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- ‘THE PILGT’S DRAWINGS “Two spaceships and a. : ” is how senior JAL Capt. Kenju Terauchi described what tallied his HE OTHER UFO MYSTERY out of Alaska happened some winters ago rs berarope erupted high in the night sky. The duty officers the Federal Aviation Administration were going wild. The public affairs guy was up all night on the phone. The wavering lightballs were being reported — it was weird, and people were getting ZOOCY. Somebody called up the control tower at Anchorage International, and the tow- er said, Well, they look like balloons to us. So the reporters immediately went to the hot-air-balloon people and said, Have you been flying balloons?, and it just so le had just held a b t and i eect thers i ie ne aecatea people had just held a banquet and every single one of them was there, a — so that blew that theory. ene ® accounted for It was a nightmare, until some FAA employees with teenagers started coming up to i = = MARGUERITE DEL GIUDICE _ the public affairs guy, Paul Steucke, saying things in the hallways like, “Uh, Paul, my kid tells me... .” It turns out that the teenagers had devised an inventive way to amuse themselves in the biting, dry, desperately uneventful Alaskan winter at 20 below. They would take those flimsy bags from the dry cleaners and fashion a contraption involving thin cardboard with a votive candle stuck to it and soda straws strung together in the shape of an X. If you light the candle and breathe into the bag, the thing will fill with light and float in a wavery glow all the way up to 5,000 feet. The teenagers would send up six of these over half a mile, confounding the adults with manufactured lightballs. The news was a huge relief. Some bags finally turned up hanging off telephone wires — Paul Steucke took pictures — and that was the most captivating event to emerge from the vast Far North in many years. Until news broke last Christmastime that would prove far more troublesome to explain: A veteran Japan Air Lines pilot in a jumbo jet reported being shadowed for almost an hour by something that leoked and behaved like nothing he had experi- enced in his 29 years in the skies. His report began, Two thousand years ago, if a hunter saw a TV, how did he describe tt to other people? My experience was similar to this... . It created many questions that a His name was Capt. Kenju Terauchi. - The crew was shaken but stable — and convinced they had seen something that could be neither ignored nor readily ex- plained. But no harm had been done, and at first all the FAA appeared to have on its hands were highly credible people reporting highly incredible things — fas- cinating, but inconclusive. The scant files on the matter dropped quietly to the bottom of the investigation heap, and the sighting seemed destined to go down as just one of those crazy Alaskan things. Of course, that’s not what happened. For Capt. Terauchi had unwittingly set in motion a sequence of events that would subject him to international attention — to excited curiosity and gawking and ridicule — and absorb the FAA in proba- bly the biggest UFO controversy to be aired in the public domain since the Air Force got out of the UFO business in 1969. Let’s backtrack to that baffling Mon- day in November, around suppertime in the northern skies of Alaska, where the sun disappears until the middle of MARGUERITE DEL GIUDICE is an Inquirer staff writer. JAPAN AIR LINES FLIGHT NO. 1628, a Boeing 747 — a “heavy” — left Iceland bound for Anchorage on the afternoon of Nov. 17, flying above 30,000 feet and under a nearly full moon. It was the middle leg of a Paris-to-Tokyo cargo delivery. A big load of Beaujolais wine had been picked up in Paris the day before, along with Capt. Kenju Terauchi, First Officer Takanori Tamefuji and Flight Engineer Yoshio Tsukuba — who rode with the wine to Iceland and spent the night at a new hotel where the beds were too small. The next day, they took the fuel- efficient Great Circle Route over the pole. An unstable air current shook the plane for about two hours; otherwise, the flight was uneventful. But then they crossed the Canadian-Alaskan border and headed to- ward Fort Yukon. Thirty-five thousand feet below, Carl Henley was placing them on his radar scope. The FAA’s Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center hummed with a calm intensity and glowed in radar green — the climate of an inner sanctum. Henley’s a big, mustachioed fellow from Arkansas with wavy black hair and seven years’ experience as a controller. This was his sixth day of work, an overtime shift. He directed 1628 to fly directly to Tal- keetna, and it was at this point, as the plane turned left in response, that the crew headed dead into their curious close encounter. At first, whatever it was looked to the crew just like a couple of lights, moving off in the distance. The lights.could have been fighter jets or special aircraft on special missions. The crew ignored them. But the lights didn’t go away, so First Officer Tamefuji radioed to ground con- trol to find out whether anybody else was up there with them. When Henley told him no, Tamefuji replied in halting-but- adequate English, “Ah, we in sight two traffic in front of us, one mile about.” A little too close for comfort. Henley wanted to know if it was mili- tary or civilian, but the crew couldn’t tell. INQUIRER They did see what looked like navigation-_ al lights, strobe lights. Henley: Roger, sir. Say the color of the strobe and beacon lights? JAL: The color is white and yellow, I think. Now that was odd. White and yellow, but no red, the international color for aircraft beacons. THERE WERE THIN AND SPOTTY clouds near the mountain below the plane. The air current was steady, the sky was clear as a windshield, and Terauchi thought the flying conditions were quite pleasant. ~ Then the two lights started maneuver- ing like two bear cubs playing with each other, Terauchi would write later. He had to try to take a picture of this — maybe someone else would know what it was. Flight Engineer Tsukuba handed Ter- ~ auchi his camera bag, and a comedy of errors began. Terauchi’s Minolta Alpha 7000 was loaded with ASA 100 film, intended for outdoor daytime scenery on the ground, and here he was flying through the shadows of the sky, six miles up, in a darkened cockpit. It would never work. He aimed. The autofocus lens whirred in and out, open and closed, like a dilating pupil — it wouldn’t set a focus in the dark. He switched to manual focus, but the shutter wouldn’t release. Then the plane started to shudder, and he couldn’t hold the camera still. I placed my camera back in the camera bag and concentrated on observing the lights. The crew was fixated on these objects, not knowing what to think. Then the experience turned hairy — the things came at them, stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights... . The inside of the cockpit shone bright- ly, like a small den with a big TV, an Terauchi felt warmth on his face. These things were big, at least the size of a DC-8. He thought he might be flying into the rear end of some aircraft, into a midair collision. The ships appeared to hover in front of the jumbo jet, then flew in level flight at the same speed, slightly higher, 1,000 feet away — a stone’s throw by the distance rule of the sky. Terauchi could see what looked like exhaust pipes, and rotating rows of amber and white lights in the middle of these flying nozzles. Something about them reminded him of a charcoal fire. No manmade machine could do what these objects were doing, Terauchi thought. Flying in tandem around a jumbo jet hurtling through space at 550 miles an hour? It made no sense. ’ For three to five minutes, the ships stayed in formation with the jumbo jet, then moved forward and off to the left. Honestly, we were simply breathtaken. The fear of a midair collision had passed. We probably would have felt more in danger and would have been prepared to escape if the spaceships were shaking un- steadily or were unable to stop themselves. But there was nothing unsteady about these aifships — their maneuvers were flawless. continued on next page —_— _ aes — ee ee 15