Japan Airlines Flight 1628 reports objects over Alaska

On 17 November 1986, the three-person flight crew of Japan Airlines cargo Flight 1628, a Boeing 747-200, reported an extended encounter with multiple unidentified objects while transiting Alaskan airspace en route from Reykjavík to Anchorage. Capt. Kenju Terauchi described two small light-emitting craft and, later, a much larger, dimly lit, walnut-shaped object that paced the 747 over a period of approximately fifty minutes.

The objects were tracked intermittently by Federal Aviation Administration ground radar at Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center. The FAA convened a press conference on 5 January 1987 and subsequently released a thirty-volume case file under the Freedom of Information Act. The case remains the most-documented commercial-aviation UAP encounter in the U.S. air-traffic-control record.