Silhouette of a Gigantic Spaceship

Interview of Capt. Kenjyu Terauchi, January 2, 1987. During the interview Capt. Terauchi reported two previous UFO sightings. About five years before the present sighting he saw a “mothership” shortly after taking off from Taipai, south of Formosa, but it was “so weird I ignored it.” Then he saw, from his home during the daytime, bright lights that continued for about ten minutes. Although this was not Terauchi’s first UFO, it was the first sighting of unidentified phenomena by the other two crew members. In January 1987 Capt. Terauchi had another sighting of a strange phenomenon which he reported. He subsequently offered a satisfactory explanation for it (From the FAA file on the JAL sighting).

Written (in Japanese, with translation) testimony of Capt. Kenjyu Terauchi as received by the FAA on January 2, 1987. A comparison of the transcript of the conversation with the air traffic controller (ref. 4 below) with Terauchi’s testimony shows that, a month and a half after the sighting, he recalled the individual events quite but not perfectly accurately and that he confused the order of some of the events. The order of events in Terauchi’s testimony has been modified somewhat in this presentation to place them in the order that is found on the AARTCC audio tape.

Flight path as constructed from the radar data package supplied by the FAA.

Information obtained from the tape recording and transcript of the tape recording of conversations between the plane and the AARTCC.

Writing somewhat more than a month after the event the pilot recalled (2) that the plane first communicated with Anchorage at 5:05 PM. He correctly recalled that the plane was asked to fly directly to Talkeetna and then take air route J-125 to Anchorage.

The order of events as presented here follows the order in the AARTCC tape (ref. 11). The order of events in the captain’s testimony is somewhat different. It appears that he accurately recalled most of the events which make up the total sighting, but he did not always present them in the proper order. His presentation seems to jump forward and back in time occasionally. The order of events as presented here seems, to this author, to be the most consistent with the testimony of the copilot and the flight engineer and the ARTCC tape. It should be noted that the lights were first seen by the captain in a location to the left and below the plane where neither the copilot nor the flight engineer would be likely to look. Whether or not the captain mentioned them at that time is not known. But all three witnesses recalled seeing the lights remaining in front and somewhat to the left of the aircraft for a number of minutes and then seeing the light return to the left side as far back as the 9 o’clock position After the lights dropped back farther than that, only the pilot was easily able to see them because of his position on the left side of the cockpit. Thus the total event consisted of a single witness sighting at the beginning, a multiple witness sighting in the middle and a single witness sighting at the end.

Notes made by Special Agents Jack Wright, James Derry and Ronald Mickle after the crew was interviewed just after the plane landed at Anchorage on November 17.

Interview of Captain Kenjyu Terauchi by Dr. Richard Haines (private communication).

Information found in the January 5, 1987 interview of Copilot Takanori Tamefuji. The difficulty in communicating through an interpreter is evident in the transcript of this interview. At one point the interviewer asked Tamefuji, referring to the arrays of lights ahead and to the left, “And you could distinguish these lights as being different from the star…?” Tamefuji’s response is transcribed as “NNNooo…,” which some might interpret as meaning that Tamefuji couldn’t distinguish the lights from stars. But the interviewer immediately continued “…from the stars?” to which Tamefuji replied, “Different is fine.” Subsequently Tamefuji made it quite clear that the lights were very different from stars.

Information found in the January 15, 1987 interview of the flight engineer, Yoshio Tsukuba.

Transcript of the conversations between the airplane and the AARTCC and between the AARTCC and the Air Force Regional Operations Command Center (ROCC).

Interview with Capt. Terauchi published in PEOPLE magazine, January 12, 1987.

Personal statement by Carl Henley of the AARTCC, released by the FAA office on December 29, 1986.

“UFO Mystery Solved, “ press release by the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), January 22, 1987 (Buffalo, NY).

“FAA Releases Documents on Reported UFO Sighting Last November,” by Paul Steucke, Office of Public Affairs, Alaskan Region, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), U.S. Department of Transport, March 5, 1987 (Anchorage, AK).

Klass, P.J., “FAA Data Sheds New Light on JAL Pilot’s UFO Report,” The Skeptical Inquirer, Summer, 1987 (Buffalo, NY).