Alaska, U.S..JAL 1628

On 17 November 1986, Japan Airlines cargo flight 1628 (a Boeing 747-200F) was crossing eastern Alaska en route from Reykjavik to Anchorage with a cargo of French wine. Captain Kenju Terauchi, first officer Takanori Tamefuji and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba reported, shortly after 17:00 local time and already after dark, lights ahead of the aircraft that stayed with them for about 45 minutes. In the FAA interview held that same night after landing, the three said they saw two sets of yellow, amber and green lights, that at no time could they see a craft, and that the onboard weather radar showed a return at about seven miles. According to Agent Ronald Mickle's notes of that same interview, Terauchi said the two sets appeared to be joined together, as fixed to one object, which from his visual sighting and the radar he judged equal in size to a 747, possibly larger; in flight he had already described it to control as "very quite big ah, plane" (02:30:56 UTC).

The lights stayed ahead of the aircraft for about twelve minutes and then moved to its left. In the longer interview of 2 January 1987, Terauchi also described a third, enormous object, seen as a silhouette seven or eight miles away, which he estimated at "two times" the size of an aircraft carrier; that scale is not in his statements on the night, which already spoke of a large object, and the silhouette rests on his account, and the flight engineer told the FAA that the lights of that second phase were hard to see and that he was not sure whether they were a distant town or a strange object, although he insisted the first ones were not town lights. The Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) saw intermittent primary returns where the pilot reported traffic and checked with the military Regional Operations Control Center (ROCC) at Elmendorf, which answered that it had "a primary target" in the same position, called it "an unknown" and later "a flight size of two" around the 747. Controllers vectored a United Airlines flight and a military C-130 toward the Japanese aircraft; the United pilot saw the 747 silhouetted against the light sky with its contrail "but I sure don't see any other airplanes", and the C-130 had no contact either. JAL 1628 flew a 360-degree turn near Fairbanks and lost sight of the lights around 17:53, before landing at Anchorage.

A point critical to interpretation is what those returns are worth. FAA technicians reviewed the radar recordings at the agency's technical centre in Atlantic City and concluded that the second target near the flight was not another aircraft but a split return from the 747 itself, an "uncorrelated primary and beacon target". The 5 March 1987 release, issued by spokesman Paul Steucke, says the agency was "unable to confirm" the event and planned no further investigation; the file was titled "Unidentified Traffic Sighting", but at no point did the FAA rule that an unidentified object had been present. Its own staff's statements cut both ways: controller Carl Henley clarified in January that he had seen tentative and radar-only targets, and that the traffic staying with the flight through turns was what the pilot told him; the area supervisor at no time saw data that conclusively indicated traffic; and two specialists who reviewed the recorded data found no targets in the areas reported. On the other side, that same night the NORAD duty officer told an FAA agent that they too showed two targets, one of them the JAL, and the ROCC kept them as unknowns while the tracking lasted.

The most-cited sceptical explanation was advanced by Philip J. Klass (Aviation Week, CSICOP) in January 1987: the lights were Jupiter and Mars. Computing positions supports it only in part: around 17:15 a very bright Jupiter (magnitude −2.4) stood about 10 degrees high at azimuth 140, and a much fainter Mars about 7 degrees; with the aircraft heading south-west, Jupiter sat roughly 70 degrees and Mars about 55 degrees left of the nose, according to a letter from astronomer Walter Webb included in the file, which fits the phase when the lights were off the left side but not the twelve minutes when they were ahead. Klass later revised his hypothesis and attributed the forward lights to a reflection of the full moon on clouds; the pilot, however, reported clear conditions to the controller, and the crew mentioned only thin, spotty clouds below the aircraft, near the mountains. On 11 January 1987 Terauchi reported another sighting in the same general area, which the FAA's 5 March release records; according to Bruce Maccabee's analysis included in the file, after landing the captain himself attributed it to village lights seen through ice crystals, and the FAA agreed with him. According to later accounts, which are not in the FAA file, JAL temporarily removed Terauchi from cockpit duty after his public interviews, a fact sceptics read as a sign of the testimony's fragility and proponents as institutional pressure.

John Callahan, then chief of the FAA's Accidents, Evaluations and Investigations Division in Washington, kept copies of the radar and voice tapes. In his testimony for the Disclosure Project (2001) and later at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure (2013), a private event with no legal standing, he said he presented the data at a meeting with representatives of the FBI, the CIA and a scientific team from the Reagan administration, and that a CIA participant told them the meeting "never took place" and the incident "was never recorded". That account does not appear in the file the FAA released in 1987 and rests on his word; the file does show that the FAA regional director reported to the agency's administrator and discussed the case with Air Force officers.

JAL 1628 brings together elements documented in primary sources: testimony from a professional crew taken that same night, recordings of the communications with air traffic control, civil and military radar returns in real time, and a file of nearly 300 pages that the FAA made public in 1987. The agency itself handled it as an "unidentified traffic sighting" while looking for an unreported aircraft that might endanger traffic.

Two things have to be held at once. First, that the instrument record does not bear out the popular version: the FAA attributed its returns to a split echo from the 747, two reviews of its recorded data found no targets, two aircraft sent to look saw nothing, the silhouette the size of two aircraft carriers rests on the captain's later account, and he attributed a second sighting in the same area weeks later to village lights, and the astronomical hypothesis explains well the phase in which the lights were off to the left.

Second, that the FAA's split echo does not by itself explain the primary targets that military radar reported in real time and kept as unknowns, the onboard radar return, or the twelve minutes of lights ahead of the aircraft that Jupiter does not cover, on a night the pilot described as clear. Procedurally, the case shows how a civilian agency documented a UAP event and closed it without resolving it, and the thesis of a later cover-up depends on Callahan's testimony, not on the file. There is no conclusive sensor signature.