Japan Air Lines Cargo Flight 1628 was a Japanese Boeing 747-200F cargo aircraft flying from Paris[clarification needed] to Narita International Airport that was involved in an UFO sighting on November 17, 1986. During the flight, Captain Kenji Terauchi reported seeing three objects he described as "two small ships and the mothership". The FAA in Anchorage only saw Flight 1628 on their radar. Two other nearby planes only saw Flight 1628 and no other objects. An FAA investigation of the incident characterized Terauchi as a "UFO repeater". Astronomers and investigators have determined that Terauchi probably mistook the planets Jupiter and Mars as UFOs. Contradictions among the accounts of the crew from the three aircraft as well as contradictions between the transcripts and later interviews with Terauchi have cast doubt that anything unusual happened.

On the Reykjavík to Anchorage section of the flight, flying at 35,000 feet (11,000 m), at 17:11 over eastern Alaska, the pilot, Captain Kenji Terauchi reported seeing three unidentified objects, "flying parallel and then ... very close". News media of the time reported that Terauchi referred to the objects as "the two small ships and the mother ship",[1] and as "two small ones and one twice the size of an aircraft carrier". After six minutes, Terauchi radioed the Anchorage Federal Aviation Administration who advised him to take "evasive action". Terauchi decreased altitude and turned the plane in a circle, but reported that the lights were still with the plane after the turns.

At the time, news media stated that the FAA reported seeing objects near the plane even after the evasive maneuvers, but upon later review, the military radar images were "dismissed as clutter, and an object that showed up on the aviation agency's screens was thought to be a coincidental split image of the aircraft". Fairbanks FAA air controllers saw only Flight 1628 on their radar screens.

Terauchi reported that the objects followed the plane for 640 kilometres (400 miles). Two planes that were near Flight 1628, a United Airlines airliner and a US Air Force C-130 cargo plane, reported that they did not see any objects either visually or on radar.

Flight 1628 landed in Anchorage, the crew were debriefed and FAA investigators determined "they were 'normal, professional, rational, (and had) no drug or alcohol involvement”.