Flight 1628's Close Encounter

On the afternoon of November 14, 1986, Japan Air Liner flight no.1628 left Iceland for its destination of Anchorage, Alaska. It was the middle leg of a Paris-to-Tokyo cargo delivery. The flight was uneventful. Capt. Kenju Terauchi flew across the Canada/Alaska border and headed for Fort Yukon, where the plane found itself being buzzed by a UFO.

Then things got weird.

The episode began when the flight crew noticed a couple of lights off in the distance. At first, the crew paid little attention to them. However, when the lights failed to go away, they became curious enough to radio ground control, asking if anyone else was flying their route. They were told "No."

Then, the two lights began making strange movements. One of the crew, First Officer Takanori Tamefuji, later described it as "like two bear cubs playing with each other." To the crew's dismay, the weird lights then seemed to come straight at them, shooting off bright flashes that lit up the cockpit. A massive flying object, about the size of two aircraft carriers, appeared before them. It hovered in front of the jet for a moment, then flew in level flight at the same speed, only about 1,000 feet away. The jet's captain, Kenju Terauchi, saw that the object had what looked like exhaust pipes, and rotating rows of amber and white lights.

He knew that whatever the damn thing was, it could not be anything made on planet Earth.

The object stayed in formation with the jet for about five more minutes, then moved forward and to the left.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Carl Henley, a controller at the FAA's Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center, noticed something unusual on the radar. A large, green, round object about five to eight miles away from 1628. The flight crew radioed Henley that the object was "I think, ah, a very quite big, ah, plane."

The jet circled around Fairbanks to try shaking off its visitor, but the object stayed with it--seemingly in exactly the same place.

Henley couldn't take his eyes off his radar screen. At the time, he had no thought this second flying ship was a UFO. He and the rest of the ground crew assumed it was a second aircraft which had become lost, and was trying to follow 1628 to Anchorage. Then, as 1628 approached the airport, the object, which had been tailing them for nearly an hour, suddenly disappeared. Virtually instantaneously, as far as the crew could tell, it veered off towards the east, leaving, in the pilot's words, "nothing but the light of the moon." The shaken, but now relieved crew landed safely at the Anchorage airport.

And Carl Henley knew he had one hell of a report to write up. Jim Derry, the head of FAA security, interviewed the crew of 1628 about what they had experienced, but this just left him confused. The crew seemed intelligent, rational, and sober, but they all consistently told a story that seemed straight out of a science fiction novel.

"Springfield Leader," December 31, 1986, via Newspapers.com

When word spread about what the men on board 1628 claimed to have seen, there naturally were attempts to "explain" the incident in some rational fashion--perhaps what the men saw were ice crystals, or the planet Jupiter--but, to date, no one has come up with anything considered universally satisfactory. A spokesman for the FAA said simply, "The FAA does not have enough material to say that something was there. We are accepting the description of the crew but are unable to support what they saw." A nice bureaucratic way of saying, "We dunno."

Captain Terauchi stubbornly refuted any suggestion that what he had seen was anything "ordinary." He was convinced that Flight 1628 had encountered something extremely advanced technologically--too advanced to be anything made by earthlings. He also believed that, eventually, other pilots would have the same experience, would also see what he had seen, and finally his belief would be vindicated.

Time will tell.  Maybe.