A freighter enters the Alaskan dark
On November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines cargo Flight 1628 crossed into Alaska on the Reykjavík-to-Anchorage leg of a haul from Paris to Tokyo. The Boeing 747’s hold was full of French wine—Beaujolais, the captain later told a reporter. On the flight deck were Capt. Kenju Terauchi, forty-seven, with twenty-nine years of flying behind him; first officer Takanori Tamefuji; and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuda. The sky was clear, a nearly full moon hung low behind them, and the jet was cruising at 35,000 feet. A little after five in the evening, north of Fort Yukon, Terauchi noticed lights low to the left. He took them for military traffic. They did not pass. They paced the freighter for several minutes, and then, he wrote, they came up to meet it.
Sources: JAL pilot describes UFOThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO Report
Two ships at the windshield
“Most unexpectedly, two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights,” Terauchi wrote in the statement he gave the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) six weeks later. “The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face.” Each was about the size of a DC-8’s fuselage, he judged, and hung 500 to 1,000 feet ahead: a dark middle flanked by rows of amber-white nozzles, like “numerous numbers of exhaust pipes,” glowing “like a charcoal fire.” Tamefuji told FAA interviewers the display was like “Christmas assorted” lights, with a salmon tint. “I’m sure I saw something,” he said. Tsukuda, seated farthest back, was “not certain whether it was lights of a distant town or a strange object.” On the radio, the crew kept to the language of their trade. At 5:19 p.m. Alaska Standard Time (AKST), the crew asked Anchorage Center whether it had any traffic near them. It did not. “Two traffic-ah, in front of us one mile, about,” came the report. Asked for a color: “White and yellow, I think.”
Sources: The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportSelected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628
A gigantic spaceship
After several minutes the two light arrays slid off to the left. Terauchi tried the 747’s weather radar and got an echo—painted green, the color of a weak return. He wondered in his statement whether “metal used in the spaceship is different from ours.” Then he looked back to the left. “Alas! There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship. We must run away quickly!” He drew it for the FAA as a walnut: two domed halves joined at a wide flat brim. He told United Press International it was “two times bigger than an aircraft carrier.” Tamefuji, shown the sketch, said he had seen nothing like it—though if one connected the lights, he allowed, it would be a big object. What went out over the radio at 5:30 was, again, more modest: “Very quite big, ah, plane.”
Sources: The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628JAL pilot describes UFOSelected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO Report
The controller searches an uncertain screen
At 5:25 p.m. AKST, the Anchorage controller had a primary return near the 747 and phoned the military’s regional operations center to ask whether it saw the same. When the military controller suggested the blip might be spurious, he answered, “Negative, uhuh, it’s not erroneous.” Two minutes later the military called back: “It is an unknown, okay, we’ve lost contact with it now.” Fairbanks Approach saw only the airliner. Anchorage offered to send up a military jet for a look. Terauchi declined. He had thought of an American pilot in a Mustang who died chasing a UFO, he wrote—almost certainly Thomas Mantell, killed over Kentucky in 1948—and decided that even an F-15 “had no guarantee of safety.”
Sources: Selected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628Unidentified Traffic Sighting by Japan Airlines: chronology and radar-data indexThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
Descent, turn, disappearance
Terauchi asked to descend from 35,000 to 31,000 feet. Was the traffic descending too? “Still, ah, coming, ah, ah, right formation, in, ah, formation.” He asked for a turn. “Deviations approved as necessary for traffic,” the controller said. To Terauchi it seemed the lights moved “as if they understood our conversation.” He had 3,800 pounds of fuel to spare, and every detour spent it. At 5:36 the controller tried an experiment: “I’m gonna request you to make a right turn, three six zero degrees… and advise me what your traffic does then.” The 747 swung through a full circle over the dark interior. Coming out of it, the crew reported that the traffic had disappeared. A few minutes later, headed south again, they had lights behind and to the left once more, and the military was calling intermittent returns in trail.
