Four Hundred Miles

Most of what's written about this case argues over the wrong question.

The wrong question is whether a Japanese cargo pilot saw an alien spacecraft over Alaska in 1986. I can't answer that and neither can anybody else, and the people who insist otherwise in either direction are the least reliable narrators in the story.

The question I find much harder to put down is what you do when a reliable man tells you something you can't believe.

The flight

Japan Air Lines 1628 was a cargo run, a 747 hauling French wine from Paris to Tokyo, and on the evening of 17 November 1986 it was on the long leg from Reykjavík into Anchorage. Three men were aboard: the captain, his copilot, and the flight engineer. Captain Terauchi had been flying for a very long time and had thousands of hours behind him.

That matters before anything else does. He was a senior professional in a profession that does not reward imagination. Pilots who report strange things get pulled off the line and sent for evaluation, and everybody flying knows it. There was no upside available to him.

What he said he saw

Somewhere over eastern Alaska, at around 35,000 feet, he reported two objects that came up off his left side and held station there. He described them as smaller craft carrying arrays of lights. They stayed with the aircraft, matching his speed exactly, close enough that he said he felt heat.

Then, according to him, they moved off and something much larger was behind them. He called it the mothership, a word he probably regretted for the rest of his life. He estimated it as enormous, and he said it stayed with him for roughly four hundred miles.

He did the professional thing. He reported it to Anchorage on the record. He requested a course change to shake whatever was behind him, and he was granted it, and he said the object followed through the turn. All three crew filed reports afterward. Investigators interviewed them and described them as professional and unimpaired.

What the ground saw

For a while, this is the part that made the case famous. Anchorage controllers reported returns on their scopes near Flight 1628 that they couldn't immediately explain.

The trouble is what came afterward. Analysis concluded those returns were most likely clutter, or a coincidental reflection of the 747 itself, which is a well-understood radar artifact. Fairbanks controllers, watching the same airspace at the same time, saw only one aircraft. A United Airlines flight and a US Air Force C-130 were routed close enough to take a look, and neither crew saw anything at all.

And that night, Jupiter and Mars were both unusually bright and sitting low on the horizon, in roughly the direction Terauchi was describing. A skeptical investigator named Philip Klass built a solid case that a veteran pilot had been fooled by planets and by refracted light in ice crystals.

That's a good explanation, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It accounts for most of the sighting, it explains why nobody else saw it, and it doesn't require anything new to exist.

The part that stayed on the record

There's one more thread. John Callahan was an FAA division chief at the time, and years later he went public saying the data was collected and handed to the CIA, and that the people in the room were told the meeting never happened. I can't verify that and neither can you. It might be exactly true. It might be a man's honest memory of an ordinary briefing, remembered with thirty years of significance attached.

None of that is what holds me. Terauchi is.

He knew what reporting this would cost. He described what he saw in his own words, with his own name attached, to his employer and to a federal agency. And then, for years afterward, while it was explained away and while he was asked about it by people who plainly thought he was a fool, he never once took a word of it back.

Two things at once

You can believe a witness completely and still think he's wrong.

Honesty is about what a person reports. Accuracy is about whether he read it right. You can be perfect on the first and mistaken on the second, and there's no shame in that.

My reading, for whatever it's worth, is that Captain Terauchi told the truth about his experience. Something was there, and it frightened an experienced man badly enough that he asked for a course change. Whether it was a very large object or a very ordinary planet doing something strange through ice, the fear was real and the report was made in good faith.

What bothers me is what it cost him to be believed about the first part while being disbelieved about the second, and how few people bothered to make that distinction while he was alive to hear it.

The full version of this case is going into a future volume of The Mystery Files. My mailing list hears about new books before anyone else.

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