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This FAA release, obtained through The Black Vault, collects material on the radar data from Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 over Alaska on November 17, 1986. It includes a March 5, 1987 explanation by FAA public affairs officer Paul Steucke, a February 1987 Airway Facilities memo, and Dennis Simantel's analysis attributing the returns to uncorrelated primary and beacon targets, considered normal. It also contains regenerated radar image photos and a Philadelphia Inquirer magazine article on the sighting and the FAA's inconclusive review.
~-lrom~17 S0 NOW YOU SEE WHAT the captain and the FAA had gotten themselves into. Dor.ens of ti.mes, day after. day, the phone rang in Paul Steuclte's office: NBC in New York. Radio Hawaii Star Magazine. Canadian Broadcasting. The Sunday Lon- don Mirror. The French News Agency. The Washington office of TRUD, the Soviet National Daily Newspaper. National Public Ra- dio. People magazine. Public response was so great that the FAA decided to inter- view the JAL crew a serond·ti.me and review the radar tapes. And Steucke started thinking strat- egy. What was the FAA's role and responsibility? What did it know? The fust officer and the flight engineer again corroborated the captain's dramatic report. But the FAA decided that the radar tapes did not - necessarily. The object on radar was now thought to be an accidental split image of the JAL 747, Steucke said, and -' . not a aeparate object- damiliai radar quirk. The people at FJ- mendorf. meanwhile, emphasised that their radar signals hadn't lasted long enOugh to be con- firmed, aDd they attributed the apparent hits to coincidental electronic clutter. The calls kept coming. Steucke kept getting new bits of material, and the thread of the story kept wandering. He felt as if he were "blowing up a balloon" - -each ti.me he doled out a bit of infor- mation, the story got bigger. He was constantly looking for holes in the data and trying to stay ahead of the reporters - not always with success. Hal Bemton, for one, of the Anchorage Daily News. After the FAA explained its double radar signal as a "split beacon," Bemtoo tracked down controller Sam Rieb, who told him that three controllers had seen a radar image of an object near 1628 that night, and "all three of us thought ·there was a track," or aircraft. (That would be Rieb, Henley and John ABI- -~'WliOW~in tO help oufJ The track· may not ' haft been very mong, Rich told Bern- t.on, but none of the controllerB at the time thooght it might be a split . of the 747. si:called Rich in for a chat. He made Rieb aware of the awkward position he had put the other controllers in - speaking for them without their knowl- edge. And from then on, Rieb referred interview requests to Steucke's office, where· reporters were informed that Rich didn't want to talk. A message also went out over the FAA employees' "code-a-phones" at work, warn- ing that reporters would hound them on this story and that FAA policy required them to go through public affairs. Steucke worried that thia mix- up made him look bad. One day he's saying only one controller had handled 1628, and now he finds out there were five, counting supervisors, and they seemed to be disputing the FAA's publicly stated position! What in the world was everybody gcing to think'! ""' At least he.wasn't handling an air crash.The subject matter1'as fascinating, and things kept hap- pening. Early on Jan. . 11, for instance, Capt. Terauchi again reported seeing unusual lights while flying over Al8sk.a. Once he landed and learned the location of a reported temperature inver- sion, he provided an explanation: AB he ~ew near Arctic Village, the town lights had gotten distorted by bouncing off ice crystals cre- ated when cold air got sand- wiched between two layers of warm air. Not a rare phenome- non. But, initially, the informa- tion was presented as if the FAA had come up with the explana- tion. Teraucbi complained to re- porter Hal Bernton, aware that it made him look like a crackpot. Hank Elias, the Alaska air- traffic manager, felt bad for the captain. A pilot is always seeing things in the sky, be says, because that's where he's looking all the ti.me. "You see things," he says, "and you rationalize." That's a star, that's another airplane, that's a navigational beacon. So the captain aee9 something, andit ·- doesn't look like anythilig he's seen in 29 yeai8 of' flying. Then, says Elias, he's "got to look at everything else real critical from now on . .. the poor guy's got to take a real hard look and say, 'Is that another one?'" Inside the FAA offices, mean- while, the attitude was, I can't believeiit. What is all this interest? But the sighting also generated wonder: For all anyone knew, the United States or the Soviet Union was testing some advanced ex- perimental craft - what better place? Or maybe there was a physical explanation, beyond our current awareness, as meteorites once were, and radioactivity, atomic fission, the anomalous motion of the perihelion of Mer- cury. And was it likely that in all the vast universe, only Earth would be singled out for life? "We all carry with us the seed of the J>')8Sibility that what Capt. Terauchi described could actual- ly have been there," says Steucke. "The debunkers are trying to keep us honest At the same ti.me, /
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