All Episodes
Previous Next
March 22, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:00
Edition 622 - MUFON, Japan

Contactee/abductee Peter Whitley - an American in Nagoya, Japan - is Director of the MUFON branch in that country - He has his own abduction stories and has collated many unique UFO/UAP/Contact stories from Japan... including some you won't have heard anywhere before...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Beautiful day as I record these words.
Has spring arrived?
Well, I'm not going to speak too soon, but they're telling us that it's 18 degrees, 64 Fahrenheit today, and looking really clear and really nice.
Hope everything is okay in your world.
I'm a little behind on the emails lately, but if you've sent me an email that requires a response and you haven't had one, perhaps, then please remind me about it and I will deal with it immediately.
I love getting your stories, your guest suggestions, all of the things that you say.
I will name-check some people in just a moment here, but thank you very much.
And if you've made a donation to the unexplained recently, absolutely vital, especially in these extremely difficult times where a lot of us just don't know how we are going to make ends meet in the future.
All donations to keep the show going, gratefully received at the website designed and created by Adam.
It is theunexplained.tv.
That's the unexplained.tv and the official Facebook page.
Please keep that going.
And thank you for all the nice messages through that.
The official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with the logo on it.
And I don't use Facebook Messenger.
So please don't send me messages through Facebook Messenger because I don't get to see them.
Please email the show through the website.
There's a link there, theunexplained.tv, if you need to.
And it's lovely to hear from you wherever in the world you happen to be.
I actually made a bit of a change in this last week.
You may know that I've been effectively incarcerated like most people through these lockdowns and everything else.
And I've literally been, you know, here for two years, driving only to go to the local supermarket, Sainsbury's, not really seeing anybody during the week, talking to a lot of people virtually, but not seeing anybody or interacting with anybody.
So last week, it got particularly bad.
And I decided, even though money is tight, I found a deal on a hotel in Devon.
And I went for two nights.
And the weather began to turn to get nicer.
And it was a beautiful experience.
I hadn't driven my car for a long time.
The car was very surprised to be driven.
So I went on the M3A303 all the way down across into Devon, through Yeoville and places like that, and down towards Exeter and then turned down towards the coast.
And it was marvelous.
And it was marvelous also to see places on the Devon border like Lyme Regis that I hadn't seen for many years.
And although the day that I went there, the rain was torrential.
It was a chance for me just to be the young man that I used to be again.
A wonderful thing.
Guest on this edition, Peter Whitley, the MUFON representative in Japan.
We'll talk about Japanese UFO stories and much more with him coming soon.
Couple of name checks.
Thank you for all of the great feedback, by the way, about Paul Sinclair.
Always an excellent guest and another good one from him.
Thank you.
I've got a lot of email about that.
Jacqueline, who emailed recently, Jacqueline, thank you so much.
You know who you are and I read every word that you said and I think that your story needs to be told or certainly that story without involving your name needs to be told.
Jeremiah in Barbersville, West Virginia.
Barbersville.
Recalling the days of Art Bell.
Nice to hear from you, Jeremiah.
Tanya in Dorset, regular listener.
Nice to hear from you.
Dave.
Lee in Staffordshire.
Steve.
Susan in Bournemouth.
Good to hear from you.
Kathy in Florida.
I've noted your comments.
Craig in Sheffield.
I liked the Charles Christian edition recently.
And I noted everything you said in your email.
Thank you, Craig.
And this from Tom in New Zealand.
Hi, Howard.
I make a B-line for your podcast as soon as you put out something new.
Your podcast is entertaining and therapeutic.
It is useful to him by the look of those words.
I'm emailing to say that I had a wow moment in the first five minutes of edition 618 with Jeremy McGowan.
He described being in the Jordanian desert and seeing a pinpoint of light move from horizon to horizon and make a geometric right angle turn repeatedly.
I was in New Zealand and saw a pin point of light move from horizon to horizon and make a perfect S-shaped maneuver before it disappeared over the horizon.
Undoubtedly for me, an intelligently driven craft.
Stuck in my head for 10 years since.
Thank you for your work, says Tom Pipkin.
Tom, thank you so much for your email.
That's great.
I don't know whether you are in New Zealand or you were visiting New Zealand when this happened.
I think you may have been visiting and you might actually be from the UK.
But if you need me to clarify that, please get in touch again.
All right, let's get to the guest now in Japan, where there is a massive time difference between here and there, nine hours.
So it's 10 o'clock in the morning as I'm recording these words, 7 p.m. in Japan.
And Pete Whitley is there.
Peter, thank you very much for doing this.
I hope that you are well.
I am, Howard.
Thank you very much for having me.
It is a pleasure to talk to you.
And how is Nagoya?
You know, here in London, I was just telling my listener we're moving into spring.
I've no idea what season you're in in Japan.
It's a long way away.
We're also in spring.
It's warming up here.
We have a relatively short spring, in my opinion.
It goes from winter.
We have about a month of cool weather.
And then for me at least, being from America, the Pacific Northwest, it starts to warm up.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Well, one of these days, hopefully my life will take me to Japan.
I know a lot of Brits and Americans live there.
Now, look, two quick questions about you.
Number one, how did you come to be an American in Japan?
And number two, how did you come to get involved in MUFON?
Yeah, okay.
I went to university, studied to become a counselor on a whim.
I came here for a year right after graduation and loved it.
Went back to the States, did my counseling thing for about five years, spent every vacation here in Japan, and finally decided, you know, instead of spending all my money on trips there, I might as well just move to Japan.
I became a member of MUFON because I read a book by Kathleen Mardin, who was a part of their experiencer resource team.
At the end of that book, it directed anyone who thought that they were a quote alien abductee or experiencer or contactee to take a MUFON survey.
I went to the MUFON website, took their survey.
The director of the Experiencer Resource Team, George Medick, contacted me back.
