Japan Airlines Flight 1628

An object the size of an aircraft carrier, or twice that in one telling, is said to have flown dangerously close to a Japan Airlines 747 freighter over Alaska on 17 November 1986. Captain Kenji Terauchi and two of his crew described it as a mother ship with two smaller lights orbiting the aircraft. The tellings say it was tracked on FAA radar. The physicist Kevin Knuth is reported to have modelled accelerations of 68 to 84 g that would kill a human pilot and speeds up to roughly 269,000 miles an hour. John Callahan, then an FAA division chief, relays a further claim: CIA agents later collected all the radar and voice tapes and said the public would panic.

What is on the record

Seven videos across three channels resolve two claimants: the captain and a co-pilot. The captain's first name is spelt both Kenji and Kenju. The tellings disagree on duration. Two have the craft following the aircraft for about an hour, two give thirty-one minutes and one gives ten minutes before it vanished. The newest telling describes red lights, then white lights, then a huge Saturn-shaped object silhouetted against the lights of Fairbanks. In that account the crew felt a wave of heat and tracked the object on their weather radar. The FAA and Elmendorf allegedly tracked it too, and the official verdict was radar echo or ground clutter. One telling says Terauchi was grounded and later reinstated with Haines' help. Another says the FAA investigated only for an airspace violation and left the sighting unexplained.

The public record fills in what the tellings leave out. The aircraft was over north-eastern Alaska near Fort Yukon, and the crew reported the lights to Anchorage air-traffic control as it happened. Anchorage radar registered returns near the aircraft and military radar was queried. The FAA opened a formal investigation and later released its records without settling the case. Sceptical analyses proposed that the crew saw Jupiter and Mars low on the horizon. Terauchi rejected that reading.

One CIA document linked here was once counted as government corroboration, and the case graded a tier higher because of it. It is a FOIA request log. It shows that someone asked the CIA for files on the subject and records nothing else. The four documents now linked are all reporting: that log, a second CIA FOIA item, a UK National Archives file from the MoD collection and a paper on UFOs and defence from the DoW release.

Why it sits where it does

JAL 1628 grades L3: two claimants, the captain and his co-pilot, describe one connected event across three channels. Radar is central to the claim, but the radar data is described in the tellings and not held in the archive. What paced the 747 is not resolved here.