Correspondence and Records Regarding JAL Flight 1628 UFO Incident

This collection of documents details the internal FAA correspondence and external inquiries surrounding the November 17, 1986, sighting of an unidentified aerial phenomenon by the crew of Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight 1628 over Alaska. The incident involved Captain Kenju Terauchi and his crew, who reported observing giant, walnut-shaped objects that paced their 747 cargo aircraft for approximately 40 minutes. The documents highlight the tension between the FAA's Alaskan Region, which sought to manage the investigation and public release of information, and FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where unauthorized disclosures of investigative materials occurred. Philip J. Klass, a prominent UFO skeptic and journalist, played a central role in the public discourse, having obtained internal transcripts and radar data to argue that the sightings were misidentifications of the planet Jupiter, Mars, and moonlight reflecting off ice crystals. The FAA's official stance, as articulated by Public Affairs Officer Paul Steucke, was that the agency lacked the mandate and resources to conduct scientific investigations into UFOs, focusing instead on airspace safety. The records include detailed exchanges between Steucke, Klass, and researchers like Dr. Richard F. Haines and Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who sought access to radar data and transcripts to support their own analyses. The documents also reveal that the JAL crew's accounts were inconsistent, with the copilot and flight engineer failing to corroborate the pilot's more dramatic claims. Ultimately, the FAA concluded that the radar anomalies were technical artifacts and that the visual sightings were likely prosaic phenomena, though the incident remained a point of contention among UFO researchers and the media.