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By
MARGUERITE
DELGIUDICE
HE OTHER UFO MYSTERY
out of Alaska happened some winters ago
when the citiz.enry of Aricliorage erupted
with reports of Wavering lights floating
high in the night sky. The.duty officers at
the Federal Aviation Administration were
going wild. The public affairs guy wu up
all night on the phone. The wavering
lightballs were being reported everywhere
- it was weird, and people were getting
zooey.
Somebody called up the control tower
at Anchorage International, and the tow-
er said, Well, they look like balloons to us.
So the reporters immediately went to the
hot-air-J;>alloon people and said, Have you
been flymg balloons?, and it just so
happened that all the hot-air-balloon
people had just held a banquet and every single one of them was there, accounted for -
so that blew that theory.
It was .a nig~tmare, until some FAA e~ploy~ ~tli teenagers started coming up to
the public affaJ?S guy, Paul Steucke, saymg things m the hallways like, "Uh, Paul, my
kid tells me. ..."
It turns out that the teenagers had devised an inventive way to amuse themselves in
the biting, dry, desperately uneventful Alaskan winter at 20 below. They would take
those flimsy bags from the dry cleaners and fashion a contraption involving thin
cardboard with a votive candle stuck to it and soda straws strung together in the shape
of an X. If you light the candle and breathe into the bag, the thing will fill with light and
float in a wavery glow all the way up to 5,000 feet. The teenagers would send up six of
these over half a mile, confounding the
adults with manufactured lightballs.
The news was a huge relief. Some bags
finally turned up hanging off telephone
wires - Paul Steucke took pictures -
and that was the most captivating event
to emerge from the vast Far North in
many years.
Until news broke last Christmastime
that would prove far more troublesome to
explain:
A veteran Japan Air Lines pilot in a
jumbo jet reported being shadowed for
almoet an hour bY something that looked
and behaved like nothing he had experi·
enced in his 29 years in the skies. His
report began, 1Wo thousand years ago, if a
hunter saw a TV, how did he describe it to
other people? My experience was similar to
this. .. . It created many questions that a
human being cannot Cl118Wer.
His name was Capt. Kenju TerauchL ·
The crew was shaken but stable - and
convinced they had seen something that
could be neither ignored nor readily ex-
plained. But no ham! had been done, and
at first all the FAA appeared to have on
;ts hands were highly credible people
reporting highly incredible things - fa&.
cinating, but inconclusive. The scant files
on the matter dropped quietly to the
bottom of the investigation heap, and the
sighting seemed destined to go down as
just one of thoee crazy Alaskan things.
Of course, that's not what happened.
For Capt. Terauchi had unwittingly set
in motion a sequence of events that would
subject him to international attention -
to excited curiosity and gawking and
ridicule - and absorb the FAA in proba-
bly the biggest UFO controversy to be
aired in the public domain since the Air
Force got out of the UFO business in
1969.
Let's backtrack to that baffling Mon-
day in November, around suppertime in
the northern siies of Alaska, where the
sun disappears until the middle of
March. .. .
MARGUERITE DEL GIUDICE i3 an
Inquirer rtaff r.mter.
JAPAN AIR LINES FLIGHT NO. 1628.
a Boeing 747 - a "heavy" - left Iceland
bound for Anchorage on the afternoon of
Nov. 17, flying above 30,000 feet and
under a nearly full moon. It was the
middle leg of a Paris-to-Tokyo cargo
delivery. A big load of Beaujolais wine
had been picked up in Paris the day
before, along with Capt.·Kenju Terauchi,
First Officer Takanori Tamefuji and
Flight Engineer Yoshio Tsukuba - who
rode with the wine to Iceland and spent
the night at a new hotel where the beds
were too small.
The nert day, they took the fuel-
efficient Great Circle Route over the pole.
An unstable air current shook the plane
for about two hours; otherwise, the flight
was uneventful But then they crossed the
Canadian-Alaskan border and headed to-
ward Fort Yukon.
Thirty-five thousand feet below, Carl
Henley was placing them on his radar
scope. The FAA's Anchorage Air Route
Traffic Control Center hummed with a
calm intensity and glowed in radar green
- the climate of an inner sanctum.
Henley's a big, mustachioed fellow from
Arkansas with wavy black hair and seven
years' experience as a controller. This was
his sixth day of work, an overtime shift.
He directed 1628 to fly directly to Tal-
keetna, and it was at this point, .as the
plane turned left in response, that the
crew headed dead into their curious cloee
encounter.
At first, whatever it was looked-to the
crew ju.st like a couple of lights, moving
off in the distance. The lights.could have
been fighter jets or special aircraft on
special missions. The crew ignored them.
But the lights didn't go away, so First
Officer Tamefuji radioed to ground con-
trol to find out whether anybody else was
up there with them. When Henley told
him no, Tamefuji replied in halting-but-
adequate Engliah, "Ah, we in sight two
traffic in front of us, one mile about." A
little too close for comfort.
Henley wanted to know if it was mili-
tary or civilian, but the crew couldn't telL
!NQUIREll
. ' -They did see what looked like navigation-
al lights, strobe lights.
~ Roger, sir. Say the color of the
strobe- and beacon lights?
.IAI..: The color is white and yellow, I
th.ink.
Now that was odd. White and yellow,
but no red, the international color for
aircraft beacons.
THERE WERE THIN AND SPOTTY
clouds near the mountain below the
plane. The air current was steady, the sky
was clear as a windshield, and Terauchi
thought the flying conditions were quite
pleasant. ·
Thell the two lights started maneuver-
ing like two bear cubs playing with eo.ch
other, Terauchi would write later. He had
to try to take a picture of this - maybe
someone else would know what it was.
Flight Engineer Tsukuba handed Ter-
auchi his camera bag, and a comedy of
errors began. Terauchi's Minolta Alpha
7000 was loaded with ASA 100 film,
intended for outdoor daytime scenery on
the ground, and here he was flying
through the shadows of the sky, six miles
up, in a darkened cockpit. It would never
work.
He aimed. The autofocus lens whirred
in and out, open and closed, like a dilating
pupil - it wouldn't set a focus in the
dark. He switched to manual focus, but
the shutter wouldn't release. Then the
plane started to shudder, and he couldn't
hold tha camera still
I placed my camera back in the camera
bag and concentrated on observing the
lights.
The crew was fixated on these objects,
not knowing what to think. Then the
experience turned hairy- the things
come at them, stopped in front of our face,
shooting off lights. . ..
The inside of the cockpit shone bright-
ly, like a small den with a big TV, and
Terauchi felt warmth on his face. These
things were big, at least the size of a DC-8.
He thought he might be flying into the
rear end of some aircraft, into a midair
collision.
The ships appeared to hover in front of
the jumbo jet, then flew in level flight at
the same speed, slightly higher, 1,000 feet
away - a stone's throw by the distance
rule of the sky. Terauchi could see what
looked like exhaust pipes, and rotating
rows of amber and white lights in the
middre of theiie flying nozzles.
Something about them reminded him
of a charcoal fire.
No manmade machine could do what
these objects were doing, Terauchi
thought. Flying in tandem around a
jumbo jet hurtling through space at 550
miles an hour? It made no sense.
' For three to five minutes, the ships
stayed in formation with the jumbo jet,
then moved forward and off to the left.
HOIU!lltl)', we were simply breathtaken.
The fear of a midair colliaion had
passed.
We probably would htwe felt more in
danger and would have been prepared to
aoope if the 1pacahips were ahaking un-
lteadily or were unable to ltop the11111elves.
But there was nothing unsteady about
these 'aifships - their maneuvers were
flawless. ·
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