Originally posted by fleabit
Why do people keep saying they saw a star or the moon, or a mirage?
It was DETECTED ON RADAR. That would pretty much rule on the celestial body theory, as well as a mirage. They saw it, they reported it, asked if
they could see it on radar.. and they did. You can't simply discount that very important bit of scientific evidence because it doesn't fit your
belief system.
Listen to the actual recording of the event.
There were two separate issues in this event, the radar return was in one location/direction, and
the lights were separate and appeared in another location/direction.
The thing detected on radar was a cloud, it didn't move much. Here is a picture of the actual cloud:
From:
www.physicsforums.com...
Scroll down to:
Apr6-07, 11:49 AM Aether
Dr. Maccabee has shared with me a hand-drawn plot of JAL1628's ground track, and I have plotted some (not all) of those points on this satellite
image: img372.imageshack.us... The four blue arrows that I have drawn on top of the satellite image all point to a big
cloud that is approximately 30nm in diameter. The first blue arrow (near the timestamp 5:31:08) represents the direction in which the flight crew were
looking when they asked the air traffic controller for permission to turn right to avoid an object ahead of them:
From this, I conclude that this cloud is in fact what Terauchi saw and reported as the "mothership" and as "the silhouette of a gigantic
spaceship".

I think he's right, there is lots of evidence for this conclusion. The red line is the flight path of JAL1628, and the blue arrows all point in the
direction of the object observed on radar, which is a cloud. And the composition of the object that made the radar reflection showed up on the radar
as green, which is the way clouds show up.
The lights were something else and in a different direction. Coincidentally all the lights looked like airport lights and came from the direction of
an airport (OK maybe not so coincidentally).
The top image is what the captain drew, the bottom image shows airport lights. Other images the captain drew matched other images of airport lights.
In fact the only time the crew could see the airport lights was apparently when they were lined up with one of the two main runways at the airport
(Allen army airfield). When they weren't lined up with either runway, they couldn't see the lights. This would be explained if the runways were
using directional lights.
Exactly how they were able to see airport lights at the distances they saw them is a mystery to me, if that's what they saw, but if they didn't see
airport lights, there sure are WAY too many coincidences like the lights appeared exactly the direction of the airport and looked like airport lights.
When the lights got real bright it might have resulted from the landing lights of a plane taking off or landing.
This has been discussed in depth in the thread Tifozi linked to a couple of posts up, which even includes temperature inversion data which could
explain some possible mirage-like effects, possibly causing some kind of superior mirage of the distant airport.
[edit on 6-8-2010 by Arbitrageur]