Good evening. Thank you for taking my call. I am retired airline captain, calling from Tokyo. I flew for Japan Airlines for many years, over ten thousand hours in the cockpit, including time as fighter pilot in Japanese Self-Defense Forces. I am not a man who imagines things. But on November 17, 1986, something happened over Alaska that I cannot explain. And I think, you know, people should hear what I saw. I was commanding a Boeing 747 cargo flight that night. We were carrying Beaujolais wine from Paris to Tokyo, with a scheduled stop in Anchorage. My first officer was Takeshi, my flight engineer was Makoto. Good men, professional. We had been in the air for hours already, long flight from Reykjavik. I remember I had been arguing with my wife before I left, something stupid about the house. Funny what you remember.
We were cruising at thirty-five thousand feet, autopilot engaged, speed about five hundred sixty-five miles per hour. The weather was clear, visibility was excellent. It was around 5:11 in the evening, local time, and we were over eastern Alaska. That's when I first noticed two lights below us and to the left, maybe thirty degrees off our heading. At first I thought, okay, military traffic, maybe some exercise. We see these things sometimes. But then, and that's the thing, these lights did not behave like aircraft. They rose up from below very fast, impossibly fast, and positioned themselves directly in front of us. Maybe five hundred to one thousand feet ahead, slightly higher than our altitude. I could see them clearly through the cockpit window. Each one had two rectangular arrays of what looked like glowing nozzles. Like jet exhaust, but arranged in squares. The bodies of the craft were dark, hard to see against the night sky, but those lights were unmistakable.
They stayed in formation with us, matching our speed exactly. No matter what heading we maintained, they stayed right there. And then they moved closer. When they got close, maybe three hundred feet, the whole cockpit lit up. I am not exaggerating this. The instrument panel, Takeshi's face, everything was illuminated by this warm light. And I felt heat. Actual heat on my face, like standing near a fire. heat from something airborne is strange - Jim' Takeshi saw them too. Makoto, from his position, he could see the lights but not the details. I radioed Anchorage air traffic control. I asked if they had any traffic in our vicinity. They said no, nothing on radar. But then, a few minutes later, they came back and said they were picking up something. A primary target, maybe five miles behind us. But I told them no, the objects were in front of us, not behind. The radar was seeing something, but it wasn't matching what we were seeing with our eyes.
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