We had a conversation to and fro.
And he said, you know what, Pete, we could use someone with your experience in Japan.
And here I am.
Okay, and you got gradually promoted to become MUFON director.
Yeah, I became the national director here about a year in.
And then now I'm a member of the Experience Resource Team, which is really my first love.
My primary interest is in human and non-human intelligent contact.
Does a lot of that happen in Japan?
We get some.
I would say less so than America.
I'm not sure if that is due to less activity or a cultural reluctance to report, however.
I think there is a different culture there.
And, you know, I'll mention to you a little later in this conversation the very famous Japan Airlines case, which we've talked about on this show many times.
But, you know, a lot of that was to do with the culture, the thought that if the captain reported this, I mean, it's a culture within the airline industry, not only in Japan.
But, you know, the captain thought if we report this, there may be problems.
And indeed, there were problems with the airline.
But we'll talk about that in a little while.
So different culture, different way of viewing these things.
Before we get into the Japanese aspect of this, because we don't get the chance to talk to many people in Japan about these phenomena, so it's always good when we can.
Talk to me about you, because I read somewhere that you say that you've been abducted by aliens three times.
What happened?
That's correct.
The first time was when I was 17 years old.
I was going to bed.
A blue light came in through the window, triangulated to my bed.
Two small gray aliens appeared there.
I could tell they were surprised, which was interesting.
There's an intuitive feeling.
I could tell they were surprised I was awake.
So like any rational person would do, I tried to jump right out of bed.
And what happened was halfway through that jump, they froze me.
I was frozen half of my body in midair, the other half touching the bed.
They proceeded to take me physically through the window somehow via that blue light.
And my assumption is we were going to a craft, but I blacked out at that moment, 17 years old, first encounter.
And you're sure that wasn't a dream?
I'm 100% positive that wasn't a dream.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And were there any signs after that experience that something had happened?
Did you wake up with any signs?
Were things not quite the way they were when you went to sleep?
Well, you know, that's a great question.
That actually leads to the second experience.
If you fast forward about six months when I was 18, I woke up on board what I assumed to be a UFO.
I was lying down on some sort of table.
To the right of me was a tall gray.
He had a long metal rod.
I'd say it was roughly 12 inches.
Once again, I could intuitively tell he was surprised I was awake.
He told me he would insert that rod into my ear and it wouldn't hurt.
Into your ear.
Now you said it was 12 inches.
I don't know how wide your head is, but that even if it was my head, it would go through my head and some.
My head is definitely not 12 inches wide.
I can assure you of that.
He did proceed to put that rod into my right ear.
He told the truth.
It did not hurt.
Afterwards, he said something, this was all telepathic, something in the effect of you're going to go to sleep and you won't remember this.
Now, the next morning, the first thing I did, of course, was remember it.
Hopped out of bed, went into the bathroom.
You know, and they say you're not supposed to put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear, but I did not take that advice.
I did stick my finger gently into my ear, my right ear, and what I found was a bit of dried blood.
Okay, and you think that that was proof that something had been done to you in the night.
You know, at the time, it seemed very odd.
You know, why would this advanced, what I assumed to be some advanced intelligent species leave a trace of blood?
But now, after having, you know, studied the phenomenon for 14 years and being a member of the experience for resource team, now I've come to understand that physical traces are found in a lot of cases.
Yeah.
Isn't that interesting?
Did you tell anybody about this?
I told each each when I was 17, 18, after each of those encounters, the first thing I did after checking for blood was I ran upstairs and told my mom.
And sure enough, she said, you had a bad dream.
Yeah.
Now, through my life, I always was open about it.
If the topic of aliens came up, I would always just say, hey, yeah, I've been taken.
And people would laugh or maybe someone would believe me.
It was just one of those things.
Let's fast forward to my third encounter.
This happened about seven years ago.
I have an eight-year-old son.
He was just about one year old.
We went back to America to visit my parents for the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
I awoke again on what I assumed to be a UFO.
Across from me was my infant son.
He was sitting in what I can only describe as some sort of futuristic alien high chair, eye to eye with me.
Between us was a sphere, a purple sphere.
Inside of that sphere was some sort of liquid or gas swirling around.
To the right of me, to the left of my son, was a tall gray alien.
He telepathically said to me, if you agree to this, you and your son will understand each other's souls.
Something to that effect.
Now, when we're talking about telepathic conversation, we're not talking about words.
It's ideas and thoughts.
So when I say you will understand each other's souls, that's just roughly what he meant.
Okay, and the intimation was that if you agree with this, what is this?
I did not know.
I had no idea, Howard.
I sat there dumbfounded.
The first two instances when I was abducted, I was terrified.
This third instance, probably because my son was there, I was just confused.
I should add that my son had the biggest grin on his face.
He looked as happy as could be.
So I sat there confused.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but apparently that was enough for an agreement.
Now, I cannot tell you how I know this, but that tall gray did something to that sphere, not physically.
I could tell he did something to the sphere.
I do not know how I could tell he did something.
Now, as soon as that happened, my son and I shot down from low Earth orbit through the atmosphere, through the clouds, through the roof of my parents' house.
When we arrived fully conscious, my son was sitting on my stomach.
I'm lying in bed and my infant son is sitting on my stomach, still with that huge grin on his face.
Which leads me to think that, I mean, you know, there are lots of people who look at these things from a not totally believing perspective.
And those people would be inclined to say, I think.
This sounds to me, bearing in mind that dreams can create a whole world that you've never seen before.
I mean, I've had the, you know, during the COVID period, especially, I have had the most astonishing and alarming dreams, three-dimensional, four-color.
They felt like they were happening.
But I woke up and I knew they were dreams.
What I'm suggesting is that, are you sure that you're not just particularly good at having lucid dreams?
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's the natural question to ask.
I equate it to, now I live in Japan and with some frequency, we do have earthquakes.
