All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Nov. 10, 2020 - Skeptoid
19:50
Skeptoid #753: The Japan Air Lines Alaska UFO

This famous UFO case is said to be proven by military radar data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The 1986 Japan Airlines UFO 00:08:47
So many UFO cases claim the title of the best evidenced yet, and the 1986 Japan Airlines flight in Alaska was no different.
We had an experienced military pilot and both his crewmates who all saw it.
We had other planes in the sky, and we had ground stations taking radar tracks.
It seems hard to accept that with all this evidence, there could be any explanation other than a genuine alien spaceship.
But we're going to try.
Right now, on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems, and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Japan Airlines Alaska UFO.
Each time I do a deep dive into a famous UFO case, I always introduce it by explaining how it's considered among the best evidenced.
So it feels like that has a bit less impact each time I say it.
Therefore, I'll qualify this one by saying it's considered the best evidenced UFO case to come out of Alaska.
It happened on the evening of November 17th, 1986, when JAL-1628, a Japan Airlines Cargo 747, was over inland, Alaska.
A flight crew of three was on board.
Captain Kenju Terauchi, an experienced military and civilian pilot, was in command.
For 40 minutes, he and his crew watched two unidentified lighted craft maintain formation ahead of them, which showed up on their radar, and then a third larger one, which he called the mother ship, off to the left.
He said it was the size of two aircraft carriers, and later drew a picture of it that looked like a giant walnut.
Why is this considered so well evidenced?
Because a military air traffic controller on the ground is on tape as having seen the mothership on his radar screen too, and the printouts of that radar track still exist.
Today we're going to have a look at it.
The story is also notable for its darkest element.
Sometime after the event, a meeting at the Federal Aviation Administration's headquarters in Washington, D.C. was attended by a group of people, including FAA technicians, three CIA representatives, and some others described as President Reagan's scientific staff.
All of the physical evidence was presented and discussed, and at the end of the meeting, one of the CIA men said, This event never happened.
We were never here.
We're confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.
The story went public about six weeks later when officials from the FAA came to Anchorage to interview the flight crew, per standard practice.
Philip Klass, editor of the industry publication Aviation Week in Space Technology, and also the leading UFO debunker with PsyCOP, was quick to point out that a very bright Jupiter was in exactly the direction Terauchi saw the mother ship, and that Terauchi did not report seeing both.
He also noted that the two smaller spaceships were described by the two other crewmen, who also observed them for 20 minutes, as being indistinguishable from stars.
Now, by no means am I claiming that what they saw were either stars or Jupiter.
The fact is it's impossible anyone will ever know.
Generic lights in the sky are the most common, most vague, and least identifiable UFO phenomena.
And that's where this story has typically been left.
The UFO skeptics claiming misidentification of stars or planets, and the UFO community pointing out all the other elements they feel are unexplainable.
Well, let's start by looking at one of these, the flight crew's detection of the two smaller craft on their own radar.
This is true.
In fact, the crew even drew a picture of exactly what had been shown on their scope.
It was a green horizontal streak a few miles in front of them.
The 747 was equipped with weather radar for spotting storms.
Green meant light clouds, and the colors progressed through yellow to red for thick storm clouds.
Klass pointed out that an actual aircraft would have produced a strong red signal, and that the weak green streak indicated thin clouds of ice crystals, exactly like the ones Terauchi later admitted caused him to mistake village lights for more UFOs on a different occasion.
After the crew lost sight of the two small lights ahead of them is when Terauchi saw the giant mothership to his left, appearing to maintain formation.
Air Traffic Control advised him to turn 360 degrees to his right and see what the traffic did.
Terauchi did so, and the traffic disappeared.
However, once he got back on course, a controller at NORAD's Regional Operations Control Center at Elmendorf Air Force Base chimed in and reported that he had an intermittent target following the 747.
This is the famous military radar confirmation that's such an important part of the story.
They offered to scramble some jets to get a visual confirmation of whatever it was, but there were already two other planes in the area.
One was United Airlines Flight 69, who had a clear view of the 747 against the sky and reported no other aircraft of any kind anywhere near it.
The other was an Air Force C-130, which also had a clear view of the 747 and saw no other traffic.
So what about this mysterious radar confirmation of something nobody reported seeing?
Let's take the nickel tour of ATC-RBS, or Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System.
Primary radar is when a signal is transmitted from an antenna, is reflected from an aircraft, received back by the antenna, and displayed as a target on the controller's radar scope.
But air traffic controllers want more information than just that, so they use an enhanced system called ATC-RBS.
In this, the radar scans synchronously with a radio transceiver, which requests all aircraft transponders to reply.
At the same moment the radar waves reflect from the aircraft, its transponder replies to the request with an identification code.
As this is an active transmission, its signal is much stronger than the primary radar reflection.
Now the controller sees on his scope the primary target plus its identification information.
Although this system is very reliable, there are any number of causes for the transponder reply to be delayed by the tiniest fraction of a second and arrive after the primary radar return.
When this happens, it's called an uncorrelated primary and beacon.
On the radar scope, it looks like the two signals are coming from different places in the sky.
The FAA records all of this data, and it was easy enough for their analysts, who are trained in all such anomalies, to look at the data and determine that this is exactly what happened with the JAL 1628 radar returns, confirming what the analysts at the Alaskan Region Air Traffic Division had already determined.
All of the documents associated with this case are available online, and included in these is a letter from the FAA that states, Enclosed is a copy of the radar computer printout for the JAL 1628 flight.
It clearly shows the uncorrelated returns and the fact that the data was not returning to the center at the same time.
This accounts for the uncorrelated target returns and the distance between them as the aircraft continued to move.
