A Sunday in the grape basin
Kōfu sits at the bottom of a bowl of mountains a hundred-odd kilometers west of Tokyo, the capital of Yamanashi Prefecture and in 1975 a city of about 194,000. Its southern edge was still farm country then: hamlets, fields and grape vineyards, the vines trained over flat overhead trellises of concrete posts and wire. On Sunday, February 23, the Yamahata family was visiting relatives in Kamichō, where Masato Kōno lived near the Hinode housing estate. Masato and the visiting Katsuhiro Yamahata were both seven, second-graders at Yamashiro Elementary School, and their fathers were brothers-in-law. The sun had set at 5:36. It was a cold, nearly cloudless evening, about four degrees Celsius, and the two boys were roller-skating on the paved ground beside an apartment block as the light went out of the sky.
Sources: 甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]Two Reports From JapanナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎
Two lights over Mount Tatsuzawa
Katsuhiro saw them first, according to the account Japanese researchers sent to APRO, the American Aerial Phenomena Research Organization: two orange lights, one large and one small, coming out of the east over Mount Tatsuzawa. The big one swung north toward Mount Atago and was gone. The small one kept coming, moving erratically, until it hung over the housing blocks at about the height of a three- or four-story building. From underneath, the boys told investigators, it was round, with three rotating fittings on its belly. Then a black tube slid down out of it, like a telephoto lens, with a clicking the newspaper rendered as kachi-kachi and the boys likened to a camera shutter. The boys decided it was a gun, and that it was aiming at them. They ran, and when it followed overhead they ducked among the gravestones of Fukuō-ji, a temple cemetery nearby, and stayed there until the light drifted off to the north.
Sources: Two Reports From Japan甲府事件ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]ドラマ「ホットスポット」の元ネタ・甲府事件だけじゃない…昭和50年次々に目撃されたUFOの意外にリアルな正体
A fire in the vineyard
Heading home, they saw what looked like flames in the vineyard behind the housing estate, sixty or seventy meters ahead. In February the field under the trellis was “as good as an empty lot, not a single vine,” as the writer Hiroshi Minamiyama later put it, and the boys ran up the field path to see the fire. APRO’s correspondents said the light rose to a considerable height and settled again near the middle of the trellis; in Minamiyama’s version it slid sideways and turned bluish-white. Close up, the orange glow gave way to a dull stainless-steel silver. The thing on the ground was a dome set on an upturned dish, ringed by a band of translucent blue square windows in black frames. It stood on three half-sphere feet about twenty-five centimeters high, and the dome was turning, then stopped. The boys walked right around it, close enough to touch. The first newspaper report made it five meters long and two and a half high; in their 1975 magazine interview the boys estimated it at about the size of a family car.
Sources: Two Reports From Japan甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎
Writing on the hull
What Masato remembered most was the writing. On the front of the craft, slightly raised “like a sticker,” were five black characters in a horizontal line, unlike any he knew; his drawing makes them look almost like kanji, and he told one interviewer he thought they meant “saucer.” Katsuhiro, on the other side, saw different marks, strung together like Roman letters: “First there’s an A, then joined on there’s a B, then C… and I don’t know the rest.” The newspaper counted four “illegible big letters”; APRO’s account had five on one side and four on the other. When the interviewer Hachirō Kubota, a devotee of the American contactee George Adamski, showed the boys a photo of Adamski’s famous 1950s saucer, Masato corrected him. There was no ball on top, he said, and “the windows of the UFO were not round, but square.”
Sources: Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]甲府事件A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)Two Reports From JapanナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎
The door comes down
Masato was alone at the front, studying the characters, when he heard a jangle from inside, like a key working in a lock. A door beside the writing dropped open and folded down to the ground as a short flight of steps; the boys’ sketch gives it seven. Something came down them, stooping, without a sound. It was about 130 centimeters tall, its head and shoulders too big for the rest of its body, completely bald and chocolate brown. There seemed to be no eyes and no nose, only deep horizontal wrinkles across the whole face, so that it looked like a mask, and from where a mouth should be hung three silver fangs about five centimeters long. Its ears were long and pointed like a rabbit’s, with a hole in the middle. It wore a shining silver suit with a belt, had four fingers, and its feet looked like split-toed work boots. Over its shoulder it carried a long gun whose muzzle flared like a trumpet. In the boys’ drawing it is labeled “ray gun.”
