Documents / Hearing transcript
This FAA compilation, released through The Black Vault, covers an incident on January 29, 1987 involving Alaska Airlines Flight 53. The Boeing 737 was flying from Nome to Anchorage when its crew saw a fast-moving target on their weather radar about 60 miles west of McGrath, Alaska. The file includes an incident record, a certified controller transcript, the FAA's crew interview statement and a news release. Anchorage Center's radar data showed no such aircraft, and the USAF reported no military traffic in the area.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
0339:30 ZAN Alaska fifty-three--go ahead 0339:33 AS53 Any traffic in this ah area do you headed towards Anchorage 0339:36 ZAN Ah I have one coming outbound from Anchorage towards McGrath at this time--its a piper navajo at twelve thousand and ah--I have a same direction Ryan Air beech zero two estimating over McGrath zero four zero eight at two five zero other than that I don't have any other airplanes 0339:52 AS53 Okay we're just curious up at about our altitude ah headed that direction--thanks----you haven't had any UFO reports lately--huh 0340:10 ZAN Well I was just getting ready to ask you about that ah could you tell me ah the position of that aircraft 0340:15 AS53 *(Ahead) just underneath our radar pickup up a blip he's moving about a mile a second just pulled right away (unintelligible) shot at him but ah----*(man) he was there and then he was gone 0340:26 ZAN Alaska fifty-three roger and ah----ah did you have any visual sighting with that aircraft or anything like that 0340:32 AS53 Negative we just pickup up on radar the ah traffic and ah just watched it just pulls out straight ahead of us and just just disappear in a matter of seconds 0340:41 ZAN Alaska fifty-three roger standby please 0344:31 AS53 Anchorage Alaska fifty-three McGrath 0344:34 ZAN Alaska fifty-three go ahead 0344:36 AS53 Fifty-three McGrath at zero three four four level three five zero-Anchorage zero four one four landing 0344:45 ZAN Alaska fifty-three roger contact Anchorage Center one eight point two six zero DME southeast of McGrath--and I just checked on this we don't have military as active there
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.