Now, if there's an earthquake in the middle of the night and I wake up and feel the house shaking and go back to bed, the next morning, when I wake up, I know that I experienced an earthquake.
There's a certain level of waking consciousness that is clearly different from a dream.
And that's the best way I can describe it.
Each of those three times, not for one second, did I consider it was a dream.
I'm not a particularly vivid dreamer.
I rarely remember my dreams.
But if I do, of course, they're just qualitatively different.
You say that you had the two experiences when you were a teenager, late teen.
Then you had this other experience much more recently.
What was the gap of time between the first two and the last one?
Oh, roughly 17 years.
Roughly 17 years.
Yeah.
Okay, so you're in your 30s now.
Yeah, I was in my 30s when we had my son.
Yeah.
My mid to late 30s.
Okay.
One year, just about one year old.
To me, that experience felt intuitively like a passing of the torch, so to speak, as if they were telling me, we're done with you.
Now it's your son's turn.
So do you believe these things, a lot of people say that these things run in families and that sometimes, you know, your parents might have had those experiences, then you have those experiences and, you know, your children have those experiences and their children.
It runs in a lineage.
But when you first told your mother about what you'd experienced, she said to you when you were 17, you had a dream.
Absolutely.
And in fact, I've gone back and asked all of my family members through my grandparents, you know, has anyone experienced anything like this, seen something they might have thought was a UFO?
They all deny it.
I personally kind of find it hard that I'm patient zero in my genetic line of this, but it's possible, you know.
But like you said, we do know that these things run in family lines genetically.
If you've had conversations with Kathleen Marden and you've had conversations with groups who are involved in this thing, alien abductions, it's a hard thing for people to go through.
Sometimes it's a very lonely experience.
But the two questions that come out first are always, you know, what do you want to do with me and why have you picked me?
Did you get answers to those questions if you asked them?
I did not.
In fact, I did not get a chance to ask them anything during those encounters.
The first two were terrifying, like I said.
The third was confusing.
I did try to get regressive hypnosis to explore those encounters.
What happened was my Hypnotherapist, he was excellent, took me back to when I was 17.
If you've never had regressive hypnosis, it's an amazing thing.
You remember details about when you were regressed, details you would never remember in a million years.
You know, oh, I had a cassette tape laying on the desk, for example.
However, when my hypnotherapist would bring me back to the moment where those two small grays appeared in my bedroom, I would cry like a baby.
And he tried over and over to get me to go back there.
And I was reliving the experience, terrified.
And after about two and a half hours, he rightly said, you know, Pete, I don't think exploring this with hypnotherapy is going to help you.
And I said, I think you're right.
So we stopped there.
Yeah.
But yeah, I have talked with Kathleen Martin.
In fact, she's a colleague of mine.
We're both on the MUFAN Experiencer Resource team.
She's absolutely an incredible researcher, a wealth of information.
Completely.
One of the best.
And a regular guest on this show and somebody that I have an awful lot of time for.
She's a very busy woman these days.
Now, I suppose, you know, I need to be asking you here, what do you think this means in your life?
You know, what do you think these experiences, apart from getting you in contact with MUFON, which is a pretty big thing, but what do you think that they were for?
Let's put it that way.
I'll be quite honest, Howard.
I don't know.
I don't know.
This phenomenon of abductees, contactees, the more I learn about it, the less I know.
Whitley Striber said something in a recent documentary that I think was incredibly profound.
What he said basically was, we need to hold on to the question.
The implication being, once we start to feel that we have the answers, we're probably on the wrong track.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is probably something that we will not be able to understand during our short times here on Earth.
Perhaps in the afterlife, we'll get a better view.
But I think perhaps we're dealing with a level of intelligence and evolution that we simply cannot grasp the picture.
Before we get into talking about your work with Mufan in Japan, just to talk about these abduction experiences, just give me a sense of what they were like, what it felt like to be in what, from what you describe as some kind of alternate reality somewhere else on a craft with beings from maybe somewhere else or another dimension.
As you say, we don't understand entirely and maybe we never will in this lifetime.
But what did it feel like?
Each time I was up there all three times, I was physically frozen.
I could not move.
It felt like just being there, frozen, looking at something you cannot understand.
And they did not tell you at any stage in any of these three experiences, apart from that dialogue that you had in the third one, they didn't tell you what they were doing with you, why it was you, why you were wanted?
No, they did not, which sort of begs the question, why aren't they telling us?
Now, some experiencers do say they've been given messages about environmental disasters.
Some experiencers say they've been given messages that they need to spread the word about this and that.
In my case, none of that happened.
I don't think I am special.
I'm not one of those people that claims I'm a star seed or anything like that.
I think perhaps I'm just one of those people they picked up and they decided to study for whatever the reasons are.
Some of my listeners who are on the more skeptical side, who email me, in fact, I had an email recently along these lines about another guest, suggest that the experience that you had, and look, I think some people are being taken.
That's my personal view, having talked with Travis Walton and having talked with Calvin Parker from Pasca Gula and many, many other people and Kathleen Marden herself a number of times.
I don't doubt that there is something happening.
But as some of my emailers point out to me, that sometimes these stories are come up with by the brain to diffuse problems that an individual might have in other areas.
In other words, to deflect from bad experiences, from life not being so good, whatever it might be, especially when you're young and at a formative age.
What would you say to that in your case?
I think that's a very valid point.
And when you contact or are contacted by an experiencer, it's important to find out details like that.
What was going on in their life at the time they were taken?
Some people, indeed, I do believe misconstrue things that happen as contact events, which may not be.
In my case, I had a wonderful childhood.
My parents stuck together.
They're still together.
I was happy as, I guess, a 17 and 18-year-old could be.
I like to think I'm a relatively normal person.
I have a stable job, you know.
I have never been in jail.
I have no Personal traumas.
