A cargo 747 was shadowed for 400 miles over the Alaskan interior while three separate radar systems painted the intruder at the same time. The captain called the largest of the objects pacing his aircraft 'twice the size of an aircraft carrier.' This is not a campfire story passed down by anonymous witnesses. It is a documented FAA incident with a date, a flight number, voice tapes, radar printouts, and a senior federal official who kept copies.

On November 17, 1986, Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 — a Boeing 747-200F hauling Beaujolais wine from Paris to Tokyo via Reykjavik and Anchorage — was crossing eastern Alaska in darkness when Captain Kenji Terauchi reported lights pacing his aircraft. He described two smaller craft and one enormous 'mothership.' The objects, he said, stayed with him for roughly 400 miles and half an hour, sometimes leaping ahead, sometimes flanking the jet. When Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control asked him to make turns to check whether the lights were a reflection, he reported that the object tracked his maneuvers.

The man who turned a pilot's anecdote into an evidentiary record is John Callahan. In 1986 he was the FAA's Division Chief of the Accidents, Evaluations and Investigations branch in Washington. He requested the full Anchorage data package — the controller voice tapes and the radar data — and, in his own account, married the radar tracks to the cockpit audio so the two could be played in sync. He then briefed FAA Administrator Donald Engen. Shortly after, Callahan says, a meeting was convened with representatives of the FAA, the Air Force, and the CIA to review the material. At the end, he claims, the assembled officials told everyone present that the data was now classified, that this was the first instance of a UFO captured on radar that they had to study, and — in the line that has haunted the case ever since — that the meeting 'never took place.' They took the originals. Callahan kept the duplicates.

The hard part of the case is genuinely hard. The Anchorage controller's radar work that night is contested. The FAA's own subsequent review concluded that the 'second target' near JAL 1628 on the ground scope was most likely a split image or uncorrelated clutter — an artifact of the radar processing, not a solid object. That is a serious deduction, and it has to be reckoned with honestly: a single ambiguous blip is not a confirmed metallic intruder. The strongest physical evidence in the file is murkier than the legend suggests.

And the skeptics named real culprits in the sky. Veteran investigator Philip J. Klass pointed out that on that night Jupiter sat only about ten degrees above the horizon directly in the pilot's forward field of view — roughly at his apparent altitude — with Mars nearby. A brilliant planet low on the horizon, seen through a moving cockpit windscreen with ice crystals and refraction, can appear to pace an aircraft and to swell when the eye strains. Robert Sheaffer went further, arguing Terauchi was a repeat UFO reporter and not a neutral witness, and questioning whether Callahan's confiscation story could be corroborated at all.

But the planetary explanation has its own seams. Jupiter and Mars do not flank an aircraft, do not appear to drop below it, and certainly do not show up — however ambiguously — on a ground radar scope at the moment a pilot says something is there. The case's center of gravity was never really the pilot. It was the institutional behavior afterward: a sitting FAA division chief, whose credentials the UFO research community itself spent years independently confirming, stating on the record that the CIA and Air Force sat in a room, watched synchronized radar and voice tape, took the evidence, and declared the briefing nonexistent.

That is the part the file leaves open. Callahan repeated the account in sworn-style testimony at the National Press Club in 2001 as part of the Disclosure Project, and FOIA requests have pried loose pieces of the JAL 1628 data package over the years. What has never surfaced is the supposed CIA/Air Force review and its classification order — exactly what you'd expect to be missing if Callahan is telling the truth, and exactly what you'd expect to be missing if it never happened. The inverted question is unavoidable: if the official explanation is a misread planet and a radar ghost, why did anyone need to classify the briefing about it — and why does the agency's own evidence package keep coming back from FOIA with the most interesting pages thin?