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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 sighting that was making the papers in Tokyo. Steucke got. the file out again. Berliner talked to Jim Derry, probed a little deeper and filed a story that night that was transmitted nationwide. The next day reality set in. The phones rang and rang and rang. It reminded Steucke of the first big story he had panied three weeks after taking this job in 1983, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing DC-10 taking off on a foggy day had taxied down the wrong runway, in the wrong direction, and run over a Navajo twin-engine commuter flight with eight people on board. The office was inundat- ed with inquiries, day and night, until Steucke could get the news out that no one had been killed. But this story was far more idiosyncrat- Sf ic-—and Sickie tdshake Sots wan. going to have as much trouble getting rid~ ‘of it as the JAL crew had with whatever those tenacious lights were that had shad- owed them. Of course, most i inquiries came from reporters. But Steucke just took that as a reliable reflection of genuine curiosity among average citizens — the reporters were only acting on their behalf, as scouts. Before long, Steucke started hearing rumblings from afar that higher-ups in the FAA were queasy about any associa- tion with unidentified flying objects. The agency’s image might be tarnished. Steucke had split for Alaska 12 years ago, to get away from the commutes and hassles of the East Coast, and word of the honchos’ uneasiness made him yearn to go paint pictures — his avocation. He started to wonder where he was treading, how far he should go. Like Capt. Terauchi, Steucke had en- tered the dangerous arena into which are cast all those who dare to publicly involve themselves with unidentified flying ob- jects. UFO indicates just that, a flying object that is simply unidentified, regard- less of speculation about its origin. But to many, the term has come to suggest the flying saucers of supermarket tabloids. Those who show interest risk being la- beled as true-believers in visitors from outer space, intellectual flyweights, or just birdbrains with plenty of room up- stairs to rent. To avoid ridicule, most serious researchers have retreated to the shadows and keep their mouths shut about what could be going on in the seemingly infinite universe. Capt. Terauchi probably would have been wiser to do that; he could have spared himself the phone calls, the rub- bernecking, the mockery. But by all ac- counts he is an honest and forthright man. By doing his duty, by reporting in good conscience something in the sky that wasn’t supposed to be there, he brought public controversy upon himself and em- barrassing scrutiny within a profession that is highly conscious of image. The FAA, meanwhile, did not want to encourage public hysteria by cavalierly ing information whose meaning it could not ascertain. It also did not want to cast aspersions on the crew — it had no reason to — or create the impression that it had anything to cover up, because it didn’t. The FAA just didn’t know. _ It was a lose-lose situation. HE AIR FORCE HAD spent 22 maddening years investigating UFO reports before closing down the last government watchdog, Project Blue Book — and the FAA had no interest in picking up where the re- treating Air Force had left off. The UFO issue had lent itself too readily to fantasy and hoax; it was impossible to control. Its history had been protracted, complicated and attended to by myriad panels and projects that passed the hot potato around without settling anything — a scenario laid out in The - UFO Controversy in America, a 1975 book - by Temple University professor David Michael Jacobs. INQUIRER - eee ie eee . ox — Te -Ground control: Do you still have the traffic? — _JAL: Affirmative. Nine o’clock. ta Se ae ee ae aE eS | Project Blue Book had been preceded by Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Twinkle, with the high point of Air Force involvement occurring in 1952. There had been a tremendous number of UFO re- ports that year — including radar scope sightings, later deemed inaccurate, that led the Air Force to scramble jets to intercept UFQs above the nation’s capi- tal. So the CIA convened a panel of five distinguished nonmilitary scientists — the Robertson Panel — to examine whether the sightings threatened national security. After 12 hours of study over three days, the panel concluded that the real danger didn’t seem to be the UFOs. The real danger was the UFO reports — ’ seemingly more credible because of the Air Force’s sustained interest — reports that could expose the public to “psycho- logical warfare” and “skillful hostile pro- paganda” that might “induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly © constituted authority.” The Russians would surely get us. Informed critics argued that the gov- ernment was going about the investiga- tion all wrong, that investigators were preoccupied with the potential threat to national security — this was the ’50s, after all, the height of the Cold War — "and not with serious scientific analyses of the thousands of cases from all over the world. But no matter what the Air Force people did, certain UFO quarters rou- tinely suspected them of orchestrating elaborate cover-ups. The flying-saucer business was the big- gest public-relations headache in Air Force history. Finally, the Condon Com- mittee, an academic group convened in 1966 to come up with a nonmilitary read on the situation, said exactly what the Air Force wanted to hear — knowledge wouldn’t be advanced by further study, and Project Blue Book should be put to sleep. It was, in 1969, and the examination of UFOs passed into the hands of independ- ent researchers and private organizations such as MUFON and CUFOS — the Mutual UFO Network based in Seguin, Texas, and the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Glenview, IIL The van- guard of current research centers on increasing reports of abductions that in- volve traumatic medical examinations on members of different generations of the same families — hair-thin needles insert- ed up the nose, plugs of skin taken from backs, arms, legs. No — the FAA had no interest in arousing history's tendency to repeat it- self. The government had learned its lesson well: The emotional, ungainly is- sues related to unidentified flying objects were in no way conducive to bureaucratic control. © continued on Page 24 17. ae Ab “ARARAAA RABE