In my case, I would say that's not correct.
So in your case, in your case, it's not a protection mechanism or a covering story for something because there isn't anything to cover.
That's interesting.
And look, I have to say, and I've talked about this on my show before, when I was, I think, 17 or 18, you know, and I was, I think, well-adjusted.
I had wonderful, loving parents.
You know, I'd had some difficult times at school when I was maybe 11 or so, you know, bullying and stuff like that.
But by the time I got to 17, it was marvelous, wonderful.
Life was great.
You know, I had the whole world before me.
So I had no problems.
But I swear that one night I looked at the doorway of my bedroom.
And, you know, I think I'm pretty well adjusted.
I hope so.
As well adjusted as most people.
What is normal?
But I looked at the doorway and standing by the doorway and whatever it was stepped back when it realized it had been seen was a stick figure with long spindly figures and a long head, a kind of cream color.
And, you know, I was and I was awake.
And, you know, before anybody says it, you know, I didn't even drink alcohol.
I wasn't imbibing anything, age 17 or any since.
So I wasn't under the influence of anything.
And that's what I saw.
So I understand that these things happen.
And, you know, when you tell people, sometimes they laugh, but you have to stick to your story and, you know, stick to your truth, as they say.
So you go through life having had these experiences.
A lot of people say that they've had these experiences, but not all of them become involved in the ufology movement.
Why did you do that?
That's a great question.
And it's a bit of a fascinating story, in my opinion.
Now, the first two events happened when I was 17 and 18.
I would tell people, if the topic of aliens or UFOs came up, I would tell people outright, hey, I was taken twice.
And most people would laugh.
A few would take it seriously.
So on and so forth.
Fast forward, I moved to Japan 14 years ago.
Shortly after I moved here to Japan, I saw a children's art exhibition.
A bunch of posters children had drawn.
One of those posters had a UFO with a gray alien inside of it.
I looked at that poster and for the first time in my life, I thought, you know, I should probably look into this and see if it happens to other people.
Now, I was incredibly naive at the time, Howard.
I went onto Amazon.com to see if there were any books on UFOs.
Of course, what I found is that there are probably thousands of books on UFOs.
And not just on UFOs, plenty of books on abductees, contactees, and experiencers.
And so it was just a dormant part of my consciousness for a long time.
And at that moment, when I saw that child's drawing, it just sparked in me this incredible interest.
And ever since, it's been my absolute passion.
Talk to me about the state of ufology in Japan.
I was not really aware too much of it until very recently.
And then I started to see some news stories appear, and I would talk about them on my radio show.
I've got Philip Jackson, who's a listener and contributor to the show, an English guy, who lives in Japan.
So he's a regular on the show.
But for example, I think this was last year, a newspaper called the Asai Shinbum, I'm sure I pronounced that badly, reported this.
The Ilinomachi District has doubled down on its efforts to become the preeminent UFO hub in the universe.
This is the way the newspaper wrote it.
The International UFO Lab was founded on the 24th of June, that was last year, in the district to collect, analyze, and disclose information on sightings of unidentified flying objects around the world.
It opened on World UFO Day.
And that to me indicates that there is a level of interest in UFOs and ufology in Japan.
How great is that interest?
There is a great deal of interest here.
I would say it's probably equivalent to the interest that I see in America.
It's a bit different.
You know, we'll have shows on TV about UFOs and they'll have different celebrities on there discussing them or, you know, famous people talking about UFOs.
It's absolutely a prominent issue here.
Like you said, the International UFO Laboratory opened up last June in 2021.
And we have to say that the location is in Fukushima, isn't it?
Near Mount Senganamori, where apparently UAPs have been seen.
Absolutely.
It's a hotspot.
I mean, granted, they put it in probably the best place they could find.
And one interesting thing about UFOs here in Japan is in the aftermath of the Fukushima, the tsunami disaster and the nuclear plant, there were many reports and some videos and pictures came out of sightings of UFOs around the nuclear plant.
Now, recently, I actually did try to track down the source of some of those videos.
I found that a couple of them were proven to be fake, but a few of them are still relatively credible videos and pictures.
And as we know, UFOs have a great deal of interest in our nuclear activity.
They do.
I mean, there are those who say that whoever it might be, whatever races there may be or race there may be, are concerned that we have harnessed this enormous power that not only has the power to, you know, devastate a small area, but could devastate the entire planet and this species.
And people claim that that's why they're interested.
I am aware of some sightings near Fukushima, which of course has been in the headlines more recently because that thing is still not totally under control, is it?
So that's a hotspot.
What about other reports, though?
Do they get reports around military bases and that kind of thing, like in America?
Absolutely.
In fact, MUFON is, I would say half of our reports here from MUFON Japan are from people in the military or people visiting their friends in the military.
So there are a lot of reports of sightings near military bases here in Japan.
One difference I would say in the overall reports of sightings here in Japan versus America is we have more of the lighted orbs, which seem to be intelligently controlled.
That's a very common sighting here, more so than like seeing a saucer or a tic-tac or a cigar-shaped UFO.
These glowing orbs that move in unison and make odd movements.
That's a very frequent sighting we get here in Japan.
And when people see things, if they don't know about you, and of course they should, but if they don't know about you, who do they report them to?
Can they report them to the authorities there?
Can they phone up the local, I don't know, the local police department in the local prefecture or where do they go?
Most of them don't do anything.
Most of them just keep it to themselves and tell their friends and so on and so forth.
One of my jobs, my primary job here is the director for MUFON of Japan is trying to get the word out that, hey, there's a place you can report these sightings.
Other than us, I mean, you could call the cops, but what are they going to do?
From your own files and your researches, talk to me about perhaps the most interesting cases that you've come across.
You know, like I said, my primary interest is in human and non-human intelligent contact.
And there are a couple historical cases here in Japan that I find fascinating.