Sources: Selected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
Other aircraft enter the search
Anchorage turned a northbound United Airlines flight toward the freighter. “Why don’t you get us a little closer?” its captain asked. At 5:51 the two jets passed. United 69 reported that the Japan Air Lines plane was silhouetted against a light sky: “I don’t see anybody around him at all. I can see his contrail but I sure don’t see any other airplanes.” A military C-130, call sign Totem 71, offered to “bop up another five or six thousand feet” and look as well. Asked whether it saw any traffic near the 747, Totem answered, “Not flashing any lights at this time, sir.” By then Terauchi had made his last report on the subject: “I couldn’t see, ah, U-F-O, over.” After the United jet went by, he wrote, “there was nothing left but the light of the moon.”
Sources: Selected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
An investigation begins in Anchorage
Flight 1628 landed at about 6:20 p.m. FAA security and flight-standards officers met the crew and judged them normal, professional, rational, and sober. Inspector Jack Wright’s notes record the captain’s phrase, “There it was, as if it was waiting for me,” and, under cargo, “Nothing different… except some expensive wine.” The matter sat in a file for five weeks. Then, on Christmas Eve, Japan’s Kyodo news agency phoned the FAA’s Anchorage spokesman, Paul Steucke; Terauchi had told the story to a Kyodo reporter. It ran on December 29, United Press International’s Jeff Berliner put it on the American wires the same day, and the FAA reopened its inquiry on New Year’s Day. Terauchi, who lived in Anchorage with his family, was re-interviewed on January 2 and talked to Larry King that night. Was he nervous up there? “No, I am the captain. I cannot be nervous.” As for what two spaceships wanted with a cargo plane, he joked to Berliner that maybe they wanted to drink the Beaujolais.
Sources: FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628The crew of a Japan Air Lines cargo jet…JAL pilot describes UFO
The FAA closes the radar question
On March 5, 1987, the FAA held a press conference and sold the complete file—transcripts, tapes, radar plots, crew interviews—for $194.30. Its technical center had replayed the radar data, which survived only because someone had pulled the tape before its routine thirty-day erasure. The second target near the 747, the agency said, was an uncorrelated primary and beacon return: a split image of the jumbo jet itself. United 69 had seen nothing. The FAA could not confirm the event, and it would go no further. “The FAA is not in the UFO business,” Steucke’s fact sheet explained; it lacked “the resources or the Congressional mandate” for a scientific study. The Air Force had already begged off. “We got out of the UFO business some time ago,” an Air Force sergeant told UPI. The same bundle of paper shows how jumpy Alaska’s airways had become that winter. On January 29 an Alaska Airlines crew near McGrath picked up a radar-only target racing ahead of them and asked the controller, “You haven’t had any UFO reports lately… huh?”
Sources: FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberController confirms UFO sightingJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvellous “Spaceship”The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
Planets, ice crystals, and a captain who saw things
Philip J. Klass, the aviation journalist who made a second career of solving UFO cases, issued a press release on January 22 headed “UFO Mystery Solved.” With two Case Western astronomers he had placed Jupiter, at a dazzling magnitude −2.6, ten degrees above the horizon off the 747’s left side, with Mars close by. Once the FAA file came out—showing, among other things, that his release had the time wrong by an hour—Klass kept Jupiter for the persistent light and added moonlight scattering off turbulent clouds of ice crystals for the flame-colored arrays. Even fellow skeptics have found the second half a stretch. But Klass had also noticed something about the witness. Terauchi was, in his phrase, a “UFO repeater.” He had told the FAA about a mothership he saw after leaving Taipei some five years earlier—“so weird I ignored it.” And on January 11, 1987, flying another JAL 747 over the same country, he asked Anchorage Center to record him, in Japanese, describing “irregular pulsating lights” and “a large black chunk just in front of us… it seems to be a spaceship.” This time there was a temperature inversion, villages below, and an answer. The FAA and the captain agreed: lights from the ground, bent through ice crystals.
