Japan.Kōfu · two boys report a landing and an occupant

Around 7:00 p.m. on February 23, 1975, in the Kamimachi neighborhood of Kōfu (Yamanashi prefecture), near the Hinode housing estate, two primary-school boys, Masato Kawano and Katsuhiro Yamahata, both about seven years old, were roller-skating when they said they saw in the sky two objects glittering orange and crackling. According to their account, reported by the Yamanashi Nichi-Nichi newspaper on February 25, the bigger one flew off toward Mount Atago and the other came down between the posts of a vineyard behind the estate and landed. It was a saucer about 5 meters across and 2.5 meters high, with four large illegible letters on the hull; a side hatch opened and an occupant of about 1.3 meters came out, with no visible eyes or mouth but with three fangs, its body glowing silver and a long rifle-like object over its left shoulder, while a smaller one stayed inside.

The being walked about a meter from the craft and put a hand on Yamahata's shoulder; too scared to walk, he was carried on his friend's back some 30 meters to his house (Leonard Stringfield speaks of temporary paralysis). According to Stringfield, the occupant walked around the craft and reboarded; the newspaper does not say so.

Around the boys' account, the newspaper records other data. The mothers went back to the spot with them and saw from a distance an orange light glowing on and off over the vineyard for about five minutes, which flew away while they looked elsewhere. A classmate, Ichiro Minegishi, aged eight, said he had seen a shining object flying toward the housing estate half an hour earlier while riding in a car with his parents on the Kōfu bypass. The next morning two of the vineyard's concrete posts were found almost fallen down, which alarmed the neighbors again, and the school inspected the site with tape measures. Stringfield later wrote that there were landing traces and a ring pattern near the broken posts and that a schoolteacher found radioactivity within the circular patch; the period newspaper does not mention that measurement.

According to Stringfield, the boys were questioned in depth by investigator Masaru Mori, who translated the article into English. Albert Rosales's database, which UFO Evidence reproduces with Hayashi Ichinan and Yoshihiko Honda as its source, gives another version of some details (a disk 15 ft across and 6 ft high, a ladder, a being with dark brown skin and pointed ears who spoke words "like a taper recorder running backwards"), which the newspaper does not mention.

The newspaper adds that the sky was clear that evening and quotes the Civil Aviation Bureau of the Transport Ministry: an airliner often flies over Kōfu between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. and, in particular, the lights of the YS-11 propeller plane, flying at a thousand meters, are visible to the naked eye. That note can account for the orange lights in the sky (and even the light the mothers saw), but not for the landing, the occupant, the effect on the boy or the posts. For those elements there is only the testimony of two seven-year-old boys, and the almost fallen posts, whose cause the newspaper does not establish. The radioactivity reading appears only in Stringfield, who does not say who took it or how; the sources consulted record no laboratory analysis of the marks and no instrumental record of the object.

The case combines an account of an encounter with an occupant, told by two seven-year-old boys, with data recorded by other people: according to the period newspaper, the mothers saw a light over the vineyard, a classmate saw a shining object half an hour earlier, and two concrete posts were found almost fallen the next morning. The radioactivity in the soil is cited later by Stringfield, and the newspaper does not mention it.

The central witnesses were children, and the versions of some details differ between the newspaper and Rosales's database. Apart from that radioactivity reading, which comes with no details, the sources consulted contain no instrumental record. The Civil Aviation Bureau's note on the lights of the YS-11 can account only for the aerial part.