Simulated radar data, colour photos

~ atthe~Derry dlova ;,c. •..
llfe? Did,the:cent8rh1Mllly:flfeMplaDs ic - and tricmno shake. Steucke wa8
on mybody this could Ile. · oft? tO a hotel ip Anchorage where_a -. ' going to haVe 8!-mtich trouble getting iid ~
~ Do you still'have the traffic? ' security guy from Waahing'ton WU aiay- . ·of it u the JAL crew had with whatever
.&AL: Affirmative. Nine o'clock. · -ing- Dave Smith, manager of the FAA's those fenatjous lights were ~t had shad-
Investigations and Security Division, who owed them.
WHATEVER HAD SHOWED UP ON wu in town to talk about drug-monitor- Of coorse, mOst inquiries clime.from
the military radar wasn't there anymore. ing programs. Derry had spent the day- reporte?S. But Steucke just took that as a
And Henley wasn't seeing much, either. showing him around. He took Smith for reliable reflection of. genuine curiosity
He had never really gotten a good track coffee, told him all about the sighting, and among average citizens - the reporters
on whatever it was. United Airlines Flight the two men mused over the bewildering were only acting on their behalf, as scouts.
No. 69 had just taken off from Anchorage; things that sometimes happen in the vast Before long, Steucke started hearing ·
it was in the same air zone as 1628. Henley open terrain of the far Far North, in rumblings from afar that higher-ups in
radioed the pilot to go take a look around America's last frontier. the FAA were queasy about any associa-
1628, and a Totem C-130 military flight - tion with unidentified flying objects. The
with extra gas offered to fly over as well. OR WEEKS, NOTffiNG agency's image might be tarnished.
Up in the JAL cockpit, 1628 could happened. Steucke had split for Alaska 12 years
make out the United airliner. The two The FAA inspectors already ago, to get away from the commutes and
planes flashed landing lights et each had their hands full with far hassles of the East Coast, and word of the
other, and the United pilot advised more pressing cases, crashes honchos' uneaeiness made him yearn to
ground control that he could see 1628, set in which people had died, and go paint pictures - his evocation. He
against a light background. the JAL sighting got banished started to wonder where he was treading,
We were flying the east side of Mount to the bottom of the investiga- how far he ~ould go.
McKinley . .. . We knew that they were tions pile. Out of sight, it was Like Capt. Terauchi, Steucke bad en-
watching us. When the United plane came out of mind - until the day tered the dangerous arena into which are
by our side, the spaceship di8appeared before Christmas, when Paul cast all those who dare to publicly involve
.suddenly, and there was nothing but the Steucke got a phone call from themselves with unidentified flying ob-
light of the moon. Shokichi Kibe, an Anchorage restaura- jects. UFO indicates just that, a flying
Neither United nor the Totem C-130 teur and correspondent for the Kyodo object that is aimply unidentified, regard-
saw a thing, other than the JAL jumbo jet. News Service of Japan. less of speculation about its origin. But to
Whatever it was had split - instanta- It seems that Capt. Terauchi's spell- many, the term has come to suggest the
neously, it seemed to the crew - toward binding report was the talk of the cockpit flying saucers of supermarket tabloids.
the east, toward Canada. among Japanese pilots. The London bu- Those who ehow interest riek being la-
reau chief for KNS, Hir08hi lguchi, had beled as true-believers in visitors from
HE STUNNED CREW gotten '!ind of it from some Japanese oUter space, intelleciual flyweights, or
of Flight No. 1628 landed fliers he was friendly with, and he had just birdbrains with plenty of room up-
about 6:25 p.m. on Runway interviewed the captain at the Forum stairs to rent. To avoid ridicule, most
6R at Anchorage Intema- Hotel, a JAL haunt, when Terauchi flew serious researchers have retreated to the
tional, ending a ~minute through London in December. Soon KNS shadows and keep·their mouths shut
ordeal that was terrifying was dispatching Shokichi Kibe to confirm about what could be going on in the
and fantastic. Henley im- . the story with Steucke. The forgotten seemingly infinite universe.
mediately took a breather JAL sighting was about to be raised from Capt. Terauchi probably would have
to clear the knots out of his the dead. been wiser to do that; he could have
gut. With "questions in my "Somebody~ picked up pretty good spared himaelf the phone calls, the rub-
mind that I couldn't an- information," said Steucke, a lean, silver- bernecking, the mockery. But by all ac-
swer," he sat down to write haired career government employee, like counts he is an honest and forthright
his report, as the head of security for the his father before him, who drives a white man. By doing his duty, by reporting in
FAA pulled up in his Lincoln Porsche and keeps a jar of M&M's on his good conacience something in the sky that
Continental. organized desk. Kibe wanted to !mow if it wasn't supposed to be there, he brought
This would be Jim Derry, a steely, was true. public controversy upon himself and em-
bulky, bearded man without hair, who Steucke looked back five weeb in his barrassing scrutiny within a profesaion
was once an adviser with the Army's files and told him, "Yeah." It had com- that is highly conscious of image.
