The 1986 JAL 1628 Incident: A Cargo Pilot’s UFO Encounter Over Alaska

This article documents widely-reported accounts and historical records of unexplained phenomena. It does not assert supernatural causation.

At 5:11 p.m. local time on November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 was cruising at 35,000 feet over northeastern Alaska, hauling a cargo of Beaujolais Nouveau wine from Paris to Tokyo via Reykjavik and Anchorage. The flight was routine. Then Captain Kenju Terauchi noticed lights moving in formation off the aircraft’s left side — lights that, over the next thirty-one minutes, would grow into what he described as a craft larger than two aircraft carriers. The encounter was tracked on radar, recorded in cockpit voice transcripts, and investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Nearly four decades later, it remains one of the most formally documented aviation UFO cases in American history.

What Was Reported

The sequence of events began shortly after Flight 1628 crossed into Alaskan airspace. According to Terauchi’s written statement to the FAA, submitted in the days after the flight, two small craft appeared ahead of and slightly below the 747. He described them as positioned side by side, each displaying an array of amber and white lights arranged in a rectangular or nozzle-like pattern. The objects moved in concert with the aircraft, matching its speed and heading. Terauchi estimated the encounter with these two smaller objects lasted approximately seven minutes before they abruptly repositioned to the left.

At approximately 5:19 p.m., Terauchi reported a much larger object appearing to the left and slightly above the aircraft. He described it as an enormous, dimly lit silhouette — pale and walnut-shaped in his characterization — that appeared to dwarf the 747 itself. In his statement, he wrote that the object was “as large as two aircraft carriers,” though he acknowledged visibility conditions made precise estimation difficult. The cockpit was illuminated by what he described as a soft glow emanating from the object’s direction.

Terauchi contacted the Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and reported the traffic. At that point, the ground radar at the center registered an additional return in the vicinity of the aircraft — a data point that would become the most contested element of the entire case. At the request of Anchorage ARTCC, a United Airlines flight in the area and a military aircraft were asked to look for any unusual traffic near JAL 1628. Neither crew reported a visual confirmation, though both were operating at significantly different altitudes and positions.

When Flight 1628 changed heading at the direction of air traffic control, the large object appeared to follow, maintaining its relative position. The total duration of the encounter — from Terauchi’s first visual contact with the smaller craft to the point the objects departed — was logged at approximately thirty-one minutes. The aircraft landed safely at Anchorage, and Terauchi, along with First Officer Takanori Tamefuji and Flight Engineer Yoshio Tsukuba, was met by FAA officials who collected statements from all three crew members.

The Witnesses

Captain Kenju Terauchi was a senior JAL pilot with approximately 29 years of flying experience at the time of the incident. He held the rank of captain on the 747 and had a record described by JAL as without blemish. His FAA statement ran to several pages and was unusually detailed, including hand-drawn diagrams of the objects’ configurations and positions relative to the aircraft. He spoke publicly about the encounter in a 1987 interview with the Kyodo News Agency and later participated in documentary interviews, maintaining a consistent account across years.

First Officer Tamefuji confirmed to FAA investigators that he observed unusual lights during the encounter, though his descriptions were somewhat more restrained than Terauchi’s. He reported seeing amber-colored lights off the aircraft’s left side. Flight Engineer Tsukuba also confirmed the presence of anomalous lights but, like Tamefuji, gave a more measured account of what he saw. Investigators noted that the three crew members were consistent on the core observation — anomalous lights, extended duration, abnormal behavior — while differing in the degree of detail and interpretation.

The cockpit voice recorder transcript, reviewed by the FAA, captured real-time radio communications between Terauchi and Anchorage ARTCC in which he reported the traffic calmly and in professional aviation language. This transcript was included in FAA investigative materials and has been reproduced in multiple published accounts, including the 1987 report by the FAA’s Alaskan Region. The controlled, professional tone of the communications has been noted by aviation analysts who reviewed the case as consistent with a credible witness reporting an ongoing observation rather than a panicked misidentification.

Terauchi’s career did suffer a consequence. JAL reassigned him to a desk job following the publicity surrounding his account, a decision the airline made without public explanation. He was eventually returned to flight status. He died in 2019.

What Investigators Found

The FAA’s Alaskan Region conducted an immediate investigation. The agency’s findings, released in a March 1987 report, confirmed the basic sequence of events as described by Terauchi and acknowledged that an unidentified radar return had appeared in the vicinity of JAL 1628 during the encounter. The report stopped short of identifying the object or objects and classified the case as unexplained.

