A pilot’s haunting encounter with an “alien mothership” has re-emerged, leading conspiracy theorists to label it a major cover-up in US history.
In 1986, Captain Kenju Terauchi and his crew aboard Japan Airlines Flight 1628 reported two mysterious lights trailing their plane over Alaska.
The incident involved objects confirmed by both onboard and ground radar, which followed the flight before disappearing. Captain Terauchi then reported seeing a massive craft, much larger than their Boeing 747, sparking intense speculation and discussion.
Despite Captain Terauchi’s thorough account, FAA interviews, crew sketches of the craft, and audio exchanges between the Japan Airlines Flight 1628 crew and air traffic controllers, efforts to debunk the UFO encounter have persisted for decades.
A high-ranking FAA official later claimed he was present when the CIA allegedly suppressed the incident, insisting Terauchi’s sighting ‘never happened.’
The backlash reportedly cost Terauchi his career, as the veteran pilot was grounded after publicly discussing the event.
Recently declassified documents revealed the extent of evidence held by both Japanese and US governments regarding the UFO mothership, including radio transcripts detailing the moment the giant mothership appeared above flight 1628.
In 2018, UFO researchers noted that these records were quietly entered into US government’s National Archives decades after the 1986 UFO sighting and years after Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to unseal the recordings.
Captain Kenju Terauchi drew a giant walnut-shaped UFO that allegedly appeared over his plane and followed the 747 airliner on November 17, 1986
Terauchi’s flight from Paris to Narita International Airport near Tokyo crossed over eastern Alaska on November 17 when the 747 airliner spotted the two strange lights and enormous mothership over US airspace.
The bright yellow and white objects reportedly flew dangerously close to the aircraft, causing Terauchi to radio for air traffic controllers (ATC) in Anchorage for help.
‘We see irregular pulsating lights just… there is a large black chunk just in front of us, distance is five miles… it seems to be a spaceship,’ the pilot said.
‘I’m picking up a hit on the radar approximately five miles in trail of your six o’clock position,’ Anchorage ATC said during the 1986 sighting.
Anchorage ATC reported spotting something on radar near the airplane and contacted the military to make sure they didn’t have any planes near flight 1628.
NORAD, the military command responsible for defending the airspace over the US and Canada, confirmed there were no military flights anywhere near Terauchi’s plane that night.
According to the transcripts released to the National Archives, Anchorage ATC confirmed with the military command center that there was some sort of ‘surge’ on the radio near flight 1628, but the radars could not identify what it was.
The ex-fighter pilot with over 10,000 hours of experience attempted to escape the small UFOs before they suddenly disappeared. That’s when Terauchi spotted what he described as a ‘gigantic spaceship.’
Captain Terauchi was later grounded by Japan Airlines after speaking to the press about his UFO encounter
According to Terauchi’s written statement given to the FAA, this UFO ‘mothership’ was the size of two or three aircraft carriers, making it possibly 3,000 feet in length.
The FAA’s logs of the radio calls reveal that Terauchi was given permission to do whatever he needed to do to get away from the massive UFO, including dropping more than 5,000 feet in the air.
By the time other planes arrived in the area, the mothership vanished and no other pilots saw the giant craft.
‘Flight JL 1628, B747 jumbo cargo encountered two spaceships and a mothership about 50 minutes above Alaska,’ Terauchi wrote in his report to federal air officials.
‘There was no danger but it created many questions that a human being cannot answer,’ he added.
After a brief FAA investigation, Terauchi spoke to two Kyodo News journalists about what he had seen over Alaska in November 1986.
‘The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it [appeared to be] standing still,’ the pilot told reporters.
The FAA branded Terauchi as a ‘UFO repeater,’ noting that he had reported two other UFO sightings before the November 17 incident and two more in January 1987.
Japan Airlines eventually grounded the pilot for speaking to the press and reassigned him to a desk job.
However, one senior official with the FAA at the time believed the Japanese pilot’s story and claimed the CIA was suppressing the evidence.
John Callahan was charged with overseeing the FAA analysis of this high-profile case.
He collected critical data, including the radar tapes, air traffic control voice recordings, and the written statements from the JAL flight crew.
However, in a January 1987 briefing with the CIA, FBI, and White House officials, Callahan claimed the investigation was abruptly shut down.
‘When we got all done with our briefing, it took a couple of hours, the CIA man stood up and said, this event never happened, we were never here, you’re all sworn to secrecy and we are confiscating all of this data,’ Callahan told Larry King Live in 2007.
John Greenewald of The Black Vault – a website devoted to archiving declassified government documents – discovered the more than 1,500 pages of evidence tied to flight 1628 in the National Archives and shared them online with the public.
Along with the interviews with all three witnesses on board Terauchi’s plane, are the FAA’s records of the incident, radar simulations of what Terauchi saw, and a mountain of requests to the FAA from the public seeking information of the Alaska UFO.
