretted that the crew had not been recorded immediately after landing, when their memories were fresh.^[2][4][5]

The radar return

During the first phase of the incident a long-range Air Force/FAA radar had sporadically shown a single blip near the 747's, at a time when the pilot was reporting several objects. The FAA's technical centre near Atlantic City analysed the recorded radar data, and the FAA specialist Dennis R. Simantel found that the second blip was an "uncorrelated primary and beacon target" — which can happen when the radar echo from an aircraft and the reply from its transponder arrive at slightly different times — adding that such returns "are not uncommon". Military radar images were dismissed as clutter. By 8 January the press was reporting the FAA's reversal: the object on radar now appeared to be "an unexplained split image" of the 747, and, Steucke said, "the bottom line is that this tells us that we don't have any radar confirmation of the object that the pilot said he saw".^[1][4][5]

The crew's accounts

The separate interviews revealed significant differences. The flight engineer, Tsukuba, said the first "UFO" was a "cluster of lights ... undulating", different from town lights, seen at about the 11 o'clock position for five to ten minutes before it vanished — the radio transcript shows the pilot reporting its disappearance about four minutes after first reporting it — and that a second, "absolutely different" light was then visible further left, at nine o'clock, for 30 to 40 minutes. He could describe no shape for either, and said that he "was not sure whether the object was a UFO or not. My mind has not changed since then." The co-pilot, Tamefuji, described at first what looked like "two small aircraft" slightly below them; asked whether he could tell the lights apart from a star, he said "No", and shown Terauchi's sketch he said, "I don't see anything like this but ... if we can connect these lights it [would] be a big object". Neither reported the warmth or bright cockpit Terauchi described.^[1][4]

Klass noted that the pilot's later account also contradicted what he told controllers at the time. After reviewing transcripts, an FAA spokesman in Washington said the pilot had reported losing "sight of the object after completing his turn", with the object reappearing a few moments later, whereas Steucke said Terauchi had told FAA officials in his interview that the object "stayed with him as he turned".^[1][4]

A "UFO repeater"

The FAA's data package described Terauchi as a "UFO repeater", with two other sightings before 17 November and two more in January 1987. Terauchi was convinced UFOs were extraterrestrial and often used the words "spaceship" or "mothership"; he told the FAA he thought the mothership had deliberately positioned itself in the darkest, easterly part of the sky because "they did not want to be seen", and hoped "we humans will meet them in the near future". On 11 January 1987, on a repeat flight over roughly the same area, he reported "irregular pulsating lights ... [and] a large black chunk just in front of us ... It seems to be a spaceship, ah UFO"; when radar showed nothing, he and the FAA agreed these were lights from small villages diffused by thin clouds of ice crystals. Terauchi had also noted that his flights over Alaska were usually in daylight and that lights were confusing at night, citing an Alaska pipeline pumping station's lights reflecting off snowy mountains.^[1][4]

The data package and the leak

The FAA released a full data package to the media on 5 March 1987, including a transcript of the pilot's radio exchanges with controllers, recordings and transcripts of the crew interviews, photographs and Terauchi's report, charging $194.30 for the complete set. The FAA's Steucke stressed that the agency "does not have the resources or the Congressional mandate to investigate sightings of unidentified flying objects", and had not tried to determine what the crew saw. Internal FAA memos show the Alaskan Region was embarrassed when Klass quoted a "certified transcript" in a 30 January wire story before the official release; the region traced the leak to the Washington office, apparently through the FAA official John Callahan, who, according to Maccabee, had invited him and others to view the material in late January.^[4][5]

Explanations

Jupiter and Mars

Klass, a senior editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology and leading UFO skeptic, reported in a CSICOP press release that as the incident began near Fort Yukon, with the 747 flying south in twilight, the very bright planet Jupiter (magnitude −2.6) would have been visible on the pilot's left, where he first reported the UFO, only about 10 degrees above the horizon — "making it appear to the pilot to be roughly at his own 35,000-foot altitude". Mars, less bright, was about 20 degrees to Jupiter's right and might explain the initial report of two lights. When Terauchi said the light was "just ahead of United", Jupiter lay in that direction, low in the southeast, but far to the right of where the United crew were looking. Terauchi never once reported seeing Jupiter or Mars, though both must have been visible. "This is not the first time that an experienced pilot has mistaken a bright celestial body for a UFO, nor will it be the last," Klass said. The astronomers Nick Sanduleak and C. B. Stephenson of Case Western Reserve University computed the planets' positions for him.^[1][4][5]

Terauchi rejected the explanation. "It was not a weather phenomena," he told reporters. "Not a star. It moved with you." He said he had seen Jupiter during the flight, but that it was not the UFO.^[4]

Moonlight and ice crystals

In the Summer 1987 Skeptical Inquirer, after studying the FAA data, Klass proposed that the event involved two different stimuli. A nearly full moon stood about 12 degrees above the horizon, almost directly behind the 747, and he suggested that moonlight reflecting off turbulent clouds of ice crystals could have produced the undulating, flame-coloured lights, explaining why they kept vanishing and reappearing as cloud conditions changed; the weak, stream-like green echo on the 747's weather radar was, he suggested, an echo from the same thin ice clouds. When the plane outflew the clouds and the first lights disappeared for good, Terauchi would have searched the sky, spotted Jupiter further left and concluded it was the original UFO.^[4][5]

Bruce Maccabee, who wrote a long report on the case, called this explanation "scientific garbage", arguing that there was no reason moonlit ice crystals would produce flame-coloured lights, and that it could not explain the heat Terauchi felt or the distinct arrays of lights seen ahead of and above the plane for many minutes, when the clouds were below it. The skeptic Robert Sheaffer, writing in 2014, agreed that moonlit clouds were an unlikely display, but argued that once the giant "mothership" had been reduced to "unexplained lights" seen only by the captain's crew, and not by the other aircraft, there was little mystery left. He cited J. Allen Hynek's conclusion that "commercial and military pilots appear to make relatively poor witnesses".^[5]

Later claims

In Leslie Kean's 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, John Callahan, a former FAA division chief, wrote that the crew had seen the object too, that it flew alongside the jet after its turn, and that the CIA held more than thirty minutes of radar data confirming it but told officials at a meeting that "this never happened". Sheaffer pointed out that the crew saw only lights, and that Callahan's account of the turn contradicts the radio transcript. In 2011 the UFO blogger Ryan Daube wrote that the CIA analyst Ron Pandolfi and Maccabee, who both attended such a meeting, did not recall anyone ordering a cover-up, and that Maccabee had received all the data for his analysis.^[5]

Sheaffer concluded that Terauchi was not "an unbiased or objective observer". The science writer Brian Dunning wrote that there was "nothing extraordinary or unusual on that evening", calling Terauchi "a fine and competent pilot" who "was hardly unbiased when it came to alien spaceships", and the case "just another unevidenced aerial anecdote". UFO researchers continue to argue that the combination of visual and radar reports remains unexplained.^[1][5]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.