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eS ee oe ON nd yee (iA i i el — ican nae UFO not a separate object — a familiar | nink, who had stepped in to help |... At least he wasn’t handling an | the captain sees something, and it hs 7 radar quirk. The people at El- | out.) The track may not have | air crash. The subject matter doesn’t look like anything he’s continued from Page mendorf, meanwhile, emphasized | been very strong, Rich told Bem- fascinating, and things kept hap- | seen in 29 years of flying. Then, © NOW YOU SEE WHAT | that their radar signals hadn’t | ton, but none of the controllers at | pening. Early on Jan.. 11, for | says Elias, he’s “got to look at the captain and the FAA | lasted long enough to be con- | the time thought it might be a | instance, Capt. Terauchi again ing else real critical from had gotten themselves into. | firmed, and they attributed the | split image of the 747. reported seeing unusual lights | now on... the poor guy’s got to Dozens of times, day after day, | apparent hits to coincidental Steucke called Rich in for a | while flying over Alaska. Once he | take a real hard look and say, ‘Is the phone rang in Paul Steucke’s | electronic clutter. chat. He made Rich aware of the | landed and learned the location | that another one?’ ” . office: NBC in New York. Radio The calls kept coming. Steucke | awkward position he had put the | of a reported temperature inver- Inside the FAA offices, mean- Hawaii. Star Magazine. Canadian | kept getting new bits of material, | other controllers in — s i sion, he provided an explanation: | while, the attitude was, J can’t Broadcasting. The Sunday Lon- | and the thread of the story kept | for them without their knowl- | Ashe flew near Arctic Village, the | believe it. What is all this interest? don Mirror. The French News | wandering. He felt as if he were | edge. And from then on, Rich | town lights had gotten distorted | But the sighting also generated Agency. The Washington office of TRUD, the Soviet National Daily Newspaper. National Public Ra- dio. People magazine. Public response was so great that the FAA decided to inter- view the JAL crew a second time and review the radar tapes. And Steucke started thinking strat- egy. What was the ith ahaa responsibility? What did it ? The first officer and the flight engineer again corroborated the captain’s dramatic report. But the FAA decided that the radar tapes did not — necessarily. The object on radar was now thought to be an accidental split image of the JAL 747, Steucke said, and “blowing up a balloon” —~-each time he doled out a bit of infor- mation, the story got bigger. He was constantly looking for holes in the data and trying to stay ahead of the reporters — not always with success. Hal Bernton, for one, of the Anchorage Daily News. After the FAA explained its double radar signal as a “split beacon,” Bernton tracked down controller Sam Rich, who told him that three controllers had seen a radar image of an object near 1628 that night, and “all three of us thought ‘there was a track,” or aircraft. (That would be Rich, Henley and John Aar- referred interview requests to Steucke’s office, where reporters were informed that Rich didn’t want to talk. A message also went out over the FAA employees’ “code-a-phones” at work, warn- ing that reporters would hound them on this story and that FAA policy required them to go through public affairs. Steucke worried that this mix- up made him look bad. One day he’s saying only one controller had handled 1628, and now he finds out there were five, counting supervisors, and they seemed to be disputing the FAA’s publicly stated position! What wn the world was everybody going to think? by bouncing off ice crystals cre- ated when cold air got sand- wiched between two layers of warm air. Not a rare phenome- non. But, initially, the informa- tion was presented as if the FAA had come up with the explana- tion. Terauchi complained to re- porter Hal Bernton, aware that it made him look like a crackpot. Hank Elias, the Alaska air- traffic manager, felt bad for the captain. A pilot is always seeing things in the sky, he says, because that’s where he’s looking all the time. “You see things,” he says, “and you rationalize.” That’s a star, that’s another airplane, that’s a navigational beacon. So wonder: For all anyone knew, the United States or the Soviet Union was testing some advanced ex- perimental craft — what better place? Or maybe there was a physical explanation, beyond our current awareness, as meteorites once were, and radioactivity, atomic fission, the anomalous motion of the perihelion of Mer- cury. And was it likely that in all the vast universe, only Earth would be singled out for life? “We all carry with us the seed of the possibility that what Capt. Terauch: described could actual- ly have been there,” says Steucke. “The debunkers are trying to keep us honest. At the same time, SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight. Kngs, 07 mg. “tar” 1.2ng nicotine: WB's, 17 ing. “tar”, 1.3\mg-nicatine: Linhts Kings, 10 ma. “tac, O68 mg. nicotine; Lights TOs, Wim: “tar, 0.9imgenicorine, Mentho} Kings, 1Bimg: “tai, 1.2 ma. nicotine av. per cigarette by FTC method. —_ ? — - < e . - as Sar “ . *, ~ ate : ee. al rE wi ~ ai. y “.- —— ‘ < a BY P * . : — Ai-g Avaiable in Lights & Menthol Kings, ~and Reyular JOOS