733667-001-020-0008
AI Summary
This document details a UFO sighting reported by Japan Air Lines Flight 1628, where the crew observed two unidentified flying objects that exhibited unusual flight patterns and characteristics, leading to significant media attention and speculation.
Key Findings
- Capt. Kenju Terauchi reported seeing two unidentified flying objects while flying over Alaska. - The objects displayed unusual maneuverability and characteristics not typical of known aircraft. - Initial theories about the sightings being balloons were debunked when the source of the lights was identified as teenagers using homemade devices. - The incident led to a major UFO controversy and garnered international attention.
OCR Text
- ‘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 …
Metadata
- Agency
- National Archives and Records Administration
- Classification
- UNCLASSIFIED
- Department
- National Archives and Records Administration
- Catalog source
- View NARA catalog record
NARA Source
- NAID
- 733667
- File
- 733667-001-020-0008.jpg
- Type
- image/jpeg
No machine-readable OCR text for this asset. Photographs without captions may have no extractable text.