Some UFO cases are strong because the witness is unimpeachable. JAL 1628 is interesting for the opposite reason: the main witness was a seasoned airline captain whose later behaviour complicated his own testimony, the corroborating radar was genuinely ambiguous, and there were two very bright objects hanging in the sky that night that had nothing to do with UFOs. It is a case that rewards being read slowly, because almost every dramatic element has a sober counterpart sitting right beside it.
Lights over the Arctic
On the evening of 17 November 1986, Japan Airlines Flight 1628, a 747 cargo jumbo, was crossing eastern Alaska near Fort Yukon on a freight run. Captain Kenju Terauchi and his two crew reported that they became aware of lights off to their side — and that the lights kept pace with the aircraft.
At first the crew described two smaller objects, each an array of lights, moving with a precision and a suddenness that unsettled them. This went on not for seconds but for many minutes — long enough to rule out a fleeting misperception, and long enough for the crew to become genuinely alarmed.
The thing the size of a ship
Then, according to Terauchi, it escalated dramatically. Behind the smaller lights, he said, loomed a gigantic object — something he would later describe as larger than an aircraft carrier, a vast silhouette pacing the 747 across the dark wilderness.
The crew asked air traffic control and their own radar for confirmation. And here the case both gains and loses its footing. Anchorage centre and the aircraft did register some returns in the vicinity — but the FAA later concluded these were ambiguous, possibly split echoes of the 747 itself or ground returns, rather than a solid, independent target. It is not a clean radar case like Tehran; it is a smudged one.
The FAA’s quiet unease
What keeps JAL 1628 respectable is that the FAA took it seriously. Investigators, notably John Callahan, who years later went public with the story, described handling the data and briefing officials — and being struck that a professional crew had reported something they could not explain over nearly an hour. The event was logged, discussed at a level most sightings never reach, and never given a confident conventional label.
The two lights in the wrong place
Now the cold water, and it is specific. On that night, from JAL 1628’s position and heading, the planets Jupiter and Mars were shining brilliantly, low in the sky, in very nearly the direction the crew first reported the pacing lights. Bright planets seen from a moving aircraft, refracted and smeared through cold, layered Arctic air, are a documented cause of exactly this kind of “it’s keeping pace with us” illusion — because a distant object appears not to move relative to you as you fly.
Sceptics including James Oberg and Philip Klass argued that the smaller lights were the planets, that the “mothership” was likely a mirage or moonlit cloud, and that the radar returns were artefacts. It doesn’t help the extraterrestrial reading that Captain Terauchi reported further UFO sightings afterwards, which led even sympathetic investigators to weigh his testimony carefully.
The UAP Times take
JAL 1628 earns a credibility of 2 — Credible, and it is a genuinely finely balanced case. In its favour: a professional multi-person crew, a long-duration encounter, and an FAA that engaged rather than dismissed. Against it: radar returns that the investigating agency itself judged ambiguous, a lead witness whose later record muddied the water, and — most tellingly — two of the brightest objects in the night sky sitting almost exactly where the encounter began.
Our reading is that JAL 1628 is very likely a planet-and-ice-fog case that grew, over a tense hour in the dark, into something enormous — the human perceptual system doing what it does when a trained but frightened observer stares at a brilliant, unmoving light from a moving cockpit. “Very likely” is not “certainly,” which is why it keeps its place among the notable cases. But it is the clearest example in this file of how a real, documented, professionally-witnessed event can still have an entirely earthbound cause — the mirror image of the Nimitz Tic Tac, where the cross-sensor data stubbornly resists any such tidy explanation.
Further reading: for a radar case that holds up far better than this one’s did, see The Tehran Dogfight. The JAL crew described classic bright orbs and a cigar-like mothership; the case is on the sightings map.
Source: FAA investigation records; crew testimony; analyses by James Oberg and Philip Klass