Japan Air Lines Flight 1628

On November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines cargo flight 1628, a Boeing 747 crossing Alaska, reported unidentified lights and then an enormous silhouetted object that Captain Kenju Terauchi compared to a giant walnut and estimated as far larger than his aircraft. The encounter lasted around 30 minutes. Ground radar recorded intermittent unidentified returns. The FAA investigated and released its file, and the case became one of aviation's most cited encounters.

The 747 was flying from Iceland toward Anchorage carrying wine. Over eastern Alaska at about 35,000 feet, Terauchi reported two arrays of lights pacing the aircraft ahead and below, close enough that the crew described feeling heat on their faces, an often-quoted detail. The lights maneuvered abruptly, then fell back. Terauchi then reported a pale band behind and to the left which, against city glow, he perceived as the silhouette of an immense object. Anchorage air traffic control granted course and altitude changes; the crew reported the phenomenon maintained position through turns. A United flight and a military aircraft later in the sequence saw nothing unusual. Anchorage radar and Elmendorf's regional radar recorded some transient unidentified returns near the JAL target during the event.

Terauchi, a former fighter pilot with decades of experience, plus his copilot and flight engineer, who corroborated the lights but were more reserved about the giant object. FAA Division Chief of Accidents and Investigations John Callahan handled the file in Washington and later stated that CIA personnel at a briefing instructed attendees the meeting "never took place," an account the agency has never addressed.

The FAA file: crew statements, ATC voice recordings, and radar data. The FAA's radar analysis attributed the unidentified returns to a split image of the 747 itself. No photographs were taken, though a camera was aboard.

The FAA concluded it could not confirm the object and found the radar returns explainable as equipment artifacts. Terauchi was reassigned to desk duty for a period after speaking with press, then returned to flying, a sequence often cited in discussions of pilot reporting stigma.

Skeptics identify the initial lights with the planets Jupiter and Mars, which stood bright in exactly the reported direction, and attribute the giant silhouette to Terauchi's imaginative reading of thin moonlit clouds, noting his own interview references to expecting a mothership and his prior sighting reports. They stress the other two crew members did not confirm the giant object and the radar returns were artifacts. Proponents counter that planets do not pace an aircraft through course reversals in a way a veteran captain would miss, and that the heat sensation and the ATC-documented maneuvers deserve more than a planetary explanation. The FAA file leaves it unidentified in the colloquial sense: investigated, unexplained, closed.