Sources: 甲府事件ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎Two Reports From JapanKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)
Two taps on the shoulder
Katsuhiro had come around the far side of the craft when he felt two taps on his shoulder from behind. He assumed it was Masato and turned around. The face was right there. Then came a sound he would spend fifty years trying to describe: kyuru-kyuru, a squealing chatter like a cassette tape on fast-forward. APRO’s correspondents called it a voice. Decades later, the researcher Ryō Takemoto relayed, Katsuhiro described the touch itself as a light tap-tap, almost a gentle greeting, but that night his legs simply gave way. He sat in the dirt and played dead, watching through half-closed eyes as the being strode briskly around the landing site as if surveying it. “Run!” Masato shouted. “I can’t!” Katsuhiro shouted back. So Masato ran over, hauled Katsuhiro onto his back and carried him toward the edge of the vineyard. From there, the boys said, they looked back through the open door and saw a second, slightly smaller figure sitting in a chair with its hand on a control stick, facing something like a television screen amid blinking red, yellow and blue lights. When it turned toward them, they ran for home.
Sources: 甲府事件ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎Two Reports From JapanKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]日本三大ＵＦＯ事件の一つ・１９７５年の「甲府事件」の当事者が証言
What the mothers saw
The boys burst into the Kōno house gasping, and Masato’s mother, Masako, had heard enough. “Don’t be silly! It’s late. Hurry up and eat your dinner!” But Katsuhiro told the same story, and the two mothers and Katsuhiro’s older brother, a third-grader, went out to look. From beside a telephone pole more than fifty meters away they saw an orange light in the middle of the vineyard, spinning and pulsing every five or ten seconds, about the size of a basketball. Masako remembered “a beautiful color like fireworks.” Katsuhiro’s mother, Hanae, started toward it. “Don’t go! They’ll take you! Don’t go!” the boys cried, pulling her back by the hands. One of the mothers ran for the fathers. By the time the men arrived three or four minutes later, carrying sticks and pieces of timber, the light had flared brighter, then dimmed and been swallowed by the dark. They searched the field and found nothing. One of the adults suggested the boys had seen a hitodama, a floating spirit-fire. That night one of the boys cried in his sleep. For a long time afterward the other would not go outdoors alone after dark.
Sources: Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 2]甲府事件Two Reports From JapanA UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)甲府事件世界の何だコレ!?ミステリー · July 11, 2018
The blackboard at Yamashiro
On Monday the two boys told their class, and the drawings they pinned up in the corridor set the school in an uproar. Their teacher, Miyoshi Ueda, a veteran of thirty-one years, did not believe it. “You don’t have to believe us,” the boys told her. “But we never lie to you.” She let them give a twenty-minute presentation at the blackboard. According to Katsuhiro’s later telling, when a classmate backed them up, the principal decided this was no ordinary story and called the local paper, the Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi Shimbun. School staff went out to the vineyard with tape measures. On February 25 the paper ran the story under the headline “A UFO in Kōfu!? Three Yamashiro pupils see it; a startling tap on the shoulder,” with a photograph of the boys explaining their drawings at the blackboard. The third pupil, eight-year-old Ichirō Minegishi, had been riding along the Kōfu bypass with his family half an hour before the boys’ sighting and saw a shining object head toward the Hinode estate. The paper also reported that two concrete trellis posts had been found nearly toppled the next morning.