One of them is the Kara incident.
This was in 1972.
A 13-year-old boy was coming home from school and he saw an object in a field that looked like a small hat flying.
And it shot a beam at the boy.
It didn't hit the boy, but it shot a beam.
So he went home.
He grabbed four friends.
Five of them went back to that field and the object was still there.
They brought a camera.
Now, they took a picture of the object.
It made a strange sound.
They took another picture of the object and this object began to try to burrow into the ground of that field.
These pictures are on the internet.
You can look them up.
It's the CARA incident.
The boys actually picked up this object.
There's a picture of the boy holding the object.
They took it home, flipped it over on the underside were 31 holes with three strange symbols.
There's a picture of this object.
They looked inside and they thought they saw tiny entities operating this small hat-sized UFO.
In 1972.
1972.
The next day, one of the boys put it in his backpack to take it to school to show his friends.
That seems natural.
That's what I would have done as well.
When he got to school, it was gone.
Okay?
That's not the end of the story.
The object came back to that same field.
Now, this time, these boys had a plan, an amusing plan, in my opinion.
They brought a bucket and filled it with water, and they had some rags.
When the object landed, they threw these rags onto this object and dumped a bucket of water on it.
And their belief was perhaps that they would short-circuit the object or it couldn't get away.
They captured that object one more time.
Now this time, they had a plan to keep it.
Their plan was to put this object in a plastic bag filled with water and keep that bag tied to the wrist of one of the boys at all times.
Once again, these boys went to school.
One of them had that bag tied to his wrist.
On the way to school, he felt a tug.
They opened the bag.
The object was gone.
That's the end of the care incident story.
Quite a fascinating tale, in my opinion.
You know, in doing what I do for as many years as I've done it, I've heard most of the stories.
I'd never heard that one.
I don't know what to make of that.
Something so tiny and, you know, something experienced by these boys.
Do we know where they are?
Ah, yes.
Those boys, actually, there was a Japanese interview with them a few years ago.
They tracked down the boys and they stand by the story.
Back in the day, one of the boys' fathers inspected it.
They took a hammer and tried to damage the object.
They couldn't make any damage on it.
Yeah, yeah.
So we know who these people are and they stand by the story.
What happened to the object?
It simply disappeared out of that bag full of water on the way to school.
So they have no clues as to where it might have gone.
That's an incredible story.
I mean, that's the kind of story that I don't think that tallies with a lot of the stories we get here in the UK, Europe, and America.
That's a very, very different kind of story.
You said you had a number of stories.
So have you any, you know, got me more where that came from?
Yeah, another one of my favorite stories that actually happened back in the 70s.
Well, in 1975, this is called the Kofu incident.
Now, these incidents are just named off the areas where they happened.
Now, two boys saw a luminous object over a rice field.
The object landed and the lights went out and what they saw was a silver-shaped craft.
These boys walked up to the object.
They looked at it.
A ladder came down from the object and an entity came down the ladder.
Now, this entity, again, this is a story that doesn't match up with what we know about most UFO or extraterrestrial encounters.
This entity was about four feet tall, dark brown, with no face.
He had pointed ears.
Where his mouth should have been, he had three long fangs.
Now, the ladder is down.
These boys are near this object.
They look inside and they see another smaller entity in the craft.
While they're occupied by gazing inside the craft, this four-foot-tall entity that came down the ladder touched one of the boys on the shoulder and made a sound that the boys report sounded like a faulty tape recorder, some sort of odd sound.
The boy that was touched was so terrified, his friend had to carry him out of the field.
Now, this would be just an interesting story that two boys came up with.
However, there were witnesses before and after that saw this luminous object come into the rice field and eventually leave.
Do they have organizations that investigate these things in Japan?
I kind of asked that question before, but just to codify and clarify it, you know, we had the Ministry of Defense here for a while investigated these things.
They may well still be investigating them.
We understand that the Americans do and other countries have organizations.
France does.
You know, is there an organization, official one, that investigates these things?
How does it happen?
Yeah, well, actually, recently in September of 2020, the JSDF, Japanese Self-Defense Force, announced publicly that they had developed protocols to report sightings officially of unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena.
That story, I'm sorry to jump in, that story fascinated me.
I mentioned it on my radio show.
And of course, it's always hard to get correspondence in Japan, so I wasn't able to get anybody to talk to me about this.
I think maybe Philip Jackson did something briefly from what he read in the papers.
But that's fascinating because all of a sudden it seemed that Japan was taking all of this seriously and had come up with protocols.
And the question that I was asking on the radio and didn't really get an answer to was, why would Japan do this now?
Why do you think?
Well, actually, we know why it happened.
Before they announced the protocols, Japanese Ministry of Defense officials met with American military officials and discussed the issue.
Okay, I just want to say to my listener, there's some noise in the background where you are.
I have a feeling that somebody is making dinner.
But just to explain to my listener that the noise is not coming from here, there's just a little bit of noise.
It's not too disturbing in the background.
Sorry, you were saying there was a meeting with Americans.
Yes, yes.
Ministry of Defense officials met with the American military, and it's known that they discussed the UFO issue.
They did announce that publicly.
That was the preface to the Japanese Self-Defense Force formally announcing the protocols.
Isn't that interesting?
How does the media treat these stories there?
The media treats them fairly seriously.
You know, I would say it's similar to America.
There's, you know, skepticism, but especially nowadays, especially after the Tic Tac videos came out in America, that that's a huge story here.
More and more people are taking it seriously.
You gave me two stories.
They were both from the 70s.
Is there anything more recent, anything that's happened in recent years, perhaps?
You know, the most notable one, in my opinion, was the Fukushima sightings.
We've had a number of other craft sightings, but we don't have a Japanese Roswell or anything like that.
It's mostly historical stuff or the big ones.
