JAL 1628 archive compilation: 1987 news report, Nippon TV reconstruction and John Callahan (Eyes On Cinema)

0:00 It was a Japan Airlines cargo flight piloted by Captain Kenju Tarauchi. This is the sketch Tarauchi drew of what he says he saw in his window that night. And this Japanese television graphic is based on his description. This is just a small space ship. We can see a big frame. This one is the size of the carrier, so a mothership. Bigger than an aircraft carrier Tarauchi claimed when he drew this sketch showing the relative size of his jumbo jet. Tarauchi's route was over Alaska to Anchorage. He says the UFOs stayed with him 40 minutes and then disappeared. Today, the FAA released tapes of the crew's conversation with controllers. Japan Air 1628, sir, if you're able to identify the type of aircraft... We cannot identify the type of aircraft coming like a formation. It's quite a big... But Tarauchi's crewmates were not sure they'd

1:00 seen a UFO, and other planes sent to look saw nothing unusual. The FAA agrees. Today, the agency concluded a three-month investigation saying there's nothing to substantiate the pilot's story. Nothing to indicate a UFO or any other aircraft near the flight. Computer memory has recreated what radar picked up as the flight progressed. Sometimes, the JAL plane is seen as a normal blip, but occasionally it appears as what some call a double blip, sometimes even two distinct blips. It caught controllers' attention that night. Military radar devices, they do have a primary target in trail view at this time. But the FAA says exhaustive analysis indicates the occasional second blip was a common radar echo. And noting that this is only one of four times Captain Tarauchi has said he's seen UFOs, the FAA today closed the case. But a tape recording reveals one investigator telling Tarauchi if he's right or the agency's wrong. All I can say is let's hope they're on our side. One impressive, well-documented case is

2:01 reconstructed here by Nippon TV when a 707 was flying over Alaska on the 17th of November, 1986. At 5 p.m., during the flight, Commander Tarauchi observed two red lights getting nearer. The control tower anchorage didn't detect anything present in the area. The lights got nearer and nearer. The three pilots felt a wave of heat. Then the lights disappeared.

3:03 Shortly after, two white lights appeared. The radar screen indicated the proximity of the object, and the object began to shadow the airplane in the direction of Fairbanks, Alaska. Thanks to the contrast of the city lights, the crew could see the outline of the object. We couldn't believe our eyes. It was 30 to 40 times bigger than a Boeing 707. We tried to shake off this object, and I veered the 707 away. The control tower asked if we required the intervention of a military fighter. We replied that it would be too dangerous, as an LL airplane needed to cross our flight path.

4:05 Towards 6 p.m., the object disappeared. The sighting lasted for an hour. These are the sketches by Captain Tarauchi. Both he and his crew saw an enormous UFO. It was under control, and he felt there was every possibility that it hadn't been constructed on Earth. My name is John Callahan. I'm a retired FAA employee. I was the division manager for the Accidents, Evaluation, and Investigation Division in D.C. About two years before I retired, I received a call from Alaska region, where the region wanted to know what to tell the media. When I questioned tell the media what, he says about the UFO, and it went downhill from there. What UFO, and it turned out I told him what any government employee would do at that time was to tell him it's under investigation. And then I had him send all that data to the FAA's tech center in Atlantic City.

5:06 The next day, my immediate boss, service director, Harvey Safir, and I went to Atlantic City. I had just purchased a new video camera, and I videoed the event. And Atlantic City, we had him play back on a scope, you would call a scope, a plan view display, PVD, exactly what the pilot seen or what the controller seen, and we tied it in with the voice tape so we could hear exactly what the controller said and what he heard. And we taped it. We came back the next day, briefed the administrator, Admiral Ingen, on what happened. He wanted a five-minute briefing. After we started the briefing, he wanted to know if he could see the video. We put the video on. He watched the video, the whole video. The next day, he set up a meeting for me to give a dog and pony show to President Reagan's scientific staff and whoever they brought over and to hand off all that data to them. That morning in the FAA round room, it was

