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“UFO signt: ne By ROBERT ENGELMAN Scripps Howard News Service A Federal Aviation Admin- istration probe of a UFO that’ showed up on an air control- ler's screen in November was set back when a radar record- ing failed to show the craft's ‘signal, an FAA spokesman said Friday. Agency officials Friday al- so interviewed for a second ~. --time a Japanese pilot who Anchorage Daily News was helped by an FAA air controller to evade what he said was an unidentified fly- ing object over Alaska in mid-November, But the UFO sighting re- mained a mystery, with FAA and Air Force sources saying it was unlikely that the origin of the craft described by Ken- ju Terauchi would ever be determined. . Terauchi, a veteran pilot ferrying JAL Flight 1628 from , Sunday, January 4, 1987 Ng sulra mystery Iceland to Japan, told United Press International last Tues- day that on the evening of Nov. 17 he had been shad- owed for more than 30 min- utes and for nearly 400 miles over Alaska by a mysterious aircraft much larger than his own plane. - The object, which Terauchi said was twice the size of an aircraft carrier, was accompa- See Page B-3, UFO ome . 7 , - UFO: Does not show up on a recording of radar screen - Continued from Page B-1 | nied by two smaller aircraft, the pilot said. The night was clear, and FAA investigators who questioned the crew con- cluded in a report that they were rational and profession- al and showed no evidence of drug or alcohol use. Anchorage FAA spokesman Paul Steucke said the agency was investigating the matter further only to find out if unknown aircraft had violat- ed the Japan Air Lines plane's airspace, not to ascer- tain if the unknown craft had extraterrestrial origins. He sald he did not expect Terau- chi to add to the information in press actounts. But Steucke confirmed that an FAA air traffic controller had spotted the unknown craft as a ‘weak, intermittent signal” on his own radar. The signal appeared within eight miles of the JAL aircraft and at the same speed and alti- tude. When the recorded radar transmission was replayed later, however, there was no image of any aircraft except for the commercial airliner, Steucke said. He said it was possible the signal from the UFO was strong enough to be picked up while the incident was occurring but not strong enough to register on the ra- dar recording system. Officials with the Air Force's Alaskan Air Com- mand initially told the FAA air controller they, too, could see the object's radar signal... But Friday, Capt. Larry Jen- kins, a command spokesman, sald the signal didn’t last long enough to be confirmed and that the command now attributed the signal to elec- tronic clutter, “We're not doing any fur- ther investigation,” Jenkins said, The FAA has no systematic procedure for evaluating re- ports of unidentified flying objects. The Air Force once did, but abandoned such in- vestigations more than 15 years ago, Jenkins said. A spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado said officials there had no radar signal that could correlate with what Terauchi described and were not investigating the incident. Terauchi and his crew of two told the FAA at 6:19 p.m. on Nov. 17 that they were fast approaching the lights of a large flying object and re- | quested help in avoiding it. An FAA controller, spot- ting the signal of the mysteri- ous craft on radar, directed the JAL pilot to take evasive action, at one point approving a 360-degree turn to shake the object. Steucke said both objects appeared to be traveling about 550 mph at 35,000 feet in altitude and traveled to- gether for more than 350 mi- es, “I haven't seen anything like this (situation) before," said Steucke, who has lived in Anchorage for 12 years and worked in the FAA for four. He said theories on the origin of the mysterious object var- fed from “a UFO to some body else's (foreign) military alreraft.”” wees os ee ee