We do have, actually, if you were to ask anyone in Japan that's knowledge about UFOs, what's the biggest UFO story?
They'd take you all the way back to 1803.
The Utsuro Bune incident.
This is well known.
There's actually a book that was translated into English all about it.
Just give me that name again?
Utsuro Bune.
Utsuro Bune incident.
Yes, you can spell it.
In English, you would spell it U-T-S-U-R-O-N.
Hyphen, B-U-N-E.
Utsuro Bune.
Yeah.
And now, what happened was in Hitachi, Ibaraki Prefecture, a ship came up on the beach.
Fishermen found it.
And the pictures, you know, the drawings that witnesses made at the time, it looks more or less like a UFO.
Out of this ship came a young girl.
She looked obviously foreign.
She spoke a language no one understood.
There was writing inside the craft.
No one could understand What it is.
They say she was extraordinarily beautiful.
She had with her a small box about the size of a bread box.
She would not let anyone touch it or take it from her.
Now, they were unable to communicate.
So what they did was they gave her some provisions, put her back in her ship, and basically pushed her off to sea, which was culturally appropriate at the time.
There's not much more they could do.
You know, if you're going to ask anyone what's probably the most famous sighting, we'd go all the way back to there.
Yeah.
So it's very much embedded within the culture.
You mentioned at the beginning of this, and we sort of touched around this at the beginning of this, that culturally, of course, many things are different in Japan, and there are many things to admire, I think, from the Japanese culture.
One of those things is the notion of honor, behaving in an honorable way.
And I wonder if that translates, as far as you're aware, into people perhaps being reticent to report phenomena that might upset the status quo or worry people that as a matter of honor, if you had had an experience that you couldn't explain, perhaps you would sit on it because you didn't want to disturb people or rock the social boat.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Like you said, that concept of honor and there's a concept of not sticking out here, you know.
You are looked down upon basically if you are too outside the norm.
It's just part of the culture here.
And so, yeah, I think people, some people are more reluctant to come out with these stories.
However, I must say, of course, I talk about this everywhere I go.
I hand out my card to everyone I meet.
I ask everyone I meet, have you ever seen a UFO?
And I have had many people tell me, yeah, I think I saw one.
So I do think if you would ask someone who has seen one personally, a lot of people would say yes.
But there is a reluctance for people to just come out and, you know, shout out on the street, hey, I saw a UFO.
I seem to remember seeing a poll from Japan that suggested, I think at the time, it was one in five people who'd perhaps had some kind of experience like this that they couldn't explain.
So there is, as you say, there is great interest in these things.
Is Japan affected, as we here in the UK and I think in America too, affected by a rash of UFO sightings lately?
I mean, the last couple of years, certainly with lockdowns and those sorts of things, there have been so many reports.
I'm still getting people sending me pictures of things that they have seen.
There was one in the northwest of England only, what, 10 days ago now from when I'm recording this, where there was something that appeared like a rocket in the sky with a flaming tail to it.
I get people sending me pictures of multiple orb-like objects that seem to be reacting with each other.
And these are people, you know, just in their front and back gardens at home.
You know, they're not experts.
They're not analysts.
They're just people with a camera.
There's an awful lot of stuff like this going on in Europe and the United States.
Is it going on in Japan, too?
Have you had an uptick there?
Absolutely, absolutely.
And I think it goes back to the past couple of years.
I mean, the Pentagon admissions in America sparked interest all over the world.
The lockdowns meant people were at home having more interest with eyes on the skies.
We have seen an uptick.
I'm not sure that that necessarily means there are more ships or objects in the sky.
I think it may just be a factor of there are more people looking now.
The Japan Airlines UFO case, although it didn't happen in Japan, this JAL case is one of the most famous of all time.
It was in the 1980s.
And I just cut and pasted a write-up about it here.
I'll just quickly read some of this.
A veteran pilot whose UFO sighting was confirmed on radar screens says that the thing was so enormous that his Japan Airlines cargo plane was tiny compared to the mysterious object.
This was Captain Kenju Terauchi.
He also said there were two other small unidentified objects smaller than his cargo plane that did not appear on radar.
Terauchi, his co-pilot and flight engineer all told Federal Aviation Administration investigators that they saw UFO lights.
They were flying parallel and then suddenly approached very close, said Terauchi, who requested and received FAA permission to take whatever evasive action was necessary to avoid the UFO that appeared for a time on FAA and Air Force radar and on the radar screen in the cockpit of this is JAL Flight 1628, 1628.
Now, this is a famous case.
I wonder if it's still talked about in Japan.
In UFO circles it is, certainly, yeah.
That was an incredibly famous case.
NORAD tracked it.
After the event, FAA officials came to Japan to investigate.
There was a huge amount of interest in it.
The KGB is reported to have actually looked into the incident as well.
CIA members are reported to have come here to study the tapes.
Absolutely.
In UFO circles, it's still, of course, well-known and probably the most well-known Japanese-related case, even though it happened near Alaska.
Interesting that it was tracked on radar near Alaska, as you say, and the pilot maneuvered to avoid whatever it was.
It's one of the most, it was 1986, November 17th.
I've just found the date here.
Now, just out of memory, we were talking about honor and those things.
And quite often around the world, pilots have been reluctant to report these things because of the professional consequences at the time for them.
I don't think Tarauchi had the easiest time after this.
I don't know whether you recall any of that.
No, I absolutely recall.
And he's come out and said in recent years that he regrets coming out.
It absolutely has impacted his life negatively.
Yeah.
I mean, I might be completely wrong about this, but I think, and it's a long time ago, so the memory's cloudy.
I think the airline may even have suspended him, I think, for a while.
Yeah, I believe that's the case.
I believe him and the co-pilot were both grounded for a while.
There was such great interest in this case that they were grilled, absolutely grilled by officials, not only from Japan, but like we spoke about from America and possibly even Russia.
