JAL 1628: Fifty Minutes Over Alaska With Something the FAA Could Not Confirm
On the evening of 17 November 1986, Japan Air Lines cargo flight 1628, a Boeing 747 freighter carrying French wine from Paris to Tokyo, was crossing eastern Alaska on its way to a refuelling stop in Anchorage. In command sat Captain Kenju Terauchi, a former fighter pilot with more than 10,000 hours in the air, alongside co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba. A little after five in the afternoon, at around 35,000 feet, Terauchi noticed lights below and to the left that seemed to keep pace with the aircraft.
What he described next went far beyond distant lights. Two clusters of glowing arrays, he said, darted up and paused directly in front of the cockpit, close enough that he reported feeling warmth on his face. The co-pilot likened the flickering lights to flames or Christmas decorations. Then, as the smaller lights fell away, Terauchi said he made out a silhouette against the fading sky: a gigantic dark shape, like a walnut, that he judged to be — in his own words — the size of two aircraft carriers. He called it a mothership. That description is his alone; his two crewmates saw the lights but never the vast outline.
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