JAL 1628

JAL 1628

On the evening of 17 November 1986 the crew of Japan Air Lines flight 1628, a Boeing 747 freighter bound from Iceland to Anchorage, reported lights near their aircraft over interior Alaska; the captain later wrote of “two spaceships and a Mother ship”. Controllers at the FAA’s Anchorage Center and at the military control centre at Elmendorf saw intermittent radar returns where the pilot reported traffic. The FAA released its file in March 1987: its Technical Center found that the second radar target was “a split radar return from the JAL Boeing 747”, the recorded radar data showed no other target, and the agency said it had not tried to determine what the crew saw. The file, 41 units in the National Archives, is public.

Source document: Original public reference