JAL Flight 1628 11/7/86 UFO Case

Miscellaneous General
1

Told by John J. Callahan, former division chief of the Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations Division of the FAA in Washington from 1981 to 1988. When working with military agencies, Callahan’s rank (GM15) was equal to that of general.

One day in early 1987, he was unexpectedly faced with the problem
of managing a UFO case—a dramatic, thirty-minute sighting by three
Japan Air Lines pilots of a giant UFO over Alaska. Previously, Callahan
had never given the slightest thought to the subject of UFOs. When he first
heard about the JAL case, he requested the extensive data be sent to him
immediately and he brought it to the attention of FAA administrator
Admiral Donald D. Engen. Admiral Engen set up a briefing, which,
according to Callahan, included members of President Reagan’s scientific
staff, as they were described to him at the time. It also included three CIA
agents.
You are about to read about an event that never happened.
I was division chief of the Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations
Division of the FAA in Washington from 1981 to 1988. During this time, I
was involved in an investigation of an extraordinary event but was asked
not to talk about it. Since retiring, I decided that the public had a right to
this information, and that they could handle it. Nothing dire has occurred
as a result of my discussing this incident publicly, yet nothing useful has
resulted from it either, although it’s never too late. I have come to realize
the serious need we have to improve our radar systems so they can capture
unusual objects in the sky, such as the one I dealt with when I was at the
FAA in 1987.
It was early January 1987 when I received a call from the air traffic
quality control branch in the FAA’s Alaskan regional office, requesting
guidance on what to tell the media personnel who were overflowing the
office. The media wanted information about the UFO that chased a
Japanese 747 across the Alaskan sky for some thirty minutes on November
7,1986. Somehow, the word had got out.
“What UFO? When did this take place? Why wasn’t Washington headquarters informed?” I asked.
“Hey,” the controller replied, “who believes in UFOs? I just need to
know what to tell the media to get them out of here.”
The answer to that question was easy: “Tell them it’s under
investigation. Then, collect all the data—the voice tapes and computer data
discs from both the air traffic facility and the military facility responsible
for protecting the West Coast area. Send the data overnight to the FAA
Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey.” I wanted the data on the
midnight redeye flight, no matter how much hassle it was for them to get it
to me.
Japan Air Lines flight 1628, a cargo jet with a pilot, copilot, and
flight engineer, was north of Anchorage, and it was just after 5:00 p.m. The
captain, Kenju Terauchi, described seeing a gigantic round object with
colored lights flashing and running around it, which was much bigger than
his 747, as big as an aircraft carrier. His crew, Takanori Tamefuji and
Yoshio Tsukuda, both saw it, too.
At one point, two objects appeared to stop directly in front of the
747, and the captain said they were “shooting off lights,” illuminating the
cockpit and emitting heat he could feel on his face.
The objects then flew in level flight with the 747. Later, the captain
made a turn to evade the UFO, but it flew alongside the jet, keeping a
constant distance. Terauchi was able to estimate the size of the largest
“spaceship,” as he called it, to be at least the size of an aircraft carrier
because he had it on his radar, and the aircraft radar has range marks. He
reported all of this to FAA officials, exactly as he saw it.

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(continued…)

Over the course of thirty-one minutes, the UFO jumped miles in
merely a few seconds. One radar sweep at the air traffic control in
Anchorage took ten seconds. At one moment Terauchi says, It’s over here
at twelve o’clock at eight miles, and when the radar antenna goes by, we
see a target there. Ten seconds later, it’s suddenly six or seven miles behind
him. It’s going from eight miles out in front of the 747 to six or seven miles
in back, in only a few seconds, in one sweep of the radarscope. The
technology was “unthinkable,” Terauchi said, because the UFOs appeared
to have control over both inertia and gravity. FAA officials interviewed the
captain and his crew extensively in the days and months following; all of
them provided independent descriptions and drawings of the “spaceships”
and their remarkable behavior. These three reliable witnesses knew how to
recognize aircraft. If this object had been a secret military exercise, the
pilots would have been informed as such and would not have wasted time
spending thirty-one minutes evading and reporting a UFO, and the FAA
would not have bothered to conduct interviews following the event. These
witnesses eliminated all known explanations for what they had observed at
close range for an extended period of time.
When a pilot looks out the window and sees an aircraft shooting
across his nose or flying along with him, the first thing he does is call air traffic control and say, “Hey, do you have traffic at my altitude?” And the
controller panics, looks at the scope, and says, “No, we don’t have any
traffic at your altitude.” Air traffic would then question the 747 pilot asking
for more information: what type of aircraft, any visible markings, color, or
numbers on the tail, etc., and then the controller would advise, “We will
track that guy and have flight standards meet him at the airport when he
lands. We’ll write him up; pull his ticket. We’ll do whatever we have to do
to find the pilot of the unknown aircraft.” If his ticket was pulled, the pilot
was no longer authorized to fly.
In this case, the pilot responded by saying, “It’s a UFO,” because he
could see it so clearly. But who believes in UFOs? This is the type of
attitude the air traffic control had at the time, and in any case, neither the
controller nor the FAA was equipped to track something like this. The FAA
has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft, but it has no
procedures for controlling UFOs.
After receiving the call concerning the UFO from the Alaskan region
almost two months after the UFO event occurred, I briefed my boss
Harvey Safer, who alerted the FAA administrator Admiral Engen. Safer
and I drove up to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to
observe the computer playback of the event and learn more about what had
happened.