But in the heat of the moment, the controller at Elmendorf AFB saw two separate targets on his scope while hearing the pilot talk about a giant UFO.
Why Evidence Disappeared 00:08:43
And the rest became UFology history.
In fact, there never was any radar confirmation of any second object in the sky.
A simple fact, conspicuously ignored and consciously contradicted by all of today's pop culture retellings of the story.
Either we accept what the radar data shows, or we reject it in favor of the UFologist's preferred explanation of a spaceship.
And if we're going to do that, logic demands that we also assign spaceship as the explanation for all of the countless other uncorrelated primaries that happen every day.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
The character of Captain Terra Uchi also plays a role in this event.
While the UFO literature typically lauds him as a former fighter pilot with 10,000 hours of flight time, that's not the whole story.
The FAA documents revealed that he was what they term a UFO repeater, meaning someone who frequently reported UFOs.
According to class, reports from such individuals are usually, quote, viewed with extreme caution.
In fact, Terauchi reported UFOs five times, including this one, two on previous occasions, and two more only eight weeks later, when he mistook Alaskan village lights seen through ice crystal clouds for UFOs.
Terauchi's reports weren't merely those of a conscientious pilot trying to be comprehensive in his reporting.
He was firmly of the belief that these were visits by extraterrestrials.
He told the FAA that the first time he saw a mothership, his term, was while taking off from Taiwan five years previously.
Following his Alaska UFO report, Terauchi wrote a detailed 18-page narrative, which was translated into English and submitted to the FAA at the time they interviewed him on January 2nd, about six weeks after the event.
The title of his paper was Meeting the Future.
In it, he repeatedly referred to the objects as two spaceships and a mothership.
He even had a hopeful and positive feeling about the visitors, writing, We worried because we do not know the purpose of the spaceship, but there is no immediate danger.
I hope we humans will meet them in the near future and confirm my experience.
He even stated in his interview why the two small spaceships ahead of them flew at a slightly different altitude.
If it was at the same altitude as we were, I assume they are using an atomic energy.
There will be some radiation left on our aircraft.
Also, the other is that air turbulence be created, so they did not want to leave any evidence of their existence.
They never positioned where the air turbulence would disturb us.
The FAA investigators also caught him in at least one blatant embellishment, which he both wrote in his story and repeated unequivocally in his interview.
The radio transcripts show that Takeuchi lost sight of the mothership once he started his 360-degree turn to the right and never saw it again.
But in his paper and in the interview, he said it followed them all the way around in perfect formation.
So let's move on to the final piece of evidence, the meeting in Washington where all sorts of officials looked through boxes of evidence and everyone was warned to never say anything about the UFO.
The details for this meeting come from the 2010 book, UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by longtime UFO author Leslie Keene.
A name you might recognize from other skeptoid episodes.
She's the one who writes most of the newspaper articles for Tom DeLong's To the Stars Academy, the UFO group responsible for creating today's mythology claiming the Pentagon has an active belief in alien visitation.
Keene had a fellow UFologist write a chapter in her book about the Alaska event and the subsequent meeting at the FAA.
He was John Callahan, best known for his part in Stephen Greer's Disclosure Project, a fringe group of fanatical UFologists who believe that the U.S. government maintains active relationships with aliens.
Callahan's chapter is the primary source for all that's known about the FAA meeting.
A few years before Keene's book came out, paranormal blogger Ryan Dubay tried to verify Callahan's meeting at the FAA.
Dubay reached out to two other UFologists, Ron Pandolfini, a former CIA analyst, and Bruce Maccabee, a prolific UFO author who was at the time an engineering contractor.
Both were at the meeting described by Callahan, and both told Dubay that anyone swearing anyone to secrecy was absolutely false.
In fact, Maccabee published extensively based on all the information shared at the meeting.
Dubay told all of this to Keene and had Pandolfini and Maccabee also tell her the same thing.
But she ignored it all, and when she published her book, not only did she claim that nobody but Callaghan has come forward to admit attending the meeting, but also asserted the existence of a CIA, quote, directive that, quote, this event never happened.
An odd claim if the meeting's attendees then went forth and published freely about it.
As far as the boxes of documents Callahan claimed the CIA was confiscating, nobody ever confiscated anything, and he even wrote in his chapter in Keene's book that he had kept all the documents personally, even after he retired.
The meeting seems to have been attended only by guys who had intense personal interests in UFOs.
From all I can tell, it could have been nothing more than an informal get-together where these like-minded enthusiasts could share all they'd heard about the Alaska story.
And at the end of the day, that's really all there is to this famous UFO account.
Just a lot of interest and retellings by a group of people who are unwavering in their belief that Earth is actively visited by aliens.
The non-UFologists who were involved in the event were the pilots of the other planes, who saw nothing at all while carefully searching, and the FAA's radar experts who studied the printout and easily identified it as a common, uncorrelated primary.
Even Terauchi's flight crew came up with nothing more than lights in the sky that couldn't be distinguished from stars.
There was nothing extraordinary or unusual on that evening, until we introduced the uncorroborated reports of a five-time UFO repeater and author of Meeting the Future.
Skeptoid's Final Verdict 00:02:16
Captain Terrauchi was undoubtedly a fine and competent pilot, but was hardly unbiased when it came to alien spaceships.
Combined with promotional efforts from the Rogues Gallery of Usual Suspects from UFO mythology, the Japan Airlines Alaska UFO event turns out to have been just another unevidenced aerial anecdote.
A great big Skeptoid shout out to Premium supporters Buggy, Tom Vandermolen, Allie Middleton, Kate Bilowitz and the Vermont family, Noah Dillon, and a special shout out to Tim Russ for suggesting this episode.
Follow us on your favorite social media for even more great content.
You'll find both Skeptoid and me, Brian Dunning, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection