by Leslie Kean
Dori Callahan remembers well that this high-level debriefing was called a short time after her husband presented his data to the admiral, and also that he told her what happened there immediately afterward. In addition, as an FAA expert, she later analyzed the radar printouts on the Alaska case, which Callahan had provided for the CIA at the meeting, along with the explanatory drawings prepared by the engineering and software staffs from the Tech Center. “And since I had worked in both hardware and software organizations at one time, I understood all of it,” she explained in a 2009 e-mail.
John Callahan points out that, when looking at the unusual radar data during the briefing, the hardware department said it was obviously a software problem, and the software department said it was clearly a hardware problem. “Both teams were fully experienced and knew the air traffic software system, and both were fully capable of knowing when the system was not working correctly,” Ms. Callahan stated in her e-mail. “In other words, there was nothing wrong with the hardware at the time of the JAL 1628 sighting, and the software was working as well. Looking at the radar display of the object darting in and around JAL 1628, it was obvious that there was an object changing positions around the jet. If it had been ghosting [a false target] as suggested by the FAA, all traffic in that control area would have had ghosting, and it would not have moved in front of and behind the aircraft.”
In contrast to the O’Hare incident, the FAA did conduct an official investigation two months after the Alaska event—mainly because there was radar evidence, and because “public interest” forced the issue. The FAA wanted “to ensure that somebody didn’t violate airspace we control,” a spokesman explained at the time.20
But maybe there were other reasons the agency looked into this. Despite the FAA’s proclaimed disinterest in UFOs, Richard O. Gordon, an official from the FAA’s Flight Standards Office, informed the JAL captain of a surprising scenario during a lengthy 1987 interview. He said that the captain’s detailed account was “very, very interesting and we need to see if we can figure out what is there.” As revealed in a verbatim transcript,21 Gordon then described plans to take the information provided by the captain and send it to Washington so authorities there could find out if it matched any previous reports. “We have a lot of stuff where pilots have had other sightings,” he declared. He told the captain that maybe his description and drawings will be the same as what happened “in Arizona and New York or wherever,” and that “we got a place in Washington, D.C., we’ll put them all together” to find out if any two cases are alike. This is a very interesting admission: the FAA keeps records of UFO sightings by pilots; they’re stored in a specific location in Washington, D.C.; FAA officials make case comparisons when new incidents occur. If it’s true, it certainly flies in the face of the agency’s public stance on UFOs.
Despite the reaction of individual FAA officials directly involved with the Alaska case, the stated FAA conclusion was that the radar readings were false targets, malfunctions in the system. Even though it had radar to support the witness accounts, the FAA dismissed this data as erroneous, and declared that it “was unable to confirm the event.”22 It praised the three “normal, rational, professional pilots,” yet the final report completely ignored the visual sightings reported in detail during the FAA’s interviews with these witnesses.23
John Callahan vigorously disputes these claims about the radar. He makes the important point that radar is not configured to detect objects that behave the way UFOs do, and that we need to revamp and upgrade its technology. This former head of the Accidents and Investigations Division was not at all surprised by the FAA’s response to the O’Hare incident a few years ago. “It was predictable,” he told me. “When pilots report seeing such an object, the FAA will offer a host of other explanations. It’s like wearing a blindfold. It’s always something else so it can’t be what it is.”
CHAPTER 22
The FAA Investigates a UFO Event “That Never Happened”
by John J. Callahan
You are about to read about an event that never happened.
I was division chief of the Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations Division of the FAA in Washington from 1981 to 1988. During this time, I was involved in an investigation of an extraordinary event but was asked not to talk about it. Since retiring, I decided that the public had a right to this information, and that they could handle it. Nothing dire has occurred as a result of my discussing this incident publicly, yet nothing useful has resulted from it either, although it’s never too late. I have come to realize the serious need we have to improve our radar systems so they can capture unusual objects in the sky, such as the one I dealt with when I was at the FAA in 1987.
It was early January 1987 when I received a call from the air traffic quality control branch in the FAA’s Alaskan regional office, requesting guidance on what to tell the media personnel who were overflowing the office. The media wanted information about the UFO that chased a Japanese 747 across the Alaskan sky for some thirty minutes on November 7, 1986. Somehow, the word had got out.
“What UFO? When did this take place? Why wasn’t Washington headquarters informed?” I asked.
“Hey,” the controller replied, “who believes in UFOs? I just need to know what to tell the media to get them out of here.”
The answer to that question was easy: “Tell them it’s under investigation. Then, collect all the data—the voice tapes and computer data discs from both the air traffic facility and the military facility responsible for protecting the West Coast area. Send the data overnight to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey.” I wanted the data on the midnight redeye flight, no matter how much hassle it was for them to get it to me.
Captain Terauchi’s drawing of two “spaceships” with light arrays or horizontal “exhaust” flames around a central object as seen through the cockpit window, provided to the FAA. Courtesy of Dr. Bruce Maccabee
Japan Air Lines flight 1628, a cargo jet with a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer, was north of Anchorage, and it was just after 5:00 p.m. The captain, Kenju Terauchi, described seeing a gigantic round object with colored lights flashing and running around it, which was much bigger than his 747, as big as an aircraft carrier. His crew, Takanori Tamefuji and Yoshio Tsukuda, both saw it, too.
At one point, two objects appeared to stop directly in front of the 747, and the captain said they were “shooting off lights,” illuminating the cockpit and emitting heat he could feel on his face.
The objects then flew in level flight with the 747. Later, the captain made a turn to evade the UFO, but it flew alongside the jet, keeping a constant distance. Terauchi was able to estimate the size of the largest “spaceship,” as he called it, to be at least the size of an aircraft carrier because he had it on his radar, and the aircraft radar has range marks. He reported all of this to FAA officials, exactly as he saw it.
Over the course of thirty-one minutes, the UFO jumped miles in merely a few seconds. One radar sweep at the air traffic control in Anchorage took ten seconds. At one moment Terauchi says, It’s over here at twelve o’clock at eight miles, and when the radar antenna goes by, we see a target there. Ten seconds later, it’s suddenly six or seven miles behind him. It’s going from eight miles out in front of the 747 to six or seven miles in back, in only a few seconds, in one sweep of the radarscope. The technology was “unthinkable,” Terauchi said, because the UFOs appeared to have control over both inertia and gravity.
FAA officials interviewed the captain and his crew extensively in the days and months following; all of them provided independent descriptions and drawings of the “spaceships” and their remarkable behavior. These three reliable witnesses knew how to recognize aircraft. If this object had been a secret military exercise, the pilots would have been informed as such and would not have wasted time spending thirty-one minutes evading and reporting a UFO, and the FAA would not have bothered to conduct interviews following the event. These witnesses eliminated all
known explanations for what they had observed at close range for an extended period of time.
When a pilot looks out the window and sees an aircraft shooting across his nose or flying along with him, the first thing he does is call air traffic control and say, “Hey, do you have traffic at my altitude?” And the controller panics, looks at the scope, and says, “No, we don’t have any traffic at your altitude.” Air traffic would then question the 747 pilot asking for more information: what type of aircraft, any visible markings, color, or numbers on the tail, etc., and then the controller would advise, “We will track that guy and have flight standards meet him at the airport when he lands. We’ll write him up; pull his ticket. We’ll do whatever we have to do to find the pilot of the unknown aircraft.” If his ticket was pulled, the pilot was no longer authorized to fly.
In this case, the pilot responded by saying, “It’s a UFO,” because he could see it so clearly. But who believes in UFOs? This is the type of attitude the air traffic control had at the time, and in any case, neither the controller nor the FAA was equipped to track something like this. The FAA has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft, but it has no procedures for controlling UFOs.
Captain Terauchi sketched a silhouette of a giant ship, which he said was the size of an aircraft carrier, with pale white lights on the horizontal rim. Courtesy of Dr. Bruce Maccabee
After receiving the call concerning the UFO from the Alaskan region almost two months after the UFO event occurred, I briefed my boss Harvey Safer, who alerted the FAA administrator Admiral Engen. Safer and I drove up to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to observe the computer playback of the event and learn more about what had happened.
The FAA had developed a computer program capable of re-creating the traffic on the controllers’ scope, called plan view display (PVD). I instructed the FAA specialist to synchronize the voice tapes with the radar data—that way, we could hear everything the controller and pilot said, while simultaneously watching the radar scope. It would be just as if you were standing behind the controller in Alaska, watching everything that was going on while he conversed with the JAL pilot and crew. I videotaped the radar display as the event was played back.
Later that day, I asked the FAA automation specialists to plot the radar targets along the route of flight on a chart and explain what each target was doing along the 747’s flight path.
The hardware and software engineers put together a large chart that showed every target along the flight of the 747 during its reported encounter with the UFO. They hung it on the wall and pointed out: This is when we first saw the UFO; this is when the pilot saw the UFO; this is when the military saw the UFO; all the way down the whole chart. I videotaped the chart.
The printout and radar playback displayed primary targets in the vicinity of the 747. These target returns were displayed about the same time and place as the pilot reported viewing the UFO. The pilot and crew viewed the target on their own radar and were able to actually see the huge UFO simultaneously, as it approached their aircraft. Anyone who watches this play back can see and hear this, but of course when the CIA saw it, their people said you can’t see it because it’s not there. The question I always ask is: Who are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the government?
Both the radar and manual controller observed the primary target. The military controllers also viewed the primary target on their radar and identified it as a “double primary,” which means it was large enough to be more than one aircraft.
