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This is an English translation of Captain Kenju Terauchi's personal statement about the November 17, 1986 sighting by Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 over Alaska. Sayoko Mimoto of the FAA Alaskan Region translated it, and the FAA received it on January 2, 1987. Terauchi describes two lights pacing the Boeing 747 cargo jet, square spaceships stopping in front of the aircraft, a green object on the plane's weather radar, and a gigantic mothership seen near Fairbanks. He says the encounter lasted about 50 minutes and ended north of Talkeetna.
It was about seven or so minutes since we began paying attention to the lights, most unexpectedly two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off liahts. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt warm in the face. Perhaps firing of jets was the result to kill inertia of their quick high speed maneuver, but the ships appeared as if they were stopped in one place in front of us. Then three to seven seconds later a fire like from jet engines stopped and became a small circle of lights as they began to fly in level flight at the same speed as we were, showin& numerous numbers of exhaust pipes. However, the center area of the ship where below an engine might be was invisible. The middle of the body of the ship sparked an occasionally stream of lights, like a charcoal fire, from right to left and from left to riaht. Its shape was a square, flying 500 feet to 1000 feet in front of us, very slightly higher in altitude than us, its size was about the same size as the body of a DC-8 jet, and with numerous exhaust pipes. The firing of the exhaust jets varied, perhaps to maintain balance, some became stronger than others and some became weaker than others, but seemed controlled automatically. We did not feel threatened or in danger because the spaceship [Personal statement concerning JAL Flight 1628 sighting of unidentified air traffic, Nov. 17, 1986. Written by Capt. Kenju Terauchi; translated by Sayoko Mimoto, F(\A Alaskan Region, Airway Facilities Division. Received by FAA 1/2/87]
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 14 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.