At 6:36 in the evening on 17 November 1986, a controller at Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center asked the crew of a Japan Air Lines 747 freighter to fly a complete circle. Not for traffic and not for spacing: he wanted to know whether the thing behind them would come around with them. Ten minutes earlier the same facility had asked military radar to look at that airspace, and at 6:38 the military reported a flight of two. It is all in the file the FAA released itself.
The short version
- The FAA released the file itself, in Anchorage on 5 March 1987. Its spokesman called the crew people of integrity who reported accurately what they saw; the same documents explained the radar target as an equipment artefact.
- Only Captain Kenju Terauchi described a structured craft. His first officer told investigators the lights did not look different from stars. A United airliner, a military C-130 and Fairbanks radar all looked and saw nothing.
- John Callahan's account of a Washington briefing involving the FBI and the CIA is his own testimony, and nothing independently documents it.
What the crew reported
Flight 1628 was a Boeing 747-200 freighter on the Reykjavik to Anchorage leg of a Paris to Tokyo cargo run, at thirty-five thousand feet over eastern Alaska. Captain Kenju Terauchi, forty-seven, was a former Japan Air Self-Defence Force fighter pilot with roughly ten thousand hours, flying with First Officer Takanori Tamefuji and Flight Engineer Tsukuba. There is no agreed clock for when the sighting began; published accounts differ by about an hour.
Terauchi described two objects lower than his aircraft and off to the left that rose and took station in front of him: arrays of lights, close enough to show structure, with what he called nozzles. He said the flight deck felt warm. Later he described something far larger alongside, a silhouette he compared to two aircraft carriers, which he called the mothership.
His crew did not report that. Tamefuji and Tsukuba both confirmed seeing lights, which is documented and not in dispute. But when FAA investigators asked the first officer whether the lights looked different from stars, he said no, and the flight engineer was recorded as unsure whether what he had seen was a UFO at all. Only Terauchi described a craft. Investigator James Derry recorded the crew as shaken but professional and sober, which is not the same as recording that something unexplained was outside the window.
The radar
At 6:26 Anchorage asked the military Regional Operations Control Center to check its radar, and a primary return was recorded about eight miles from the aircraft; by 6:27 it had stopped. At 6:36 the crew were issued the full circle. At 6:38 the military reported a flight of two. A United flight vectored to look at 6:45 reported at 6:50 that it saw the JAL aircraft and no other traffic. At 6:53 it was over. A C-130 saw nothing, and Fairbanks reported only Flight 1628.
The strange part is not that a blip appeared, since raw radar is full of birds, weather and clutter, but that a controller escalated in real time with no incentive to invent work for himself. The case is also thinner than the popular version admits. The military's flight of two is a report relayed by telephone by an operator describing what he thought he had, and no military radar tape was released. Spokesman Paul Steucke's explanation was mechanical, and it is the hinge of the case: the aircraft's skin echo returns alongside its transponder signal without lining up in the same place, producing what the system calls an uncorrelated primary and beacon target. Two blips, one aeroplane. Researchers who worked the case hardest counter that the second return moved independently and dropped out on course change, which a split echo should not do. That is unresolved, because the data is not public.
What the agency said, and when
For roughly six weeks nothing happened in public. UPI broke the story on 29 December 1986 and the Washington Post carried it on 1 January 1987, so every account given to a journalist afterwards is a recollection rather than a report. The FAA interviewed Terauchi on 2 January; by 8 January officials were calling the radar object an unexplained split image of the 747; and on 5 March the agency released the file in Anchorage. Reporting from the period indicates Administrator Admiral Donald Engen ordered that release, which no primary document verifies.
Steucke also said the crew were people of integrity who did report accurately what they saw, while the agency said it was unable to support what they reported and attributed the radar targets to the uncorrelated target mechanism. Those are not a contradiction but a distinction most coverage collapses on purpose: these men honestly told us what they perceived, and we cannot corroborate that their perception matched an external object. The agency also stated it has neither the resources nor the mandate to investigate sightings of this kind.
The case against, at full strength
Philip Klass was an aviation electronics editor who understood radar hardware better than almost anyone writing about UFO cases. Here is his argument unsoftened. That night over eastern Alaska, Jupiter stood at roughly magnitude minus two point six, one of the brightest objects in the night sky, on the pilot's left-hand side, at an elevation of around ten degrees. The elevation is the load-bearing part. At thirty-five thousand feet a body ten degrees up does not look like it is in the sky. It looks like it is out there with you, at your level, holding station. Mars was roughly twenty degrees to Jupiter's right. Two bright objects off the left side at apparent aircraft altitude is exactly the initial report.
Klass then made an observation that is genuinely hard to answer. Across all of Terauchi's accounts he never once reported seeing Jupiter or Mars alongside the objects. Either the planets were obscured while the objects were not, which requires cloud in exactly the right place, or the pilot was looking at the planets and describing them as objects.
His explanation did have to move, and that weakens it. When the planetary account could not cover the flame-coloured, textured quality described, he shifted to moonlight reflecting off ice crystals in high cloud, with the radar return coming from the same thin cloud. But that mechanism was not invented for this case: it is the one the FAA used to resolve a later Terauchi sighting on 11 January 1987, determined to be village lights diffused through thin cloud. Terauchi was also a repeater, with several further sightings by early 1987, and investigators treat a repeat reporter as a caution flag.
Then the sharpest blade. On the radio at the time, Terauchi indicated he had lost sight of the object after completing his turn. Later, after the story broke, he described it as having stayed with him through the turn. The first is consistent with a light source falling out of his field of view; the second is a claim of intelligent pursuit, and it emerged six weeks afterwards, following national press coverage. That is the signature of a memory reworked toward narrative coherence, and it does not require dishonesty. He also said the mothership had positioned itself so as not to be seen, which is unfalsifiable. The sceptical case is serious, and it does not touch John Callahan at all.
