733667-02-001-0003
OCR Text
FLIGHT TO REMEMBER: |__ Continued from Page At | after that first sighting of ts are some of the most blzarre in Alaska aviation _ history. Since first becoming Public in late December, the reports have transformed this soft-spoken, 47-year-old, An- chorage-based pilot into an international celebrity, inter- viewed by People magazine, Tokyo television and more a dozen other national and international publica- tions, Terauch! has lived quietly fo a comfortable house in Anchorage, his base for the lest three years. He spends several weeks 2 month flying polar routes between Europe and Alaska. During his time off, he enjoys fishing for red and allver salmon. » This week, Terauchi 1s home . His phone rings Es th reporters eager to about his strange No- vember flight, ‘Terauchi has an impressive So eal weleht ty ee we w Ta’ incredible tale. He hes 29 years experience. He says he hasn't often navigated: the Iceland-Greeniand-An- chorage route, but he has rou- tnely flown other trana-polar foutes. o o- Until November, Terauchi 7 says, he never believed in i UFOs. Now, he does. He : thinks they’re sent by visitors . from outer space. In fact, last sunday, Teenenl gale re- Ho po Mysterious ts of a ‘Spaceship during a flight to ‘ Anchorage, " | ,This time, however, he ad- "’ ,Inits he made a mistake. He ‘© “Ow concedes that there was a f. , more terrestrial explanation "3 * to what he saw. He agrees es.with Federal Aviation Ad- ministration officials who Co- arate speculated that the second sightings were the lights of villages reflected off ice crys- tals in the atmosphere. But Terauchi remains con- vinced that the lights he saw in November were spaceships of some unknown, extra-ter- restrial origin. In interview | after interview, he methodi- cally makes his case, charting the events of the sighting on flight maps of the arctic sky. One day, he’s convinced someone else will see the crafts, and his account will take on hew meaning. “I think we have to keep this record....'" Terauchi's encounter began with his sighting of the two belts of amber lights. To check them out, he radioed Anchorage air traffic control- lers, The controllers replied that no military or civilian, flights were in the vicinity: @ two belts of light con- tinued to dance in front of the plane. Terauchi grabbed for his camera, ie chgeeeet Pg taking a ‘picture wou futile Pua ‘there was pet enough t to expose the film properly. . Five ainites after the lights first appeared in front of the plane, they suddenly moved farther out ahead of the plane, he said. He could then make out the shapes of the crafts — cylinders wrapped in lateral lines of light that extended from a darker centéer..The lines ap- peared to be exhaust outlets, and they alternately pulsated t from the two sides of @ cylinder, They appeared to be controlled by comput- ers, he said. As the two ob- jects reversed direction, the exhaust lights appeared to flare brighter, lot Tamefuji, in a sep- terview, also reported Veteran JAL pilot recounts sighting of strange company Above is an Iilustration based on a description Japan Alr Lines pilot Kenju Teraucht provided * + Buatration by Wiliam Hays Ulustrator William Hays. it shows two smaller craft Tereuchl says hovared in front of the cockpit window of his 747 cargo plan-on Nov. 17. At adi ag they moved closer, square (ac cre-wn here). He direction of the darker panel In the mile, which he with glowing orango ombers. seeing the two strange lights. “I saw several lights in front of us, and then I couldn’t see them, and the captain told me they were on the left-hand alde,” he said. . After about 15 minutes, the first two Hghts disappeared, Terauchi said. Then, on his’ left, he saw a big band of glowing white light, similar to the’ light emitted by a fluorescent bulb. He turned on his weather radar and tuned it to a 20-mile radius. At eight miles, on the left side of the screen, the radar showed a tiny ball, Terauchi radioed the FAA flight control. center in An- stance they appeared rectangular and, described the lights as pulsating in the said said resemblog bleck charcoal dotted chorage. Three controllers monitoring radar saw what they thought was an object at about the same reference Polnt on their monitor, ac- cording to Sam Rich, an air traffic controller, and Paul Steucke, an FAA spokesman, Steucke, however, said sub- sequent examination of the radar tape showed the object to be a split-image of the JAL plane. Rich said none of the controllers, at the time, thought that was the case. As the plane flew over Fairbanks, the lights of the city gave Teraucht a better view of the new object. He says the band of light circled a huge walnut-shaped object that appeared to be twice the size of an aircraft carrier, As the lights of the city faded, Terauchi again could see only the white band of light. To try to lose the ob- ject, he got permission from a controller to descend from 35,000 to 31,500 feet. The…
Metadata
- Agency
- —
- Classification
- UNKNOWN
- Department
- National Archives and Records Administration
- Catalog source
- View NARA catalog record
NARA Source
- NAID
- 733667
- File
- 733667-02-001-0003.jpg
- Type
- image/jpeg
No machine-readable OCR text for this asset. Photographs without captions may have no extractable text.