Sources: A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)ドラマ「ホットスポット」の元ネタ・甲府事件だけじゃない…昭和50年次々に目撃されたUFOの意外にリアルな正体Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 2]甲府事件
Other lights that evening
The newspaper’s reporters and, within weeks, researchers from the Japan Space Phenomena Society and the magazine UFO to Uchū (“UFOs and Space”) found more people who had seen something in the sky. Kimio Atsushiba, caretaker at the municipal environment center a few hundred meters to the east, said his dogs began barking strangely at about 6:30. He saw a yellow light streak past with a tail, and then, in the west, something bigger and brighter than the evening star drifting slowly north; an official told him it was probably a meteor. Genshin Saitō, chief priest of Jōkō-ji a few kilometers south in Shimo-Imai, saw a blue-white object the size of a ping-pong ball zigzag, swoop and vanish at around seven. A girl named Yumiko Dobashi said she had watched a UFO from her balcony in the Hinode estate. None of them saw a landing. But alongside the boys and their mothers, they helped a children’s story become what the Modern Space Flight Association in Osaka would call “the most outstanding humanoid sighting in Japan so far.”
Sources: Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 3]Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 4]甲府事件Two Reports From Japan
The Geiger counter in the vineyard
The strangest follow-up came from an electrical-engineering teacher. Susumu Maeda taught at Kizan Technical High School and held Japan’s top-grade license for handling radioactive materials. After reading the newspaper, he took his science club to the vineyard, collected about forty soil samples and tracked them with a Geiger counter for about a month. He reported faint activity above background that decayed with a half-life of about fifteen days, and analysis at a nuclear research laboratory in Tōkai suggested that iron, lead, rubidium and other elements in the soil had been activated by particle radiation. He would not say whether the source was a UFO or fallout. His report went to the Japan Space Phenomena Society, and in 2020 the society’s Tsuneo Kira refitted the numbers and proposed phosphorus-32, with a half-life of 14.3 days; his suggestion was that fertilizer in the soil had been irradiated by a reactor aboard the craft. The society’s own write-up admits the samples’ locations were never recorded, some were mixed, and no control samples were taken away from the site.
Sources: Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 3]ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎1975年“甲府事件”現場に遺された放射性物質と“UFOの原子炉”の謎きらちゃんのショートシンキング甲府事件
The woman at the crossroads
In December 1982, as the case was revisited on Nippon Television’s late-night show 11PM, a new witness surfaced. Midori Satō, an insurance saleswoman, had written to the station to say that on the evening of the encounter she had been driving south toward Kamichō when she heard a boom like fireworks. At a crossroads two small figures, 130 to 140 centimeters tall and dark as if in some tribal costume, stood in the lane and ignored her horn. One laid a hand on her windshield and pressed its face to the glass: a straight line for a lower eyelid, crumpled layers above it, a nose, and black, wrinkled hands with no lines on the palms. Farther on, a group of men and women with sticks flagged her down and asked, “Did you see a UFO?” She said no. Her husband told her she would be laughed at, and she stayed quiet for seven years. The skeptic Tatsuya Honjō later noted that her timing put the crossroads about an hour before the boys’ encounter, and in 2021 a niece of Masato’s said on YouTube that the family remembered meeting no such woman.
Sources: 甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 3]Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 4]
Silence at fifteen
Both boys appeared on 11PM in 1982, as first-year high school students. After that Katsuhiro Yamahata largely withdrew from the media. “I was interviewed countless times from the age of seven,” he told the occult monthly Mu in 2025. Wary of media that wanted to play the story for laughs, he said, “I decided to go silent at fifteen.” Even so, a 1990 documentary coaxed him out for a UFO-calling session; the light that duly appeared was Jupiter. Both men returned to the vineyard for Fuji TV in 2017, at about fifty. Yamahata moved back to Yamanashi around 2019 after years working elsewhere, and began to speak again. “The vineyard looked like it was on fire,” he told the Yamanashi broadcaster YBS in 2025. “I went closer out of curiosity, and it wasn’t orange but a silver light. It really was a saucer.” He knows some people think his whole family made it up. Masato Kōno has not spoken publicly in recent years.