It is one of the most fascinating and tangible cases in all of ufology.
I agree.
So, you know, day to day, when you're doing your job of running the MUFON Japan branch, what happens?
Do you go out seeking stories or do people come to you with stories?
No, yeah, people come to us.
Basically, the experiencer resource team.
If a sighting includes contact with an entity, they are referred to us.
Now, most of us on the experiencer research team are also field investigators, meaning we research sightings of objects, but we do not specifically investigate the cases that come to us.
Our main job is to provide support.
Almost all of the people that come to us are really just looking for assurance that they're not crazy.
Can you give me examples of some recent cases?
You don't have to name names, of course.
Sure, I had a case just last year.
I get cases throughout Asia because we don't have that much presence around here.
But I had a case from China, and it was a woman who was deathly afraid of coming out in public.
She had no one to turn to.
Her main concern was that she was afraid she was infected by devils or something to that effect.
And she had nowhere to turn.
Xiaoma is an excellent Chinese researcher.
I don't know if you've ever talked to her.
She's based in Australia.
But she can speak a lot to the culture of China.
But it is very much looked down upon there.
In fact, they've harassed groups in China that investigate UFOs for years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's one example of a recent case.
What exactly had this poor woman who obviously was, you know, isn't having the easiest time?
So she got in touch with you because there isn't anyone to get in touch with at home.
What exactly happened to her?
Did she have an experience like yours?
She did.
It happened at night.
An entity she described as a gray appeared inside of her bedroom and took her outside.
She didn't have many more details outside of that, but that was enough to, you know, cause her some emotional distress, you know, which often happens with experiencers.
That's a natural thing, you know.
You see something crazy like that, you question your own sanity.
I must, absolutely.
You know, I mean, that experience, small though it is, that I had, I never talked about that.
The first time I talked about that to anybody, I think I mentioned it to my mother and father at the time, maybe.
But the first time I mentioned it to anybody, I was on the radio and I'm much older now and I just don't care.
So I told the truth about what I'd experienced.
But it's difficult for people.
Operating in Japan like you do, clearly the language is very different.
The culture is very different.
Everything's very different.
Do you speak Japanese?
How are you able to do these things?
Presumably you speak the language and stuff.
Yeah, I speak Japanese.
Most of the people that contact us through MUFON contact us in English.
It's rare for us to get Japanese contacts.
And that's something I would really like to see more of, yes.
But yeah, absolutely.
If someone contacts me in Japanese, I'll communicate with them in Japanese.
Yeah.
Of all the cases that you've handled in the years that you've been doing this, Pete, is there one in Japan, perhaps, or in Asia generally, that has fascinated you so much that you want to do more research on it?
It's intrigued you so much?
I would say there's a case of an individual, and I'll leave, he will remain nameless for the purposes of this, but he seems to attract sightings on a near constant basis.
He has sent me so many videos, pictures.
He's an excellent photographer, and he's also a skeptic himself.
He does very thorough research on the videos, stuff that I frankly couldn't do, to show that this can't be a plane and so on and so forth.
This is not a camera artifact, etc.
He's contacted the makers of his cameras and showed them the footage.
Said, is there anything that this camera could produce this?
And they said, no.
What exactly is he recording?
What do the objects look like?
Like I mentioned before, they're mostly orbs of light, which appear to be intelligently controlled and behave in a manner which seems that objects that humans create could not do.
You know, they'll fly incredibly fast, make right turns, 90 degree turns at incredible speed, so on and so forth.
And these objects that he's recorded, does he feel that they're attracted to him or does he feel that somehow, which some people think they can do, he's summoning them?
He does not summon them, but he does feel that they're attracted to him.
This individual himself is an experiencer in the sense that he has had contact with non-human intelligence.
So there does seem to be some link there.
Perhaps that is why he is able to get so many sightings.
And he's in Japan.
Yes, he is.
Yes, he is.
Are you going to do more about that?
Oh, I'm in constant contact with him.
He's a good friend.
And actually, I bounce cases off him all the time.
When I get pictures and evidence, I'm no professional at analyzing videos.
And as long as the contactee or the person that took the pictures or video agrees for them to be released, I send them over to him for analysis.
Absolutely.
I can see that there's a book in your experiences.
I think you should write one if you're not planning one already.
Well, I actually am in the midst of writing a book.
It's actually on a completely different subject that we probably don't have time to go into.
Astra, I knew you were about to say that.
Sorry, I anticipated what you were about to say.
I know that you wanted to talk about astral projection to communicate with extraterrestrials and visit UFOs.
Just give me a thumbnail sketch of what that is and how you think you use it.
Sure.
Now, I'm going to preface this and say two years ago, if someone would have come up to me and said, hey, I do astral projection to visit UFOs, I would have thought it was hogwash.
I didn't believe in any of that stuff.
I didn't believe in channeling.
I didn't believe in automatic writing.
I didn't believe in astral projection.
I've been practicing hypnosis for over 20 years on myself.
I am a certified hypnotherapist, but I've been practicing just on myself.
I use it for relaxation purposes.
Eventually, what happened was about a year and a half ago, I got a little bit bored.
I decided to look into adjacent areas to hypnosis, and I found that the practice of astroprojection does have some commonalities with hypnosis.
So what I did was I made a technique where I put myself under hypnosis, and then I used what they call the vibrational technique, which is common in astro projection to exit the body.
The entire reason I got into this in the first place was solely to try to visit UFOs.
Now, like I said, before I started, I thought this was all hogwash, but I gave it a try.
I was bored with my hypnotic routines.
When I realized it was real, when I first got out of my body and I saw myself there, I saw the objects on the table, my phone upside down, which was unusual.
When I realized it was possible, almost without effort, I've been able to contact extraterrestrials.
And in 2021, I conducted exactly 40 sessions of astral projection, visited two ships, and primarily interacted with five entities.
