The Radar Targets over Japan

On 16 September 1947 the MEW radar at Fukuoka picked up a target at 89 miles and tracked it in to 19 miles, where it faded. Air Force intelligence put its speed at 840 to 900 miles per hour. The analysts believed the figure accurate "since it was made by a good crew, through a 70-mile long track". Their reading went further. The approach "indicates use of a homing receiver", and fading at short range "further indicates the possibility of good radar evasion technique".

What is on the record

The three cases sit on one page of "Analysis of Flying Disc Reports", a secret Directorate of Intelligence study enclosed with a memo of 18 December 1947 from Major General George C. McDonald (DOW-UAP-D100). It calls them "three radar intercepts of rapidly moving, unidentified objects". On 1 July a GCA radar at Chitose Army Air Base on Hokkaido picked up a target at 16 miles moving at more than 500 miles per hour. It "split up into two targets, each larger than a P-51". On 28 August the Fukuoka set caught a target at 26 miles in instrument weather. It withdrew in a climb to 54 miles before it faded. An Air Intelligence report of December 1948 (DOW-UAP-D094) repeats the first and third cases and drops the second.

Project 1947's transcription of the Far East Air Forces reports, which are not in the release, gives different figures: one target making repeated turns at Chitose, an orbiting track on 28 August, a pickup at 98 miles on 16 September. It also records that the September crew was short-handed, the height-finder was out and plots were made from memory. The Far East comments suggested Soviet jets for the first two cases. For the third, the Air Defense Section pointed to "radiation phenomena" and dual reflection paths, a radar propagation effect rather than a craft.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Here the record names the radar sites and vouches for one crew, but it identifies no individual. No independent testimony sits beside it in the archive, and no scope photograph of these tracks is known. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What the Fukuoka set tracked is not resolved here.