What happened
A Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 freighter carrying French wine from Reykjavík to Anchorage was cruising at 35,000 feet over remote Alaska in the early evening of 17 November 1986 when the crew noticed lights to their left. Captain Kenju Terauchi, a former fighter pilot with decades of experience, said two smaller craft with rows of glowing, flickering lights then took up position close in front of the jet, so bright they lit the cockpit, before dropping back. Later he said he saw the outline of something enormous, which he estimated as twice the size of an aircraft carrier. He asked Anchorage Center about traffic; there was none. The crew said the jet's weather radar showed a target, and the Air Force's Elmendorf radar centre briefly reported an uncorrelated primary return near the 747. Controllers gave permission for turns and a descent, and Terauchi said the lights stayed with him. The encounter lasted nearly an hour. The FAA interviewed the crew and found them professional and rational.
The official explanation
The FAA concluded its radar returns were not confirmed: military returns were dismissed as clutter and an FAA return as a coincidental split image of the 747 itself, and a United Airlines jet and a USAF C-130 sent nearby saw nothing. Philip J. Klass argued the crew saw Jupiter and Mars low on the horizon, noting the captain never mentioned seeing those bright planets; Klass also said the captain's later accounts differed from what he told controllers at the time. The FAA's data package described Terauchi as having reported UFOs on other occasions, including one in January 1987 later attributed to village lights diffused by ice crystals.
The anomalous case
Three trained crew members observed the lights for close to an hour, and the event was logged in real time on FAA voice tapes, with a military radar centre briefly reporting an unknown primary target near the 747 and later 'a flight of two'. FAA files on the case, which The Black Vault located in the National Archives after the FAA said they would be destroyed, run to more than 1,500 pages of radar data, transcripts and interviews. Former FAA division chief John Callahan later said that when he briefed the case in Washington in early 1987, CIA personnel and Reagan administration science advisers attended, and a CIA representative told participants the event never happened. Physicist Bruce Maccabee argued the radar data show a real target at times, not mere split images.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- FAA case file on JAL 1628 (NARA RG 237), part 1 official, documents.theblackvault.com
- FAA case file on JAL 1628 (NARA RG 237), crew interview report official, documents.theblackvault.com
Sources
- Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 incident Wikipedia
- The Vault Files: 1986 Alaska JAL Flight 1628 The Black Vault
Witness reports elsewhere
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