733667-001-020-0011
AI Summary
This document details the events surrounding a UFO sighting by the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 1628 while flying over Alaska. The crew reported seeing strange lights that appeared to follow their aircraft, leading to an investigation by FAA officials. The incident sparked significant media interest and raised questions about the FAA's handling of UFO reports.
Key Findings
- The crew of JAL Flight 1628 reported seeing unidentified lights during their flight. - The lights disappeared when another aircraft approached. - FAA officials conducted interviews with the crew but deemed no further investigation necessary. - The incident gained media attention weeks later, leading to public curiosity and inquiries. - The FAA was concerned about the implications of associating with UFO reports.
OCR Text
Se te ee ae Dippin a St oe ee Jt 2 2 Sint e = ae tees Sven Pare tS CRT see? Did the Sater ae night plan plans . eo ns net gtill have the traffic? Henley: Do you c JAL: Affirmative. Nine o'clock. WHATEVER HAD SHOWED UP ON the military radar wasn’t there anymore. And Henley wasn’t seeing much, either. He had never really gotten a good track on whatever it was. United Airlines Flight No. 69 had just taken off from Anchorage; it was in the same air zone as 1628. Henley radioed the pilot to go take a look around 1628, and a Totem C-130 military flight with extra gas offered to fly over as well. Up in the JAL cockpit, 1628 could make out the United airliner. The two planes flashed landing lights at each other, and the United pilot advised ground control that he could see 1628, set against a light background. We were flying the east side of Mount McKinley. ... We knew that they were watching us. When the United plane came by our side, the spaceship disappeared suddenly, and there was nothing but the ight of the moon. Neither United nor the Totem C-130 saw a thing, other than the JAL jumbo jet. Whatever it was had split — instanta- neously, it seemed to the crew — toward the east, toward Canada. HE STUNNED CREW of Flight No. 1628 landed about 6:25 p.m. on Runway 6R at Anchorage Interna- tional, ending a 50-minute ordeal that was terrifying and fantastic. Henley im- . mediately took a breather to clear the knots out of his gut. With “questions in my mind that I couldn’t an- swer,” he sat down to write his report, as the head of security for the FAA pulled up in his Lincoln Continental. This would be Jim Derry, a steely, bulky, bearded man without hair, who was once an adviser with the Army’s Special Forces in Vietnam. He, security agent Ron Mickle and James Wright from - flight standards ran the crew around the block a couple of times on what they'd seen. “We weren’t really sure what we had,” Derry said later. “Was it a security situation, or a violation of air space? It was just a strange thing.” Derry judged the captain to be “a very stable, competent professional.” He was sure he was concerned. “It’s like driving down the highway on an empty read and all of a sudden four lights come up over your left windshield and follow you for an © hour,” said Derry. “It gets your attention.” The first officer and flight engineer hadn’t had as clear or sustained a view as the captain. “But what they saw, wemes mi pretty much the same,” Derry said. Si alent alee thocree 6 Stearact professional, rational, no drug or alcohol involvement. It didn’t seem to Derry that any further investigation would be warranted by se- curity. “There was nothing there,” he said, “to indicate that anything was inse- cure.” If anybody decided to do anything, it would have to be the people at flight standards, or air traffic control. Ss Wala ob the sal Dea es “over to a hotel in Anchorage where a security guy from Washington was stay- | ing — Dave Smith, manager of the FAA’s Investigations and Security Division, who was in town to talk about drug-monitor- ing programs. Derry had spent the day- showing him around. He took Smith for coffee, told him all about the sighting, and the two men mused over the bewildering things that sometimes happen in the vast open terrain of the far Far North, in America’s last frontier. OR WEEKS, NOTHING happened. The FAA inspectors already had their hands full with far more pressing cases, crashes in which people had died, and the JAL sighting got banished to the bottom of the investiga- tions pile. Out of sight, it was out of mind — until the day before Christmas, when Paul Steucke got a phone call from Shokichi Kibe, an Anchorage restaura- teur and correspondent for the Kyodo News Service of Japan. It seems that Capt. Terauchi’s spell- binding report was the talk of the cockpit among Japanese pilots. The London bu- reau chief for KNS, Hiroshi Iguchi, had gotten wind of it from some Japanese fliers he was friendly with, and he had interviewed the captain at the Forum Hotel, a JAL haunt, when Terauchi flew - through London in December. Soon KNS was dispatching Shokichi Kibe to confirm the story with Steucke. The forgotten JAL sighting was about to be raised from the dead. “Somebody had picked up pretty good information,” said Steucke, a lean, silver- haired career government employee, like his father before him, who drives a white Porsche and keeps a jar of M&M’s on his organized desk. Kibe wanted to know if it was true. Steucke looked back five weeks in his files and told him, “Yeah.” It had com- pletely slipped his mind. Kibe was wel- come to come over — Steucke would give him whatever information was available. After all, this was Alaska. You ask a straight question up here, you tend to get a straight answer Steucke had no idea what he was about to get into after the holidays, even after Jeff Berliner of United Press Interna- tional in Anchorage called, wanting to know about this JAL sigh…
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
- 733667-001-020-0011.jpg
- Type
- image/jpeg
No machine-readable OCR text for this asset. Photographs without captions may have no extractable text.