Sources: 甲府事件の当事者・山畠克博のUFO体験！ 天の存在に導かれたコンタクティの不思議写真を公開甲府事件【特集】「甲府事件」から50年 “UFOと遭遇”元少年が語る当時の記憶 葛藤乗り越え抱く思いとは？「宇宙人との遭遇」から49年 少年の思い出、UFOの日として認定
Kōfu UFO Day
Japanese writers now list the case as one of the country’s “three great UFO incidents,” with the Kera incident of 1972 and the Nikoro incident of 1974, and in the 2020s Kōfu’s fans decided to own it. A hobbyist’s soft-vinyl figure of 2019 gave the being a name, Kōfu-seijin, the Kōfu alien. In 2023 the radio host Kiichi Tokutake and the group that became UFOKOFU1975 launched a crowdfunding drive for a full-size costume, and a local confectioner sold UFO dorayaki pastries filled with grapes. On February 23, 2024, the costume and Yamahata were “reunited” before about eighty fans, and the Japan Anniversary Association registered the date as Kōfu UFO Day. A live show followed that June with an idol duo called the Kōfu Cosmo Girls, and a plastic model kit from Max Factory went on sale in Kōfu on the fiftieth anniversary. In February 2025, signboards and a face-in-the-hole panel went up near the old vineyard in Kamichō, where visitors can pose to be tapped on the shoulder. At the anniversary gathering that month Yamahata told about a hundred fans he would keep telling the facts “as long as I live.”
Sources: 「甲府事件」48年目の新証言で明らかになった「UFOの消え方」とは？ 現地イベントをレポート／山梨奇譚日本三大UFO事件のひとつ「甲府事件」とは“宇宙人・甲府星人”と当時の目撃者が再会 「甲府UFO事件」で地域活性化「宇宙人との遭遇」から49年 少年の思い出、UFOの日として認定「甲府UFO事件」50周年でプレイベント 地域活性化につなげるMax Factory’s plastic model of the alien from the Kofu Incident「甲府UFO事件」から半世紀…“宇宙人”の目撃現場に看板設置「観光スポットに」山梨2025年2月号・甲府UFO事件から50年 UFOで甲府を盛り上げたい！「甲府ＵＦＯ事件」５０周年祝う／町おこしに愛好家ら１００人宇宙人に肩をたたかれた「甲府事件」から半世紀…小学生の時にＵＦＯ目撃した男性がイベント来場
What the 1975 record holds
The earliest layer is the Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi Shimbun of February 25, 1975, two days after the event, which survives in quotations and in an English translation made by Masaru Mori of Chiba and printed by the UFO Newsclipping Service in 1976. It names the two boys and gives about 7 p.m., the orange “crackling” lights, a craft about five meters across that came down “between the props of the vineyard,” a silver being with “no visible eyes nor mouth, but with three fangs,” a hand on Yamahata’s shoulder, the mothers’ five minutes of glowing light, and two concrete posts found almost fallen. The same article carried the only official comment: the Transport Ministry’s civil aviation bureau noted that scheduled flights crossed Kōfu between six and seven and that the lights of YS-11 turboprops could be clearly visible. The fuller interviews by UFO to Uchū and the Japan Space Phenomena Society followed that spring; they are known here through later books and blogs that quote the original magazines.
Sources: A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)ドラマ「ホットスポット」の元ネタ・甲府事件だけじゃない…昭和50年次々に目撃されたUFOの意外にリアルな正体甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]
How the story changed
The core of the story has held for fifty years: the lights, the landing, the writing, the fanged face, the touch, the piggyback escape and the mothers’ glow. Many details have not. The time moves from about 6 to 7 p.m. depending on the source, and the craft from car-sized to five meters across. The early accounts put the taps on the left shoulder, the modern ones on the right. The 1975 paper gave the being no eyes or mouth; Yamahata now describes a big head, long arms and narrow shoulders, closer to the modern gray. A 2008 book had the being ask “Is that Kōno?” in Japanese, but Masato said in 1975 that it “didn’t speak” Japanese. In Yamahata’s 2025 retelling the dash to the temple cemetery comes after the touch, not before the landing. English retellings added more: a 1977 American roundup had the boy fainting in 1976, and later websites added a ring pattern in the soil and a teacher finding radioactivity in the circle. Masaru Mori, who translated the clipping, became in some versions an investigator who questioned the boys. The surname 河野 appears as both Kawano and Kōno.