Sources: FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvelous ‘Spaceship’JAL pilot reports second UFO sightingFAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last November
The captain and the division chief
Two afterlives attached themselves to the flight. The first was Terauchi’s. A Japanese weekly that found him in retirement in 2006 reported that JAL had grounded him for talking to the press and parked him at a desk for years; other accounts make it a couple of years, and one Japanese television program made it about three months. Klass, writing in mid-1987, knew only that he had been transferred back to Japan. A doctor, Terauchi said, told him it had been an illusion. His wife’s verdict was different: “You saw something you weren’t meant to see.” The second belongs to John Callahan, who in 1987 ran the FAA’s accidents and investigations division in Washington. In an interview recorded for Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project in 2000, Callahan said he had briefed FAA administrator Donald Engen and then a room containing three FBI men, three CIA men, and three of President Reagan’s scientific staff; that one of the CIA men marveled at having thirty minutes of radar data on a UFO; and that the CIA then “swore all these other guys in there that this never took place. We never had this meeting.” Callahan said he kept the tapes. Two men who say they attended an FAA briefing of that kind, CIA analyst Ron Pandolfi and Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee, recalled no such oath, and Callahan’s account gets several details of the flight itself wrong. It has been a fixture of disclosure lore ever since.
Sources: JAL Pilot’s UFO Story Surfaces after 20 YearsThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportTestimony of John CallahanJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvellous “Spaceship”
What remains above Alaska
Strip away the mothership and something stubborn is left: three sober airmen who agreed that lights of some kind held station off their nose, close and bright enough to talk about for half an hour on an open frequency while a controller cleared them to go anywhere they liked to get away. Jupiter was where Klass said it was. It does not stop in front of a windshield. What did Tamefuji mean by Christmas lights? What did the controller have on his scope at 5:25 that he would not let the Air Force call erroneous? And what was Kenju Terauchi looking at, that night and the others, that nobody else could ever quite see?
Sources: Selected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
A near-contemporaneous official record
The FAA package is unusually rich for a civilian encounter: the controller transcript, a formal chronology, same-night interview notes, later crew interviews, operational logs, flight-path charts, recorded radar data, simulations, and the agency’s releases. It establishes who said what to air traffic control, when, and how controllers responded. The colorful material—the spaceships, the heat, the walnut—comes from Terauchi’s written statement and press interviews six weeks after the flight.
Sources: FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberSelected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628Unidentified Traffic Sighting by Japan Airlines: chronology and radar-data indexThe Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628
Limits of the radar data
The live transcript includes intermittent FAA and military primary returns near the 747, while Fairbanks saw only the airliner; the Anchorage controller told United 69 that he had never really had a good track. The FAA’s replay attributed its own second target to a known mismatch between the aircraft’s primary echo and its transponder beacon. The 747’s weather-radar echo was weak, by all three crewmen’s account. No continuous track of an independent object exists through the descent and turn.
Sources: Selected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberFAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO Report
Three witnesses, unequal descriptions
All three crew members reported unusual lights and were judged rational that night. Only Terauchi described structured craft, heat, or the giant silhouette; neither of the others reported the cockpit lighting up. Tamefuji, asked whether he could tell the lights from a star, said no. The first-night notes and the live radio calls also disagree: interviewers recorded the crew saying the lights stayed with them through the full-circle turn, where the transcript has them reporting the traffic gone. Terauchi’s earlier and later sightings bear on how much weight his interpretation can carry, though not on whether the other two men saw lights.
Sources: The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportFAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberSelected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628
The Callahan story
John Callahan’s account of a CIA-led briefing first appeared in 2000, thirteen years after the event, and later in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book. A briefing for outside scientists and intelligence staff does appear to have happened; the oath of secrecy rests on Callahan alone, and the data he says was suppressed had already been sold to the public by the FAA for $194.30.
Sources: Testimony of John CallahanJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvellous “Spaceship”
Classification
This file is classified as a commercial aviation radar-visual report unconfirmed by FAA review. The agency’s radar replay, its technical reconstruction, and the two aircraft sent to look did not verify separate traffic. The lights themselves remain unidentified: the FAA never tried to say what the crew saw, and the best astronomical explanation covers one of them.
Sources: FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberFAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvelous ‘Spaceship’
- 17 NOV 1986 · ABOUT 5:11 PM AKST
North of Fort Yukon, the JAL 1628 crew first observes unusual lights off the left side while cruising at 35,000 feet.
