Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 over Alaska

Crossing eastern Alaska at dusk on 17 November 1986, the crew of JAL 1628, a Boeing 747 freighter carrying wine from Paris to Tokyo, reported two arrays of lights pacing the aircraft, at one point filling the windscreen with what Capt. Kenju Terauchi described as banks of glowing nozzles. Anchorage Center picked up an intermittent primary return near the aircraft's position; a United flight and a military radar site were asked to look. Terauchi later described an enormous silhouette behind the lights — 'twice the size of an aircraft carrier' — that shadowed the 747 through turns and a descent before falling away near Denali.

The FAA conducted a formal investigation and, unusually, released the entire package within months: crew statements, controller transcripts, and radar data. Its conclusion attributed the recorded radar returns to a split image of the 747's own transponder and took no position on what the crew saw. Skeptical analyses identify the initial light arrays with Jupiter and Mars low on the horizon; the walnut-shaped giant rests on Terauchi's testimony alone. Terauchi was taken off flight status for a period following the publicity — a fact that entered the folklore of pilot reporting reluctance and is part of why aircrew reporting channels remained cold for thirty years.

John Callahan, the FAA's Division Chief of Accidents and Investigations, later stated that CIA personnel at a Washington briefing on the case instructed attendees it had never happened — an account that postdates the events by more than a decade and is itself part of the contested record. The released file remains one of the most complete government documentations of an airliner encounter.