John Greenewald of Black Vault finds documents related to JAL airline ufo encounter over Anchorage

17 years after filing for records using the freedom of information Act, Greenewald has found the missing records of this famous encounter. They were found in the Records Group of the FAA 1922-2008.

But to refresh everyone's memory of this case the bio:

Japan Air Lines flight 1628 was a UFO incident that occurred on November 17, 1986 involving a Japanese Boeing 747-200F cargo aircraft. The aircraft was en route from Paris to Narita International Airport, near Tokyo, with a cargo of Beaujolais wine. On the Reykjavík to Anchorage section of the flight, at 17:11 over eastern Alaska, the crew first witnessed two unidentified objects to their left. These abruptly rose from below and closed in to escort their aircraft. Each had two rectangular arrays of what appeared to be glowing nozzles or thrusters, though their bodies remained obscured by darkness. When closest, the aircraft’s cabin was lit up and the captain could feel their heat on his face. These two craft departed before a third, much larger disk-shaped object started trailing them. Anchorage Air Traffic Control obliged and requested an oncoming United Airlines flight to confirm the unidentified traffic, but when it and a military craft sighted JAL 1628 at about 17:51, no other craft could be distinguished. The sighting lasted 50 minutes.

He then talks about finding these documents:

Fast forward more than 17 years after my initial request. I believe I found the records. I discovered them in Record Group 237: Records of the Federal Aviation Administration, 1922 – 2008. Holding National Archives Identifier number 733667, and local identifier number 1203, I found more than 1,500 pages regarding the JAL1628 UFO encounter. I believe, but this is only a guess as of the writing of this article, that the FAA must have transferred a copy to the National Archives, but either did not keep a record of the transfer (which they should have) or they attempted to mislead me that the records had been destroyed, when in fact, they were not. Plus, this is more than 1,400 pages than the FAA’s original estimate, and more than 1,200 pages archived by NICAP’s original JAL1628 files. I believe based on the folder they were discovered in, the time frame of the documents and the contents within, the below contain the records I sought in 2001, but was told they were destroyed. In a bizarre twist to this story, I offer you the complete set of 1,569 pages, titled by their official file designation headers, listed in the order they were found.

The story source includes all of the documents which can also be downloaded into a zip file if you wish. Otherwise you can open them in adobe if you wish, or have.
The links to the documents are all at the bottom of the story.

There is some really interesting stuff in here. I haven't seem them all yet.

source

a reply to: data5091

Each had two rectangular arrays of what appeared to be glowing nozzles or thrusters, though their bodies remained obscured by darkness.

Reminds me of the Stephenville UFO.

The object had a dull gray finish with inverted cone shapes coming out of its undersides,

www.coasttocoastam.com...

Interesting that seems like a lot of paperwork to go “missing” and for just a simple the pilot must have had some bad sushi before the flight type incident. Thanks for the heads up I’ll check out the docs.

I've just read the first pilot report - breathtaking! Thank you for this! Absolutely riveting.

Phenomenal case, and a significant UFO encounter, always been a favourite

I believe the pilot was removed from duty for a while, I think that reading this, even though he is being truthful, is understandable. It's a breath of fresh air though, reading the actual thoughts of someone who was there.

Page 1. 6t- F ~A In[ ll.. ~ &.) Once upon a time if a hunter saw a t.v., how did he describe it to other people? My experience was similar to this. The north of Alaska in mid-November you cannot even see the sun; the darkness continues until the middle of March. Flight JL 1628, B747 jumbo cargo encountered two spaceships and a Mother ship about SO minutes above Alaska. There was no danger but it created many questions that a human being cannot answer.

Page 2. So I am writing that experience down here. In mid-October, I was excited to hear the special flight. This special flight was to import special French wine from Iceland to Anchorage for approximately a 6 hour and 20 minute flight. It is an extremely short flight compared to most flights. It takes about two-thirds normal flight hours. There are only two landings at Kefurabik (sp.?) International Airport.

