The Alaska Cargo Flight Encounter

Evening. I'm a researcher, been studying aviation anomalies for about fifteen years now. I'm calling from Fairbanks, and there's a case that happened right here in Alaska that I think your listeners need to hear about. November 1986. A cargo flight out of Japan Airlines. I've gone through the FAA files, the radar data, the interview transcripts, all of it. And I'm telling you, this is one of the most documented encounters in aviation history. The pilot was a man I'll call Captain Kenji Takahashi. Ex-fighter pilot. Over ten thousand hours in the cockpit. Twenty-nine years flying for the airline. This wasn't some weekend hobbyist, you know what I'm saying? This was a professional. A veteran. And what he reported that night scared him. It scared all three of them on that flight deck.

So here's what happened. November 17th, 1986. Captain Takahashi and his crew, his first officer Takanori Fujita and flight engineer Yoshio Nakamura, they're flying a Boeing 747 cargo jet from Paris to Tokyo. They've got a layover scheduled in Anchorage. The plane's loaded with French wine, Beaujolais, heading to Japan. Routine flight. They'd already stopped in Iceland, refueled, everything normal. It's around five eleven in the evening, Alaska time. They're cruising at 35,000 feet over eastern Alaska, somewhere near Fort Yukon. The sun's already set, but there's this red glow on one horizon and a full moon rising on the other. Clear skies. And that's when Captain Takahashi notices something to his left. Two lights. Amber colored. And they're not behaving like any aircraft he's ever seen. They shot toward his plane from below, closed in fast, and started flying parallel to the 747.

Now, Takahashi's first instinct is that it's military traffic. Maybe a patrol flight. But these things, they weren't moving like jets. They darted around. Changed positions. At one point they came right up in front of the cockpit, maybe 500 feet ahead, and just paced the aircraft. The whole flight deck lit up. Takahashi said he could feel heat on his face. Heat. From objects outside the aircraft at 35,000 feet. He described them as having rectangular arrays of lights, like glowing nozzles or thrusters arranged in rows. The colors were cycling, orange, green, white, amber. He compared it to a Christmas display. His first officer Fujita saw them too. Said there were too many lights, clusters of them, way too luminous to be stars or planets. The flight engineer Nakamura, he was sitting further back, but he described seeing lights shaped like the windows of a passenger aircraft. Two distinct clusters, moving together.