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English translation of Terauchi statement (Meeting the Future)

FAA via National Archives / The Black Vault · 14 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

Again, we be&an communicating with the Anchorage Center. We said
that we could see a light in the 10 o'clock position at the same
altitude and wondered if they could see anything in their radar.
The Anchorage Center replied that they see nothing in their
radar. I thought it would be impossible to find anything on an
aircraft radar if a large ground radar did not show anything but
I judged the distance of the object visually and it was not very
far. I set the digital weather radar distance in 20 miles, radar
angle to horizon. There it was, on the screen, a large, green,
and a round object had appeared in seven or eight miles (13
kilometers to 15 kilometers) away, where the direction of the
object was. We reported to the Anchorage Center that our aircraft
radar caught the object within seven or eight miles in 10 o'clock
position. We asked if they could catch it on the ground radar
but did not seem they could at all. Normally it appears in red
when an aircraft radar catches another aircraft. I wonder if the
metal used in the spaceship is different from ours. While we
were communicating with the Anchorage Center, the two pale white
lights gradually moved to the left side and to left diagonally
back 30 degrees as if they understood our conversation and then
when they were beside our aircraft they totally disappeared from
our radar.
[Personal statement concerning JAL Flight 1628 sighting of
unidentified air traffic, Nov. 17, 1986. Written by Capt.
Kenju Terauchi; translated by Sayoko Mimoto, FAA Alaskan
Region, Airway Facilities Division. Received ~y FAA 1/2/87]

Cases discussed

  • The Mantell UFO Incident 1948
    U.S. military fighter called the mustang that had flown up high for a confirmation and a tragedy

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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.