Sources: A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)甲府事件甲府事件の当事者・山畠克博のUFO体験！ 天の存在に導かれたコンタクティの不思議写真を公開「宇宙人との遭遇」から49年 少年の思い出、UFOの日として認定UFO Research Newsletter 5(5)Fanged Humanoids of Kofu (Japan)Two Reports From JapanHumanoid Encounters 1975–1979
The posts and the trellis
The physical traces are real but modest. The count of damaged concrete posts runs from one broken and one damaged, in the 1975 magazine account, to one broken, one leaning and one toppled in Minamiyama’s. The wire mesh overhead was reported pushed apart “as if something heavy had sat on it,” with the wires slack but uncut, and there were several holes in the ground that the boys identified as the landing feet. Their teacher went to the field at lunchtime. “Apart from one post half-fallen and two or three wires bent, nothing was unusual,” she said, and she could not tell whether the holes were landing marks. A neighbor and her daughter later told television of a pressed-in hole with white residue like ash. The puzzle investigators keep returning to is the scale. Minamiyama measured the posts about 1.7 meters high and just under 2.2 meters apart. A craft five meters wide could not have come down in the middle of the trellis without cutting the wires or flattening the outer posts, yet the damage was in the center. The vineyard’s owner was never quoted.
Sources: 甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 3]Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 4]ナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎甲府事件
Ordinary explanations
Skeptics have proposed an explanation for each piece rather than for the whole. For the lights in the sky, the civil aviation bureau’s evening airliners, and for the caretaker’s tailed light, a meteor. For the fire in the vineyard, Tatsuya Honjō of the Japanese skeptics’ group ASIOS pointed to a 1990 TV Asahi follow-up that showed a bonfire burning in the local vineyards in winter. The blogger behind UFO Jikenbo floated a farmer in a mask and split-toe boots working under a lamp, with a sprayer for a gun. For the being’s face, researchers have noted resemblances to monsters from the TV superhero series Ultraseven and Return of Ultraman, and Honjō compared Masato’s drawing to an alien in a 1974 issue of the boys’ comic weekly Shōnen Magazine. Japan was in the middle of a UFO boom in 1975, and the boys’ teacher, Ueda, wondered about television and manga herself. Against all this stand the tests she set: she kept the boys apart and made them retell the story every few days, and it “always remained the same from beginning to end.”
Sources: A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 4]甲府事件Fanged Humanoids of Kofu (Japan)Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 2]
Classification and evidence note
This archive files Kōfu as a close encounter of the third kind: two witnesses describe a landed craft, an occupant who touched one of them, and a second occupant inside. Everything about the craft and beings rests on the testimony of two seven-year-olds, gathered first by their school and a local newspaper and then by enthusiast investigators. The mothers saw an orange light in a field, not a craft. The posts, the holes and the radiation readings are physical, but none can be tied to the event with confidence. No official body investigated. What sets the case apart is the boys’ consistency under questioning, the ordinariness of the setting, and a town that eventually took the story up as its own.
Sources: A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)Two Reports From JapanLetter on the Kofu humanoid reportHumanoid Encounter on Japanese Mountaintop甲府事件Kofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 2]
- 23 FEB 1975 · EARLY EVENING
Half an hour before the boys’ sighting, classmate Ichirō Minegishi, riding on the Kōfu bypass, sees a shining object heading toward the Hinode estate.
- BETWEEN 6 AND 7 PM
Two orange lights approach from the east; the smaller one hovers over the boys, clicking, and they hide in the Fukuō-ji cemetery.
- MINUTES LATER
The boys find a landed silver craft in the winter vineyard; a fanged being descends and taps Katsuhiro Yamahata twice on the shoulder.