During the briefing at the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, I asked both the hardware and software engineers (these were the same people who had built the air traffic control system) to tell me what those dots in the vicinity of the JAL aircraft were. The hardware engineers said, “This target over here is a software problem, and this one over here is also a software problem.” Every time, all the way down: It’s a software problem; there is nothing wrong with our hardware system. So, I said, “Fine, that makes sense to me.”
Then the software guy got up and said, “This target over here, it’s a hardware problem and this one here—a hardware problem.” There were no software problems, and there were no hardware problems. “Well,” I asked, “what do we have if we don’t have anything? Do we have a target there or not?” One of the technicians stated, “My religion forbids me to believe in UFOs,” so I said, “Fine,” and got ready to leave.
When I arrived back at FAA headquarters, I gave Administrator Engen a quick briefing of the playback and showed him the video of the radar scope synchronized with the voice tapes. He watched the full half hour, and then set up a briefing with President Reagan’s scientific staff, and told me my function was to give them a dog-and-pony show and hand this operation off to them, “since the FAA does not control UFOs.”
At the briefing, we looked at the data printouts and played the video for the people there two or three times—the participants turned out to be the CIA, the president’s scientific group, and a bunch of grunts. We talked for an hour and half or so, and the scientists asked a number of questions—very intelligent questions, in fact. They wanted to know things like the speed of the radar antenna, the frequency and the bandwidth, and the algorithm for the height-finding equipment. The FAA people we brought into the room were technical engineers—hardware and software specialists—and they gave those answers like they were high school math coaches. They spit that stuff right out; it was really amazing to watch these FAA experts work.
At the end, one of the three people from the CIA said, “This event never happened; we were never here. We’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.”
“What do you think it was?” I asked the CIA person.
“A UFO, and this is the first time they have over thirty minutes of radar data to go over,” he responded. They—the president’s scientific team—were very excited to get their hands on this data.
“Well, let’s get a Twix out and advise the American public that we were visited by a UFO,”1 I suggested.
“No way. If we were to tell the American public there are UFOs, they would panic,” he informed me.
And that was it. They took everything that was in the room—and in those days, computer printouts filled boxes and boxes. These FAA printouts were titled “UFO Incident at Anchorage, 11/18/86,” written on the front cover. The printouts provided ample data for an automation specialist to be able to reproduce everything the controller saw on a chart.
A few weeks later, an FAA technician brought in the FAA’s report of this event that never happened. I had him put it on a little table in the corner of my office, and said, “Leave it there. When the CIA wants the rest of the data, I’m sure they’ll come and get it.” Some time passed and someone brought in the voice tapes from the incident, and we put that next to the report on that table, waiting for the CIA to come and make a pickup.
The chart produced at the Tech Center also came to my office, where it remained for a year and a half, along with the detailed FAA report and the voice tapes, which had been placed on that corner table waiting for the CIA. No one ever came and got them. When I was leaving for retirement in August 1988, one of the branch managers, in a hurry to get me out, packed everything that was hanging on the walls and sitting in the office, put it in boxes, and shipped it to my house. I’ve had this data and the video in my possession ever since.
Now, more than twenty years later, it’s become very clear to me that most people, including FAA controllers, really aren’t familiar with how the FAA radar system works and why all aircraft traveling through our airspace are not caught on radar or displayed on the controllers’ PVD. The system and organization of the FAA are not configured to identify and track these aircraft types. In short, current FAA equipment will not paint a “spaceship” unless the aircraft has slowed to a speed similar to current aircraft.
The reasons are simple: The UFOs appear to have no transponder; they are often too big for the automation sys
tem to be considered an aircraft, so the radar thinks they’re weather (radar readings with an unrecognizable signature are often automatically sent out through a second system as weather); or they’re too fast for the radar to get a hit on before they’re out of range. If something is hovering, as it was at O’Hare Airport in 2006, it often doesn’t show up, or if it did it would be a small dot and FAA controllers would not give it much concern.
During the playback of the 1986 event I clearly observed a primary radar target in the position reported by the Japanese pilot. But the radar signals were intermittent because the UFO was painted as an extremely large primary target and so the FAA computer system treated the UFO radar return as weather. Regardless, the target could be seen near the 747 off and on for thirty-one minutes.
So we have a problem. Because of these radar deficiencies, when pilots report seeing an unusual object, the FAA will not investigate unless the object can be identified by an airborne pilot, and instead the FAA will offer a host of weak explanations. If the FAA cannot identify the object within FAA terminology, then it doesn’t exist. Another cliché we sometimes used: For every problem there is a solution. The FAA seems to believe that the converse is also true: If there is no solution, there is no problem.
The Alaska UFO investigation is a case in point. The final FAA report concluded that the radar returns from Anchorage were simply a “split image” due to a malfunction in the radar equipment, which showed occasional second blips that had been mistaken for the UFO. Thus the FAA would not confirm that the incident took place.