The Kera Incident (介良事件)

Kera lies about 7 km from central Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku. In 1972 it was rice paddies as far as the eye could see. Among the fields stood a cluster of large boulders, the "Kera stone", which has been compared to Stonehenge.

August 25, 1972. Michio Seo, 13, was walking past a paddy. Several feet above the field, a small device was flying erratically. It had "a dull silver metallic finish" and "a wide brim sloping upward to a bell-shaped flat top." He came closer. It shot a bright beam of light in his direction and chased him away.

He came back with four friends. As evening fell, the object returned, pulsating with multicoloured light. One boy got close. It sounded a loud pop and shone a blue glow. They all ran. Accounts compare its flight to a bat hunting insects. Japanese sources say it glowed as it flew low, floating about 1 m above the ground. It landed on the paddy and gave off intense light. It never appeared in rain.

From September 1 to 5 the boys watched it fly and land again and again. On September 6 they trapped it under concrete blocks, sealed it in a plastic bag and put it in a backpack. One of the boys, Yasuo Fujimoto, took it home. By morning it was gone. They caught it again the next day. Again it vanished overnight.

In their hands it was about 18 cm across and about 7 cm high. Its underside bore concentric grooves like a record, a square pierced with many small holes, and engraved seigaiha wave and chidori plover designs. Through the holes, parts like radio components could be seen. It rattled when shaken. The boys hit it with a paperweight, tried to prise it open with a screwdriver, poured water on it and threw blocks at it. Their camera shutters would not fire. Only one distant photograph is said to exist. Yasuo's father, Matsuo Fujimoto, thought it looked like an antique cast-iron ashtray, but "too light for the real thing." After about a month it stopped appearing. It had vanished, one account says, "as if it had teleported."

The NTV late-night show 11PM made it a national story. No government investigation followed. The Japan Space Phenomena Research Association built a replica. Doubts grew. One witness said it looked "like a tobacco tray (ashtray) painted silver." Seo was known for his skill at magic tricks. On NHK Radio in 2016, the Kōchi comet discoverer Tsutomu Seki said a high-school teacher had told him one of the boys admitted the story was made up. Sceptics also note that only the core group of four or five boys saw it fly, and that the dates do not always agree.

August 25, 2022. Exactly 50 years later, writer Nakazawa and researcher Getter Shōn returned to Kera. Comparing maps with 1970s TV footage, they identified the paddy area. Honjō Tatsuya, chair of the skeptics' group ASIOS, supplied a cast-metal ashtray that matches the boys' drawings. Nomura, a middle-school witness in 1972 and now chief priest of Asamine Shrine in Kera, examined it. The real object, he said, was noticeably lighter. And an antenna-like mechanism stuck out from its underside.

In Japan the case sits among the "Big Three" UFO incidents, beside Kōfu in 1975 and Nikoro in 1974. An audiobook has called it "Japan's Roswell." It appears in the district's own commemorative history. The object itself was never kept. What the boys held in their hands that September is still argued over.