- SAME EVENING
The mothers watch an orange light pulse in the vineyard for about five minutes; the fathers arrive with sticks and find nothing.
- ABOUT 7:00 PM
Chief priest Genshin Saitō of Jōkō-ji sees a small blue-white light zigzag and vanish.
- 24 FEB 1975
The boys give a blackboard presentation at Yamashiro Elementary; staff measure the vineyard.
- 25 FEB 1975
The Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi Shimbun reports the encounter, with the aviation bureau’s note on evening airliners.
- SPRING 1975
UFO to Uchū and the Japan Space Phenomena Society interview the families; Susumu Maeda’s science club tests the soil for radiation.
- MAR 1976
The UFO Newsclipping Service prints an English translation of the newspaper report.
- NOV 1976
The APRO Bulletin publishes the Osaka Modern Space Flight Association’s report, which calls it “the most outstanding humanoid sighting in Japan so far.”
- DEC 1982
Both boys appear on Nippon TV’s 11PM; Midori Satō’s crossroads account comes to light.
- 1990
A TV documentary stages a UFO-calling session with Yamahata; the light that appears is Jupiter.
- 2017
Kōno and Yamahata, now about fifty, revisit the site for Fuji TV.
- 2019
A soft-vinyl figure names the being Kōfu-seijin, the Kōfu alien.
- 23 FEB 2024
A full-size costume is unveiled and February 23 is registered as Kōfu UFO Day.
- FEB 2025
Signboards go up near the old vineyard; about a hundred fans mark the fiftieth anniversary with Yamahata.
Sources & interviews
A UFO landed in Kofu City? (A boy scared when tapped on his shoulder by a spaceman.)Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi Shimbun · February 25, 1975 · English translation by Masaru Mori of Chiba, printed in UFO Newsclipping Service no. 83, March 1976, p. 16ドラマ「ホットスポット」の元ネタ・甲府事件だけじゃない…昭和50年次々に目撃されたUFOの意外にリアルな正体Marimo Murase · President Online · March 9, 2025 · quotes the Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi report of February 25, 1975, and Yamahata’s account of how the paper heard of itTwo Reports From JapanVance Dewey · The A.P.R.O. Bulletin 25(5) · November 1976, pp. 5–6 · from Yoshihiko Honda of Osaka and the Modern Space Flight AssociationLetter on the Kofu humanoid reportBeatrice Zimmer · The A.P.R.O. Bulletin 25(10) · April 1977, p. 2 · reads the shoulder tap as “a decidedly friendly gesture”Humanoid Encounter on Japanese MountaintopJun-Ichi Takanashi · MUFON UFO Journal · November–December 1978 · measures a later case against the Kōfu boys’ encounterUFO Research Newsletter 5(5)April–May 1977 · George D. Fawcett’s review of 1976 sightings, with the garbled “student fainted” entry misdated to 1976Humanoid Encounters 1975–1979Albert S. Rosales · catalogue entry for February 23, 1975, drawn from the HUMCAT addendum and Yoshihiko Honda甲府事件Miyabi · UFO事件簿 blog · November 20, 2015, revised through 2025 · a close reading of UFOと宇宙 no. 12 (June 1975), Hiroshi Minamiyama’s 1982 book, ASIOS’s UFO事件クロニクル (2017) and the 1982 11PM broadcastKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 1]OTAKUPAPA · My Dad Is an OTAKU · August 15, 2021, updated May 31, 2023 · from Hachirō Kubota’s 1975 interviews in UFOと宇宙 and the boys’ sketchesKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 2]OTAKUPAPA · My Dad Is an OTAKU · September 23, 2021 · the mothers and teacher Miyoshi Ueda, from Hiroshi Minamiyama’s interviewsKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 3]OTAKUPAPA · My Dad Is an OTAKU · February 21, 2023 · traces, radiation and other witnessesKofu Incident: A Creepy Alien Got off a UFO to a Vineyard and Tapped a Japanese Boy on the Shoulder in 1975 [Part 4]OTAKUPAPA · My Dad Is an OTAKU · March 15, 2023 · on Tatsuya Honjō’s ASIOS chapter and the replies to itナチスUFOと異星人接近遭遇「甲府事件」の謎Shin’ichirō Namiki · Mu, March 2017, pp. 14–21 · excerpt reposted on web Mu, March 23, 20231975年“甲府事件”現場に遺された放射性物質と“UFOの原子炉”の謎Tsuneo Kira (Japan Space Phenomena Society) · web Mu · August 6, 2020 · re-reads Susumu Maeda’s radiation reportきらちゃんのショートシンキングJapan Space Phenomena Society · 2003–2004 · on the Maeda data and its weaknesses · archived copy甲府事件の当事者・山畠克博のUFO体験！ 天の存在に導かれたコンタクティの不思議写真を公開web Mu · May 12, 2025 · interview with Katsuhiro Yamahata from Mu, May 2025「甲府事件」48年目の新証言で明らかになった「UFOの消え方」とは？ 現地イベントをレポート／山梨奇譚web Mu · March 29, 2023 · the 2023 anniversary event, the Kōfu alien figure and Yamahata’s later memories日本三大UFO事件のひとつ「甲府事件」とはFM FUJI · radiko news · August 2023 · based on Yamanashi Shinpō, June 24, 2023 · the crowdfunded costume and the UFO dorayaki「宇宙人との遭遇」から49年 少年の思い出、UFOの日として認定Asahi Shimbun · March 1, 2024“宇宙人・甲府星人”と当時の目撃者が再会 「甲府UFO事件」で地域活性化UTY TV Yamanashi / TBS News Dig · February 23, 2024「甲府UFO事件」50周年でプレイベント 地域活性化につなげるKōfu Keizai Shimbun · June 24, 2024【特集】「甲府事件」から50年 “UFOと遭遇”元少年が語る当時の記憶 葛藤乗り越え抱く思いとは？YBS Yamanashi Broadcasting / NNN · February 22, 2025「甲府UFO事件」から半世紀…“宇宙人”の目撃現場に看板設置「観光スポットに」山梨YBS Yamanashi Broadcasting / NNN · February 5, 20252025年2月号・甲府UFO事件から50年 UFOで甲府を盛り上げたい！Kōfu City · citizen reporter feature on the UFOKOFU1975 group · February 2025宇宙人に肩をたたかれた「甲府事件」から半世紀…小学生の時にＵＦＯ目撃した男性がイベント来場Yomiuri Shimbun · February 23, 2025「甲府ＵＦＯ事件」５０周年祝う／町おこしに愛好家ら１００人Kyodo News via Shikoku Shimbun · February 23, 2025Max Factory’s plastic model of the alien from the Kofu IncidentGigazine · February 9, 2025日本三大ＵＦＯ事件の一つ・１９７５年の「甲府事件」の当事者が証言Tokyo Sports · November 7, 2023 · researcher Ryō Takemoto relays Yamahata’s account世界の何だコレ!?ミステリー · July 11, 2018Fuji TV · programme archive page for the episode that aired the mothers’ recorded testimonyFanged Humanoids of Kofu (Japan)Rob Morphy · Cryptopia · November 16, 2010甲府事件Wikipedia (Japanese) · the collected account and its referencesSpotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
Connected files
Utsuro-bune: The Woman in the Hollow BoatJapan’s other famous visitation, from 1803: a strange vessel on a beach with writing on it that no one could read.The Socorro ArroyoAnother landed craft with a marking on its hull, small figures beside it, and impressions left in the ground.The Little Men of KellyKōfu’s rabbit-eared visitor has kin in Kentucky: another family’s night of small, big-eared, glowing beings that came right up to the house.The Ariel School EncounterChildren again as the witnesses, and a story they kept telling into adulthood.The Tape Behind the DoorTwo years earlier, two men on a Mississippi pier described wrinkled beings with projections where a nose and ears should be, floating out of a glowing craft.Discuss this case
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