The FAA Wakes Up And Investigates

This information about the sighting must have come as a compete surprise to the FAA headquarters. On January 1 the FAA reopened its inquiry into the sighting. Capt. Terauchi was interviewed on vendredi 2 janvier s1Interview of Capt. Kenjyu Terauchi, vendredi 2 janvier 1987. During the interview Capt. Terauchi reported two previous UFO sightings. About five years before the present sighting he saw a "mothership" shortly after taking off from Taipai, south of Formosa, but it was so weird I ignored it. Then he saw, from his home during the daytime, bright lights that continued for about 10 minutes. Although this was not Terauchi's first UFO, it was the first sighing of unidentified phenomena by the other two crew members. In janvier 1987 Capt. Terauchi had another sighting of a strange phenomenon which he reported. He subsequently offered a satisfactory explanation for it. (From the FAA file on the JAL sighting), at which time he supplied his written testimony s2Written (in Japanese, with translation) testimony of Capt. Kenjyu Terauchi as received by the FAA on vendredi 2. A comparison of the transcript of the conversation with the air traffic controller (ref. 4 below) with Terauchi's testimony shows that, a month and a half after the sighting, he recalled the individual events quite but not perfectly accurately and that he confused the order of some of the events. The order of events in Terauchi's testimony has been modified somewhat in this presentation to place them in the order that is found on the AARTCC audio tape.. On dimanche 4 the national press reported that the FAA had reopened the inquiry and numerous news stories followed.

The FAA released portions of the information through Mr. Steucke as the information became available. Unfortunately the FAA did not have a complete and accurate story to report and consequently the early news stories contained errors. The most amusing of these was in the reported time of the sightings. For some reason someone had handwritten a a note on the master copy of the first FAA release, which was a summary of the AARTCC tape recording. The note indicated that the events had begun at 6:19 PM, even though the summary itself clearly said 0219 UTC which translated to 5:19 PM Alaska Standard Time. This time error was perpetuated in news reports even though the captain recalled the correct time and stated it during an interview with Larry King on vendredi 2.

While the press was having fun with the story the FAA continued its inquiry. The copilot was interviewed on lundi 5 s3Information found in the lundi 5 janvier 1987 interview of Copilot Takanori Tamefuji. The difficulty in communicating through an interpreter is evident in the transcript of this interview. At one point the interviewer asked Tamefuji, referring to the arrays of lights ahead and to the left, And you could distinguish these lights as being different from the star...? Tamefuji's response is transcribed as NNNooo..., which some might interpret as meaning that Tamefuji couldn't distinguish the lights from stars. But the interviewer immediately continued ...from the stars? to which Tamefuji replied, "Different is fine." Subsequently Tamefuji made it quite clear that the lights were very different from stars. and the flight engineer on jeudi 15 s4Information found in the jeudi 15 janvier 1987 interview of the flight engineer, Yoshio Tsukuba.. A complete transcript of the AARTCC tape recording, although with some errors, was completed on January 9 and the radar data tape recording was sent to a special FAA facility for analysis. The FAA announced that it would release the material it had collected after it complete the inquiry.