6:06 either 9 or 10 o'clock, three men from Reagan's scientific staff, three CIA people, three FBI people, and I don't remember who the other guys were, along with all the FAA experts that I brought with me. They could decide or talk about the hardware and the software, how it worked. We put on a dog and pony show. We let them watch the video. We had all the data there. We had all the printouts that the computer put out. They got all excited over it. When it was all done, the CIA, one of the CIA men told the people they were now sworn to secrecy that this meeting never happened and this event never happened. When I asked him why, I thought it was probably just a stealth bomber at the time, he said, well, this is the first time that we have recorded radar data on a UFO and these guys are going to get all excited drooling over all this data. I said, well, are you going to tell the public about it? And he says, no, we don't tell the public

7:08 about this. It would panic the public. He says, we're going to go back and study this. I said, okay. That was what he was going to do. Now, I've told this story many times and I get sometimes funny looks from people. I have with me the voice tapes of the controllers that were involved, the FAA original tapes. See, after we handed this stuff off to the president's staff, the FAA didn't know what to do with it. We don't separate UFOs from real traffic, so it's not our problem. I have a copy of the original of the video that we took, which is rather interesting. And once the thing was all over, the report started coming into my office, but because it wasn't an FAA air traffic problem, the FAA's report ended up on a table in my office. And it stayed there until I retired when one of the staffers packed up all my gear and

8:08 helped move to my house. Also, in a box I found just a few days ago in my 1992 tax return, I have the target printouts from the computer data, which so if you wanted to look at every target that was up there at the time, you can now reproduce this from this piece of paper here. And it's called the UFO incident, Japan 1648. I believe the number was that happened on November the 18th, 1986. I'm prepared to go to Congress, to swear before Congress that everything I've told you people and everything that is here is the truth. Thank you. Having public participation in the UFO program caused an awful lot of headaches for the United States Air Force. Their regulations indicated that they couldn't tell the public that there were unknowns, that they were only to tell the public the ones that they had identified. And because of this, they had to give all types of explanations for UFOs, and it caused the Air Force to have a very

9:08 bad name. Not only that, the information concerning UFOs was highly classified, and having the public participation in the UFO program wasn't to the best of the Air Force interests. So, in December of 1969, December 17th, 1969, the United States Air Force again told the public that it had terminated its UFO program, and now covertly investigates the better civilian sightings, and concentrates mostly on government source control cases and airline pilot cases under the order JANIP 146, a Joint Army Air Force Navy order, which outlines what military civilian pilots are supposed to do when they see a UFO sighting. They submit what they call a surveys report, which contains information vital to the security of the United States. Once they make an official report, they're subjected to a $10,000 fine and or 10 years in jail if they reveal the contents of this report. Also, in 1973, after the last huge UFO wave,

10:12 worldwide UFO wave, UFOs mysteriously disappeared from the national newspapers. The only way usually you're going to find out about UFO sightings other than belonging to an organization who's investigating UFOs would be to subscribe to a local news clip service. And you would see that UFO sightings are still happening in this country and abroad all over the place, but they aren't getting reported in the national press, which is very unusual. And there was one recently in Alaska. Very unusual that that particular account in Alaska should get in the press. It was a month afterwards. It was kept out of the press for a month, and this involved a huge UFO seen by a Japanese Airlines crew flying a cargo plane, a Boeing 747, into Anchorage, Alaska. And they were followed for hundreds of miles by this huge UFO, which was described as a bowl inverted upon a bowl with a rim around it. We call it the satin-type configuration. The pilot and the crew members described it

11:14 as being as large as two aircraft carriers placed side by side. They tracked it on their weather radar to make sure that they weren't seeing things. They were in contact with the FAA at Anchorage and also Elvendorf Air Force Base. And they have said and they've maintained their story that both locations also tracked it on radar. It wasn't mentioned in the press, it wasn't mentioned in the press, it wasn't mentioned in the press, it was kept very quiet. It broke in Japan around December 30th, December 31st, and got back into the press in this country after a month. And immediately the FAA officials contradicted their own controllers. The Air Force spokesmen also contradicted their own radar operators. And told the press that, the FAA told the press, that the radar was just a double image of the plane. Elvendorf Air Force Base officially said that they were just picking up ground clutter. The two smaller objects, which were seen with the big objects, were described as being Mars and Jupiter, although they didn't look like Mars and

12:14 Jupiter at all. And the last I heard was that the FAA controllers were very upset about this, and the Japanese pilots and pilot and the crew members are still sticking to their story, regardless of what our government says.