- 17 NOV · 5:19 PM
The crew asks Anchorage Center about traffic and reports two targets roughly one mile ahead with white and yellow lights.
- 5:25–5:27 PM
Anchorage and military controllers discuss a primary return near the 747; the military calls it an unknown, then loses it.
- 5:30–5:35 PM
Terauchi reports a very big plane, descends from 35,000 to 31,000 feet, and says the lights are still in formation.
- 5:36–5:39 PM
Anchorage requests a 360-degree right turn; after it the crew reports that the traffic has disappeared.
- 5:44–5:51 PM
The crew reports lights again to the left and behind. United Flight 69 is vectored closer but sees only the JAL 747 and its contrail.
- 5:53–6:23 PM
Terauchi reports losing sight of the UFO; the C-130 Totem 71 sees no lights near the 747, and Flight 1628 lands at Anchorage.
- 24–31 DEC 1986
Kyodo contacts the FAA; Kyodo and UPI break the story on December 29, and Terauchi describes an object twice the size of an aircraft carrier.
- 1–15 JAN 1987
The FAA reopens its inquiry and re-interviews Terauchi, Tamefuji, and Tsukuda. On January 11 Terauchi reports a second sighting, attributed to village lights and ice crystals.
- 22 JAN 1987
Philip Klass issues “UFO Mystery Solved,” identifying Jupiter and Mars.
- 5 MAR 1987
The FAA releases its records, attributes its apparent second target to a split radar return, says it cannot confirm the event, and closes its inquiry.
- OCT 2000–MAY 2001
Former FAA division chief John Callahan records, and the Disclosure Project releases, his account of a CIA briefing where participants were told the event never happened.
- DEC 2006
Shukan Shincho finds Terauchi in retirement; he says JAL grounded him for speaking to the press.
Sources & interviews
Unidentified Traffic Sighting by Japan Airlines: chronology and radar-data indexAnchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center · December 18, 1986 · NARA Record Group 237The crew of a Japan Air Lines cargo jet…United Press International · December 29, 1986 · Contemporary reportingController confirms UFO sightingUnited Press International · December 30, 1986 · Contemporary reportingJAL pilot describes UFOUnited Press International · Jeff Berliner · December 31, 1986 · Contemporary witness interviewJAL pilot reports second UFO sightingUnited Press International · January 12, 1987 · Contemporary reportingSelected portions of the pilot-controller transcript for JAL 1628Federal Aviation Administration, Alaskan Region · February 4, 1987 · NARA Record Group 237FAA releases documents on reported UFO sighting last NovemberFederal Aviation Administration · March 5, 1987 · Release, fact sheets, and earlier statements · NARA Record Group 237The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628Bruce Maccabee · International UFO Reporter · 1987 · Reproduces Terauchi’s statement and FAA crew interviewsFAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO ReportPhilip J. Klass · Skeptical Inquirer · Summer 1987Testimony of John CallahanDisclosure Project · Interview recorded October 2000, released May 2001JAL Pilot’s UFO Story Surfaces after 20 YearsJapan Today, summarizing Shukan Shincho · December 2006 · Via the Internet ArchiveJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvelous ‘Spaceship’Robert Sheaffer · Skeptical Inquirer · November/December 2014 · Review of Philip J. Klass’s conventional analysisJAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi’s Marvellous “Spaceship”Robert Sheaffer · Bad UFOs · July 2014 · Includes responses to John Callahan’s accountJapan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628Wikipedia · Orientation and reference trail · Consulted September 16, 2026Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
Connected files
The Tehran InterceptAnother night-flying crew, another brilliant light, and the same skeptic—Philip Klass—pointing at the same planet.The Nimitz EncounterEighteen years later: a controller’s radar contact, aviators sent to look, and an object that would not stay put.The Washington FlapWhere the argument over radar blips that pilots cannot see began.Leslie KeanThe journalist whose 2010 book gave John Callahan’s CIA-briefing story its widest audience.Steven GreerFounder of the Disclosure Project, which first put Callahan on the record.Discuss this case
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