The man who says he kept a copy
The sceptical case is entirely an argument about what was outside the aircraft. Callahan's claim is about what happened in a room in Washington. He says he was the FAA's Division Chief for Accidents and Investigations at headquarters, a title researchers struggled for years to verify: accessible records showed a more junior branch manager role. In 2015 the researcher Paul Dean examined paperwork Callahan supplied personally, including a federal Form 171 listing him as division manager for investigations and evaluations at FAA headquarters from October 1986. Those are original-looking documents of the right age, supplied by the subject himself; they are not an FAA response to a verification request, and the agency has never publicly confirmed the title. The date does cut in his favour: he moved into that division a month before the flight.
His account runs as follows. In early January 1987 he took a call from the FAA's Alaskan regional office, which was fielding press inquiries, and told them to ship the voice tapes and data discs overnight to the FAA Technical Center in Atlantic City. There, he says, specialists synchronised the voice recordings against the radar data and played it back, and he videotaped the result. He says he briefed his supervisor and Administrator Engen, and that a briefing was then convened in Washington attended by roughly three representatives each from the FBI, the CIA and President Reagan's scientific study team. He says a CIA representative closed it by saying the meeting never took place and the material was being taken, and that he had already made copies, which he still has.
That entire account is Callahan's testimony. There is no independently released FBI or CIA record of the briefing, no attendee list, and no second attendee has come forward publicly. It is uncorroborated, and that is a description rather than an accusation. He has said it where saying it falsely carries a cost: at the National Press Club on 9 May 2001 and in Leslie Kean's 2010 book. One detail cuts the other way: in at least one retelling he dates the incident to 7 November 1986, not the seventeenth.
What we can and can't say
Documented. The Anchorage chronology from 6:26 to 6:53, including the brief primary return eight miles out, the full circle, the telephoned flight of two, and the United vector. The negative sightings by the United crew, the C-130 and Fairbanks radar. Derry's assessment of the crew as sober and credible. The first officer's answer about the stars and the flight engineer's uncertainty. The 5 March 1987 release, the people of integrity remark, and the uncorrelated target explanation. The 2001 Freedom of Information fee dispute and threatened destruction deadline, and the 2009 response that the records had been destroyed.
Contested or unestablished. Whether the second radar return moved independently of the aircraft, which cannot be settled without data that is not public. The characterisation of four radar systems giving inconsistent results, which comes from summaries rather than a technical annex. The flight engineer's claim that he tracked returns on the aircraft's weather radar. Engen's reported direction to release the material. Callahan's job title, supported only by documents he supplied himself.
Testimony only. Everything Terauchi describes about structure, nozzles and a mothership, which his own crew did not corroborate, and the entire Washington briefing: the attendees, the confiscation, the line about the meeting never taking place, and the copies Callahan says he holds.
The most likely explanation for what three men saw over Alaska is mundane, and the evidence says so. What is not mundane is the shape of the file around it: an agency that documented the event carefully, released it unusually openly, explained one half precisely, declined the other half for want of a mandate, and then lost the tape. Retention schedules routinely destroy operational material, so the loss is not in itself sinister, but the primary electronic evidence is gone either way. If the radar return really was a routine artefact, it is worth asking why anyone convened a briefing about it.
Sources
- FAA primary document set, Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 (NICAP archive PDF) — the uncorrelated primary and beacon target wording, Steucke's technical explanation, and investigator James Derry's crew assessment.
- FAA Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 records, Internet Archive — the full released record set.
- The Black Vault, JAL 1628 document archive — crew names as recorded in FAA paperwork, and the 2001 and 2009 FOIA correspondence including the destruction response.
- Wikipedia, Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 — route and aircraft, the split-image characterisation, the 11 January 1987 ice-crystal resolution, and the negative sightings.
- Robert Sheaffer, Bad UFOs, "JAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi's Marvellous 'Spaceship'" — Klass's argument in detail, including the planetary positions, the shift to ice crystals, and the contradiction over the 360-degree turn.
- Philip J. Klass, "JAL 1628: Capt. Terauchi's Marvelous 'Spaceship'", Skeptical Inquirer — the original sceptical analysis.
- The Debrief, "What Really Happened to Japan Airlines Flight 1628 in 1986?" — crew roles, the declined interceptor offer, and the four-radar-systems characterisation.
- UFO Briefing Document, "1986: Japan Airlines 747 over Alaska" — the minute-by-minute Anchorage chronology from 6:26 to 6:53, and the people of integrity quotation.
- Enigma Labs, "Airline Crew Encounters UAP Over Alaska" — Terauchi's background, the weather-radar claim, and the December 1986 to March 1987 publication timeline.
- Paul Dean, The UFO Chronicles, "John Callahan & The JAL-1628 UFO Encounter", part one and part two — the credential dispute, the Form 171 and resume, and the explicit caveat that these documents were supplied by Callahan and not confirmed by the FAA.
- National UFO Center, "UFOs Are Real: FAA Division Chief John Callahan 2010" — Callahan's fullest first-person account, including the briefing attendees, the "this meeting never took place" line, and his misstatement of the incident date.
- Unexplained Sightings, JAL 1628 Alaska UFO — the reported Engen direction, and the objection that the secondary return moved independently and disappeared on course change.
- WorldCat, Disclosure Project: National Press Club news conference, 9 May 2001 — date and venue of Callahan's on-the-record testimony.
- Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010) — venue for Callahan's named account.
About the author
Motech researches and produces long-form video on technology and the unexplained for an audience of more than 270,000 subscribers. Corrections and tips: info@richardelhaj.media