The case became significantly more prominent due to the involvement of John Callahan, who at the time of the incident served as the FAA’s Division Chief of Accidents and Investigations. Callahan has stated publicly — including in testimony given to the Disclosure Project in 2001 and in subsequent interviews — that following the release of the Alaskan Region report, he was directed to brief officials from the CIA, FBI, and Reagan White House staff in Washington. According to Callahan, the briefing used original tapes, radar data, and transcripts from the incident. He has stated that after the briefing, a CIA official told those present that the meeting “never happened” and that the data was classified. Callahan claims he retained a personal copy of the briefing materials before they were collected.

Those materials — including radar data, voice recordings, and the written crew statements — were later released under the Freedom of Information Act and have been reviewed by independent researchers. The FAA’s own documentation confirmed the radar return, though agency officials subsequently offered differing assessments of its significance. Philip Klass, the longtime aviation journalist and UFO skeptic who covered the case extensively for his SKEPTICS UFO Newsletter, obtained and published portions of the FAA radar data and argued the primary return showing an unidentified object alongside JAL 1628 was a split radar return from the aircraft itself, a known technical artifact.

The University of Colorado’s previous Condon Report methodology was cited by some researchers reviewing the case, though no formal scientific investigation body was convened specifically for the JAL 1628 incident. The case was, however, reviewed in detail by Dr. Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist who had worked at Ames Research Center, and Bruce Maccabee, a Navy physicist. Both published analyses arguing that the radar data could not be fully explained by the split-return hypothesis given the duration and movement of the return. Their findings were published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in the early 1990s.

The FAA’s official position, as stated by spokesman Paul Steucke in 1987, was that the agency was “accepting the descriptions of the crew” and that the case was genuinely unresolved. That same year, FAA Administrator Donald Engen reportedly instructed the agency to make its investigative materials available to civilian researchers, an unusual step that reflected the degree of public and congressional interest the case had generated.

Possible Explanations

The most widely cited conventional explanation was put forward by Philip Klass and later supported by astronomer and skeptical investigator James McGaha. Their position held that Terauchi initially misidentified the planets Jupiter and Mars, which were both bright and well-positioned in the Alaskan sky that evening, as the two smaller craft. The geometry of the flight path, they argued, placed both planets in the general direction Terauchi described during the first phase of the encounter. Under this explanation, the movement of the lights relative to the aircraft was caused by the aircraft’s own changes in heading and altitude, not by any independent motion of external objects.

The larger “mothership” object, in the Klass-McGaha interpretation, was attributed to a combination of optical illusion — specifically, a misperception of the planets’ apparent size — and the radar ghost return generated by a split echo from JAL 1628 itself. They noted that the secondary radar return disappeared when the aircraft changed course, which is consistent with the behavior of a split echo.

Proponents of a genuine anomaly, including Haines and Maccabee, challenged the Jupiter-Mars hypothesis on several grounds: the objects reportedly moved independently of the background star field, the radar return showed a separate track for a period, and the duration of thirty-one minutes was difficult to reconcile with a crew of three professional pilots simply misidentifying known astronomical objects in familiar airspace. No conventional aircraft, weather balloon, or atmospheric phenomenon was identified as a confirmed source.

No explanation has been formally accepted by any government agency as definitive.

Why It Still Matters

The JAL 1628 incident occupies a specific and durable place in the historical record for several reasons that have nothing to do with whether the objects were extraordinary. It produced a formal FAA investigation with preserved primary documents. It generated radar data reviewed by credentialed researchers on both sides of the question. The cockpit voice transcripts exist and are publicly available. John Callahan’s account of a post-incident government briefing — and his claim that data was subsequently classified — has never been officially confirmed or officially refuted, but his identity and former position are verifiable matters of public record.

In the years since the UAP topic has returned to mainstream policy discussion — through the 2017 New York Times reporting on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment, and the subsequent work of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the JAL 1628 case has been repeatedly cited as an example of an early, formally documented aviation encounter. Its paper trail is more complete than most. That completeness makes it a useful test case for the limits of what official investigation, at least as conducted in 1986 and 1987, was able to resolve.

The encounter over Fort Yukon lasted thirty-one minutes. Three experienced crew members filed written statements. Radar operators logged an anomalous return. The FAA opened a formal inquiry and released its materials. At the end of that process, the agency’s own position was that the case was unexplained. That finding has not changed.

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