Special Forces in Vietnam. He, security pletely slipped his.mind. Kibe was we!- The FAA, meanwhile, did not want to
agent Ron Mickle and James Wright from - come to come over - Steucke would give encourage public hysteria by cavalierly
flight standards ran the crew around the him whatever information was available. releasing information whose meaning it
block a couple of times on whet they'd After all, this was Alaska. You ask a could not ascertain. It also did not want to
seen. "We weren't really sure whet we straight question up here, you tend to get cast aspersions on the crew - it had no
had," Derry said later. "Was it a security a straight answer. reason to - or create the impression that
situation, or a violation of air space? It Steucke had no idea what he was about it had anything to cover up, because it
was just a strange thing." to get into after the holi~ even after didn't. The FAA just didn't kr!ao.
Derry judged the captain to be "a very Jeff Berliner of United Press Intema- It wu a Joae..lose situation.
stable, competent profeaionaL" He was tional in Anchorage called, wanting to
sure he Wll8 concerned. "l~s like driving . !mow about this JAL sighting that was HE AIR FORCE HAD
down the highway on an empty road and making the papers in Tokyo. Steucke got. spent 22 maddening years
all of a sudden four lighta come up over the file out again:. Berliner talked to Jim investigating UFO reports
your left windshield and follow you for an Derry, probed a little deeper and filed .a before closing down the
hour," said Derry. "It gets your story that nigh_t that was transmitted last government watchdog,
attention." nationwide. Project Blue Book - and
The first officer and flight engineer The next day reality set in. The phones the FAA had no interest in
hadn't had as cleat or sustained a view as rang and rang and rang. It reminded picking up where the re-
the captain. ''But what they saw, they saw Steucke of the first big story he had treating Air Force had left
pretty much the same," Derry said. He handled three weeb after taking this job off. The UFO issue had
made notes, judged the crew to be namal, in 1983,,when a Korean Air Lines Boeing lent itself too readily to
proff!S11ional, rational, no drug ar alcohol DC-10 taking off on a foggy day had fantasy and hou; ·it was
inooluement. ..• ~ed down the wrong runway, in the impossible to control Its history bad been
It didn't seem to Derry that any further wrong direction, and run over a Navajo protracted, complicated and attended to
investigation would be warranted by se- twin-engine commuter flight with eight by myriad panels and projects that passed
curity. "There was nothing there," he people on h9ard. The office was inundat- the hot potato around without settling
said, "to indicate that anything waa inse- ed with inquiries, day and night, until anything- a scenario laid out in The
cure." If anybody decided to do anything, Steucke could get the news out that no · UFO Contrweny in America, a 1975 book
it would have t.o be the people at flight one had been killed. . by Temple University profeeaor David
standards, or air traffic contzol But this story was far more idiosyncrat- Michael Jacobs.
INQUIRER -
;Ground control:·
Do you still have ·
the traffic?
JAL: Affirmative.
Nine o'clock.
Project Blue Book had been preceded
by Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project
Twinkle, with the high point of Air Force
involvement occurring in 1952. There had
been a tremendous number of UFO re-
ports that year - including radar scope
sightings, later deemed inaccurate, that
led the Air Force to scramble jets to
intercept UFOs above the nation's capi-
ta!. So the CIA convened a panel of five
distinguished nonmilitary scientists -
the Robertson Panel - to examine
whether the sightings threatened national
security. After 12 hours of study over
three days, the panel concluded that the
real danger didn't seem to be the UFOs.
The real danger was t!:e UFO reports -
· seemingly more credible because of the
Air Force's sustained interest - reports
that could expose the public to "psycho-
logical warfare" and "skillful hostile pro-
paganda" that might "induce hysterical
behavior and harmful distrust of duly ·
constituted authority."-The Rusfilans
would surely get us.
Informed critics argued that the gov-
' ernment was going about the investige-
tion all wrong, that investigators were
preoccupied with the potential threat to
national security- this was the '50s,
after all, the height of the Cold War -
· and not with serious scientific analyses of
the thousands of cases from all over the
world.
But no matter what the Air Force
people did, certain UFO quarters rou-
tinely suspected them of orchestrating
elaborate cover-upe.
The flying-saucer business was the big-
gest public-relations headache in Air
Force history. Finally, the Condon Com-
mittee, an academic group convened in
1966 to come up with a nonmilitary read
on the situation, siiid exactly what the Air
Force wanted to hear - knowledge
wouldn't be advanced by further study,
and Project Blue Book should be put to
sleep~
It waa, in 1969, and the examination of
UFOs pellleci into the hands of independ-
ent reeearchera and private organizations
such as MUFON and CUFOS- the
Mutual UFO Network based in Seguin,
Texas, and the J. Allen Hynek Center for
UFO Studies in Glenview, fil The van-
guard of current research centers on
increasing reports of abductions that in-
volve tnumatic medical examinations on
members of different generations of the
same families - hair-thin needles iiisert-
ed up the nose, plugs of skin taien from
backs, arms, legs.
No....., the FAA had no interest in
arousing history's tendency to repeat it-
self. The government bad learned its
l!lfl80n well: The emotional, ungainly is-
sues related to unidentified flying objects
were in no.way conducive to bureaucratic
control ·
continued on Page 24
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