Page 3. This particular flight was planned to stop at Iceland and increase cargo items rather than flying direct· from Paris to Anchorage. However, since being wintertime if the condition of the runway was poor, we may have to reduce the cargo, therefore, everyone was paying special attention to the amount of cargo. The temperature of Kefurabik Airport in November is approximately maximum of 3 degrees C. and the lowest was minus 3 degree C.
Page 4. Six of us Japan Airline employees arrived at Kefurabik Airport at midnight and three people welcomed us as usual. We headed on to a new hotel. The bed was extremely small. I understood why the down blanket was only 135 centimeters. We stayed only about 17 hours. The weather became good and the runway was not frozen and we left the Kefurabik at 2042.

Page 16. Co-employees are married, have children and are young. I am pleased that nothing happened. The ending of this encounter was very well. We worried because we do not know the purpose of the spaceship, but there is no immediate danger. What do you think about our experience? I hope we humans will meet them in the near future and confirm my experience.

[Per sonal st at ement concerning JAL Flight 1628 sighting of unidentified air traffic, Nov. 17, 1986 . Written by Capt. Kenju Terauchi; t ransl ated by Sayoko Mimoto, FAA Alaskan Region, Airway Facil i t ies Divi sion. Received by FAA 1/2/ 87 ]

a reply to: Zcustosmorum

it's one of mine as well. I can just imagine what is going on if I would have seen the things they saw, and had been in the cockpit.

a reply to: Zcustosmorum

In case someone starts googling for more information: The Kefurabik airport mentioned here means with 99.9% certainty the Keflavik airport in Iceland. This seems to be the Japanese pronounciation of that very airport.

Excellent work by Mr. Greenwald. This is the kind of thread and case that should be front-and-centre in Ufology.

Old video clip that I had saved. Bad quality, but you can hear what Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA, Mr. Callahan stated: "CIA said to all the people here, 'This event never happened. We never were here and you're all sworn to secrecy. We are confiscating all this data.' And they did." Why would the government want to hide all the evidence?

I thought perhaps it is one of those things called UFO and taking a photo might help to identify the object later.

Captain Terauchi sounds really charming and delightful, doesn't he? A shame he gave up trying to take a photograph with his ASA-100 due to shutter and focusing issues - which was arguably odd in itself.

The account of the initial two objects is enthralling reading indeed, especially by the time the 'mothership' appears and its subsequent instant disappearance once another plane arrives to verify the sighting for Air Traffic Control.

We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. Alas! There was the silhouette of a gigantic spaceship. We must run away quickly! ...... When the United plane came by our side, the spaceship disappeared suddenly and there was nothing but the light of moon.

Alas! Hurrah! That's my weekend reading sorted! S&F for the OP. Superb case.

One wonders why UFOS do that. There are many incidents where they seem to just want to tag along with flights for a while.


On this one maybe they were after the wine

originally posted by: Willtell
On this one maybe they were after the wine

LOL. The UFO/Aliens forum's Post Of The Week.

Was the cargo still there afterwards?


PS: Did the 1978 Kaikoura Lights spring to mind?

A lot of the information in these documents have been available online for a while in the 377 page PDF FAA report HERE. Transcript between the towers and JAL 1628 crew, Terauchi and crew interviews, FAA reports, newspaper articles, and so on. I don't think there's a cover up of information.

a reply to: Willtell

because they want to check out ant technology, see what it looks like close up.

originally posted by: Zcustosmorum
I believe the pilot was removed from duty for a while....

Richard Haines goes into more detail about that in this interview mate.





Great thread Data and there is also a good interview with JGJ (who is also a member of this forum) here where he discusses the huge amount of UFO government documentary evidence already released.

Cheers.

originally posted by: shawmanfromny
Old video clip that I had saved. Bad quality, but you can hear what Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA, Mr. Callahan stated: "CIA said to all the people here, 'This event never happened. We never were here and you're all sworn to secrecy. We are confiscating all this data.' And they did." Why would the government want to hide all the evidence?