I know this sounds absolutely crazy.
I am with all of your listeners insane.
This is one of the most insane things I've ever heard.
I was right there too, but my experience has shown me that it's possible.
So those people who report that they've been abducted, they have nighttime experiences, do you think that they might actually just be putting themselves into the state that you get into when you do astral projection?
And you say that that actually transports you to alien craft and into meetings with aliens?
There may be some cases of that.
We have, you know, a lot of tangential evidence that most people who report abductions are actually physically taken.
My opinion is that most abductions are physical, but there certainly are some people that are natural at natural astral projections.
Some people do it, have out-of-body experiences, and have no idea what's going on.
You know, of course it's confusing.
I can imagine.
I went into it knowing what I was looking for, so it didn't surprise me when it happened.
I didn't mean it surprised me a bit.
But yeah, there are people that are natural astral projectors and out-of-body experiences.
And so it's true.
And on your travels, on your astral travels, who have you met and what have they told you?
Well, primarily I have met three grays, two small grays, one tall gray, and I have met two mantis type entities.
I can say with confidence, these are the same five because they exhibit personalities.
They also exhibit masculine or feminine traits.
Now, that's not to say that they're necessarily male or female, but in my interactions with them, one of those small grays definitively has feminine traits.
Yeah.
And so basically, what I went up there, the first time I went up there, they asked me, I met with a small gray.
And telepathically, he asked me, what would you like to see?
And I had no idea.
I knew I wanted to go up there, but I don't know what to see.
What's on a UFO?
You know, I know very little.
I said, show me what you want to show me.
And that became a pattern.
Every time I went up, they seemed to have a lesson or something they wanted to show me.
Basically, to make a long story short, the main thing that they showed me was that they are doing work on what you and I might call souls.
They're doing work on human souls to help them evolve.
Presumably, these souls are from the deceased.
They've never told me that specifically, but I've seen them working on these things on the ship.
How did that look?
Quite odd.
They keep them in these capsules.
The souls themselves Look like strands of light, different colors, moving in different ways.
I was shown one that was barely moving.
And I was told by the tall gray that this particular soul was damaged and needed a lot of work.
So apparently the lively ones maybe are further down the down the path than the ones that don't appear lively.
I've never heard anything like this before.
So they're doing work on the souls of people who've passed over, who've died, presumably what, with the intention of sending them back here, better?
You know, I asked them where you're sending, where do you send these things because I saw them work on it.
And I saw after it was done, it shot up into the ceiling, presumably to go somewhere.
I asked them, where are you sending these things?
And their answer was, it doesn't matter where, it matters why.
I don't quite understand that.
The implication behind that was they may not be coming to Earth.
They may be going somewhere else.
My first question when I was exposed to this was I asked them, I said, do we ever get to come back like you?
Because I'm up there and these things appear to be gods, right?
They're showing me things and doing things that are unbelievable.
And they sound insane, right?
So I asked them, I asked one of the grays, do we ever come back like you?
Like I mentioned, they have personalities.
This gray was amused by the question.
And the gray told me, no, we don't have souls.
We are biologically created to do this work.
By whom?
By the mantis entities.
They told me that in a later session.
About halfway through those 40 sessions I conducted, I finally did meet one of the mantis entities.
I eventually went on to meet another.
These entities confirmed that they did create these graves for that purpose because their job is frankly above working on individual souls, apparently.
Where are they from?
They told me it was so far away I could not understand.
Boy, I can understand why you've wanted to write this down.
We must talk some more about this.
Pete, thank you very much.
what my listener won't know is that we had some technical issues setting the sound up, but it was well worth it to have that conversation.
I can't imagine what it's like to be in I am in Nagoya, Japan.
That's correct.
City?
It is.
No, it's not particularly a naval town.
We're right in the center, right between Tokyo and Saka.
Yeah.
Are you on the high-speed train line, the Shinkansen line?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
You've never been to Japan.
You never rode the bullet trains?
Never, but I'd love to.
Oh, they're fun.
Some of them are a bit luxurious, I must say.
It's like taking an airplane, but you're on the ground.
I can remember seeing the James Bond movie when I was a little boy, You Only Live Twice.
And of course, that was set in Japan.
There was a wonderful, I've still got the little toy car.
It's a bit battered, a Toyota sports car.
And I was captivated by that image of Japan.
So hopefully one day I'll be able to go and see it before I turn up my toes.
I hope so.
If anyone would like to follow those 40 sessions, I am slowly putting them up.
I journaled them all immediately after they happened.
I'm gradually putting them up on my website.
It's peatwhitley.org, P-E-T-E-W-H-I-T-L-E-Y.org.
There's nothing for sale.
I'm not accepting donations.
I'm simply telling people how I perform this, encouraging others to do it.
And I'm gradually adding all 40 of those sessions to a blog there.
This year I have started again.
I have three sessions this year.
But I will have to save that for another conversation now.
Yeah, totally.
Please keep in touch, Pete.
I've enjoyed this conversation.
We've certainly covered an awful lot of ground.
And some of the things you tell me about, in fact, most of the things you told me about, I have not heard stories quite like them before.
So I think we've done something very interesting here.
And I thank you very much indeed.
Howard, thank you so much for having me.
It's been a pleasure talking to you.
I'm a big fan of yours.
You're an excellent interviewer.
Always enjoy your shows.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
And what would I say in Japanese?
The only word of Japanese I know is konichi wai, but what would I say to say, you know, goodbye, thank you kind of thing?
You would say arigatu kuzaimashita.
Wow, I'm not even going to try and say that, but you know, like they say in the movies, what you just said.
Thank you so much.
We'll talk again.
Likewise, thank you, Howard.
Take care.
Peter Whitley, the MUFON representative in Japan there.
Hope you enjoyed that one.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained as we cruise into spring.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch with me.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection