Japan Airlines Cargo Flight 1628 (Alaska, 1986)

Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 was a Boeing 747-200 freighter flying from Reykjavík to Anchorage and on to Tokyo. Around 5:11 p.m. local time on 17 November 1986, over eastern Alaska, its captain reported that three lights were tracking the aircraft. The coordinates above are approximate; sources do not agree on the exact position.

The sighting

Captain Kenji Terauchi, First Officer Takanori Tamefuji and Flight Engineer Yoshio Tsukuda (spellings vary across sources) reported objects at 35,000 feet that flew parallel to the jet and then drew close. Terauchi described "two small ships and the mothership." Accounts differ on how long the encounter lasted: Wikipedia puts the distance covered at about 400 miles, and the crew's account in a 1986 UPI report put it at about 50 miles, with the lights disappearing roughly twenty minutes after first being reported. The crew said they saw only lights, not a solid shape. The lights were yellow, amber and green, with no red, which the crew said did not match an ordinary aircraft's lighting pattern.

Anchorage air traffic control saw targets on radar and advised the crew to take evasive action. The captain descended and circled, but the lights reportedly stayed with the aircraft. A United Airlines jet and a US Air Force aircraft sent to look reported nothing unusual.

Official response and radar

The incident was not public until a reporter asked the FAA about it, and UPI published the story on 29 December 1986. FAA spokesman Paul Steucke said controllers could confirm only JAL 1628 on radar and that the agency "can't reconcile the difference" between the crew's report and the radar picture. The Air Force briefly reported a second target about eight miles away, then said it was gone; an Alaska Air Command officer called it "random clutter or weather interference." An FAA investigator concluded the crew were "normal, professional, rational" and not impaired.

The FOIA release of the case file, published by The Black Vault, includes crew interviews from January 1987 and an Anchorage Center chronology dated 18 December 1986 that concluded radar did not confirm any target close to the jet. The FAA's final report, issued in March 1987, did not identify the phenomenon.

Case for and against

The case is usually cited as a hard radar-visual report because a civil airliner crew, a control tower and possibly military radar all recorded something at the same time. The skeptical reading is that the sighting was a combination of bright planets and a radar double image. Philip J. Klass argued in Skeptical Inquirer that Jupiter and Mars lay in the direction the crew reported, and that the second radar return could be an uncorrected primary and beacon echo of the same jet. He also noted that the crew's accounts differed when they were interviewed separately in 1988, and that Terauchi first told controllers he lost sight of the object after his turn. Robert Sheaffer and Brian Dunning later argued that the captain was not a neutral observer. Ufologist Bruce Maccabee and others argued that the radar data still looked anomalous, so the dispute was never settled.

The case also has a sequel. On 11 January 1987 Terauchi reported pulsating lights and a "large black chunk" in the same region, this time with the crew on a different flight. FAA radar showed nothing, and the agency attributed the report to village lights seen through ice-crystal cloud. Its file described Terauchi as a "UFO repeater." Terauchi maintained that November's sighting was real while accepting the explanation for January's.

Current status

No single account settles the question, and the records themselves disagree on several points. Wikipedia says both the FAA and Air Force confirmed targets on radar, while the 1986 UPI report says only the JAL jet appeared on FAA radar. The Black Vault's secondary account of a CIA-linked briefing that claimed the event "never happened" is unconfirmed by other sources. The case is cited in ufology as a rare civil radar-visual event and in skeptical literature as an example of how planets, weather and radar artifacts can produce a convincing report.