Bruce Maccabee, a PhD with the Navy, was there, and he said Callahan misunderstood what he said and apparently thought he was a CIA guy when he's not CIA. What was said according to Maccabee is along the lines of what you'll find in the 3rd pdf in the black vault download...that information about an ongoing investigation can only be released through official channels which usually means not much at all while the investigation is still going on, but Maccabee never said or implied that the information wouldn't be released after the investigation was complete, in fact he wrote up a rather detailed analysis of the incident himself and published it.

Also the Black Vault docs have correspondence about someone in the FAA violating this protocol which was established well before this "incident" and it talks about what a disaster it would be if such information of ongoing investigations was prematurely leaked of more serious FAA investigations where fatalities were involved. The correspondence doesn't blame Callahan for the unauthorized leaks directly, but they seem to imply he might have been the leak. They weren't telling him the information could never be released, just not until the investigation was complete, not only according to Maccabee, but according to all the FAA internal correspondence too.

Not only was the information released, but you could buy packages from the FAA, see the black vault docs which include an order form. You could buy the radar data, the tapes of the recordings of communications with the controller...a ton of stuff. It was a huge package if you bought the whole thing.

The people who think this was a UFO should not read these docs, it will break their heart. What we have here is a UFO report, but there was no UFO. These docs confirm the 747's radar was picking up a cloud because it was green and green is clouds on that system...all the details are here. Nobody's really sure what the visual sighting was, but they are sure it's not a UFO because not one but two other aircraft confirmed there was nothing in the sky but the JAL 747. When the united flight was diverted to find the other traffic JAL1628 reported, JAL1628 was asked to turn their landing lights on so United could identify that aircraft, which they did. United flight said they clearly see the JAL flight but nothing else. Tower asked JAl where the UFO was now, he said it's in front of the united flight, they should see it. But they didn't see it, there was no UFO.

You can speculate on what the visual sighting was but it's pretty clear it wasn't a UFO, if that means some kind of object.These docs say the FAA thought he was seeing reflections in ice crystals in the cloud from lights on the ground. It wasn't only the united flight that checked, there was another aircraft (a C130) and they also confirmed there was no other visible object in the sky where the JAL flight reported it. Of course the other flights with other viewing angles wouldn't see the same reflections in the ice crystals if the FAA hypothesis was correct.

Another thing that's puzzling, why is it only the third "mothership" that captain saw that interests people, the one in this case? Why does nobody ever talk about the other two "motherships" he saw before this one? Or the other UFOs he saw after this one? Reading all these details convinces me this case has way more to do with psychology and human perception than it does to do with UFOs, especially since we have pretty good evidence from satellite data now that wasn't in the FAA package which identifies what the "mothership" likely was, as discussed in my "mirage" thread. Their radar detected a cloud, how can anybody have any doubts about that when it was green and clouds are green on that radar system? And the other two aircraft didn't see the UFO Terauchi saw, because there was no UFO, only a mirage of some sort. I have a pretty good idea what that was too, also discussed in my mirage thread.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I really appreciate the logical clarity you bring to a number of threads.

I myself don't care if any of the purported UFO events ever turn out to
be UFO's or anything else unusual for that matter.

It is my contention that anyone who wants to research controversial
subjects should have that sort of thinking as a baseline, or confirmation
bias will distort the evidence.

However if we can reduce the signal to noise ratio.. then IF something
truly remarkable does come up.. then we can see it with more clarity.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
And the other two aircraft didn't see the UFO Terauchi saw, because there was no UFO, only a mirage of some sort. I have a pretty good idea what that was too, also discussed in my mirage thread.

Great post.

So can we assume Terauchi was simply lying to sex up his account when he said the 'mothership' immediately vanished upon the arrival of the United plane?

Or did the United plane interfere with the mirage's 'projection' in some way?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I think the mirage theory is more out there than the actual encounter, and I don't think you're helping yourself by trying to apply this new kind of phenomenon in blanket form across numerous cases