Seeing the Light

A few months ago the pilot and cockpit crew of a Japan Air Lines 747 reported seeing an enormous unidentified flying object that, they said, flew in formation with them for 40 minutes over Alaska. This report got a certain measure of credibility--it came from reliable and sober airline pilots.

Now Philip J. Klass, an expert on UFO sightings, has looked into this latest incident on behalf of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and has discovered that what the JAL pilots saw was nothing unusual at all, though it was extraterrestrial. What the crew saw, Klass discovered, was the planet Jupiter, and possibly the planet Mars.

At the time of the sighting last Nov. 18, an extremely bright Jupiter (-2.6 magnitude) was just 10 degrees above the horizon in the Alaska twilight--an elevation that would have made it appear to be about 35,000 feet in altitude, just where the 747 was. Mars, which was not as bright that night as Jupiter, was also visible in the sky, lower on the horizon and about 20 degrees to the right of Jupiter.

The two planets together were easily mistaken for the running lights of a large aircraft. In his first radio report to air controllers in Anchorage, the pilot, Capt. Kenjyu Terauchi, said that he saw “white and yellow” lights. When he descended 4,000 feet, he said that the UFO stayed with him, which the planets would have seemed to do.

A quarter of all UFO sightings turn out to be planets or stars. The crew members saw lights, but misinterpreted them, which is much more reasonable and believable than visitors from outer space.