When you think about Japan and UFOs or UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) you might recall the Utsuro-bune – Hollow Ship that I talked about in episode 78, way back in 2021 — and which I’m going to revisit later this week in a bonus show, by the way.
But that’s by far the only encounter with UAP and NHI (non human intelligence) in Japan. So today I’m going to talk about The Big Three UFO incidents + an extra one that I find quite intriguing and well documented.
Intro:
Hey hey, this is Thersa Matsuura and you’re listening to Uncanny Japan. The place where I talk about all the more obscure parts of Japanese culture. Be it weird creatures, interesting superstitions, or creepy tales. This is all the fun and fascinating stuff I dig up while doing research for my writing.
I hope everyone is well. It’s hot here, the rainy season has started, and every once in awhile something large like five-pound rat jumps and scampers in the ceiling of my bedroom. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.
The new Stephen Spielberg movie has just come out. It won’t get to Japan until the fall, of course. But very awesome-ly a bunch of podcasts on the SpectreVision Radio network are doing UAP and disclosure-themed shows. These encounters happen all over the world, so I thought I’d talk about a couple from Japan today, and then re-visit the Utsuro-bune show I did earlier as a bonus episode later in the week.
Remember: Ad-free versions, me reading various folktales, as well as The Pillow Book are over on Patreon for five dollar patrons and above.
Okay, let’s talk about the Three Big Japanese UFO or UAP incidents plus one.
Show:
While the utsuro-bune is arguably the most interesting strange UAP occurrence in Japan because it is so old and there was quite a bit written about it, there have been some more recent sightings or encounters, too. So let’s look into four of these. The first three are from the 1970s, which was called the UFO Boom. Note: The 70s also had the kuchisake onna (slit-mouthed woman) boom, the jinmengyo (the fish with a human face) boom — which I talked about in episode 30, and a Uri Geller spoon bending boom. The 70s were wild.
The first of the Big Three is called the Kera Incident. Kera being the area where it all happened. While UFOs did eventually become a thing everyone was talking about in the 1970s, this was early in the decade, 1972, and as far as I can gather they still weren’t widely known yet.
It was August 25th, in Kochi City and a 13-year old boy named Michio Seo was out walking when he saw something darting above the rice fields. It looked and behaved sort of like a bat, but wasn’t a bat.
Later he told three of his friends about the strange hovering-darting-around thing, and they decided to go investigate. At seven pm they went out and after about an hour of searching, they found it. Again it was flying over the fields, but now that it was getting dark, it was visible because it emanated a silver pulsating light. One of the boys moved closer, the thing popped loudly and its color turned to blue. Everyone ran away.
A week later, again after dark they saw the bright object flying around once more. A couple days after that they found that it had crash landed. But I’ve also read a version I like better, where they used a long-handled bug or fish net and caught it in that. Either way one of them took it home.
It was small, shaped something like a bowler hat. The bottom had some small holes in it and designs that were said to look like waves and another that looked like a bird. It also made a rattling sound when shaken.
Eventually, a detailed replica was made by the Osaka branch of the Japan Space Phenomena Research Association and there are photos of that online. But as for the real object goes, it’s said there is only one existing photo that was taken at a distance. And that all attempts at taking photographs of it failed.
So after capturing it and bringing it home, it’s usually said the boy wrapped it in a plastic bag and put in his backpack. The next morning, though, when he checked on it, it was gone! But that’s okay, they saw it again the next day and caught it again. Again it was taken home and hidden and again it disappeared the next morning. This happened a couple times before it disappeared for good.
Whether or not this one’s true is of course up for debate. Quite a few people saw the small object, but only four (the boys) actually saw it flying. That along with the fact the first boy who found it, Michio, was somewhat known as being good at magic tricks. So there are those who think that maybe he was playing a prank. There’s even a teacher who came forward and said one of them said it was a faked.
However, four years after this happening, a nine-year old girl who also lived in Kochi is said to have seen a hat-shaped small object that descended from the sky and crashed. She even touched it. It was covered in some slimy substance. She grew frightened and ran away, but when she looked back over her shoulder, she saw it spin and shoot up into the sky.
2.
The second of the Big Three, is the Kōfu Incident. This one sounds more credible to me. It happened on February 23rd, 1975 in Kōfu City, Yamanashi, in and around a vineyard.
Two seven-year old boys, who were cousins (Masato Kawano, and Katsuhiro Yamahata), reported that around 6:30pm they were out rollerskating when they saw two orange lights or orange glowing objects in the sky. One larger than the other. The lights turned and hovered over the boys so that they described them as circular and when looking up at them. They could also see three spinning devices on the undersides. Suddenly a black tubular thing began to stretch from one of the crafts and frightened the boys so much that they quickly took off their skates and ran to hide in a nearby graveyard.
While they were hiding, the larger one took off and headed toward Mount Atago. It was getting dark so they decided to head home, but on their way they saw something that looked like a bright flame. So they did what any seven-year olds worth their salt would do, they ran after it.
This led them down a dirt road and to a vineyard. The flame-like light either zoomed off or faded — different newspapers reported it differently — but what was left was the craft. They described it as looking like a plate turned upside down with a dome on top. It was silver but with shining blue windows on the dome part. They also described it as perfectly silent and there were strange characters written on it.
There are drawings they made that are quite specific and detailed.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Masato was on one side of the craft while Katsuhiro went to the other side to check that out. While Katsuhiro was gone, Masato saw a creature emerge. He described it as short (around 130 centimeters or four feet tall), the head and shoulders were large compared to the rest of its body, skin was brown and it had no hair, and here’s were it deviates from what you normally hear Grays looking like. He said it had no eyes, no nose, nor a mouth, just a bunch of wrinkles where they should be. It had two long pointy ears and three downward facing fangs. He thought the whole thing was a mask of some sort. He also said it had four fingers and was wearing some kind of silver full body suit. It made no sound as it walked.
Suddenly Katsuhiro heard a clattering sound and started to go back around the craft to where his cousin was and what was making the noise. Before he got there, though, he was tapped on the shoulder twice. When he turned around he saw the same creature that Masato would later describe. The boys said it spoke, but they couldn’t understand it.
They then fled, with Masato carrying the terrified smaller Katsuhiko on his back because he was so scared he couldn’t move. They also said they stopped at the entrance to the vineyard looked back and could see inside the craft. A similar alien-type creature was sitting there with really long arms, lots of high tech stuff on the walls.
Now. Of course these kids are seven-year olds and you wonder how much is just their imaginations. But it’s also reported that their recounts of the whole encounter were very consistent and the details, too, didn’t change and were very detailed. They also answered all the questions put to them by family, teachers, and reporters without hesitation. And they certainly weren’t faking their fear and shock either. They’d encountered something.
That’s not all. Other people also witnessed the glowing orange lights in the sky. For one, the boys’ mothers. After reaching home and obviously excited and freaked out and trying to get someone to come out so they could show them what they’d just seen, their mother’s did go out. They got as close as fifty meters (or fifty five yards) away and did indeed see some kind of orange ball-like object over the vineyard. It faded and blinked out and by the time the boys’ fathers arrived a littler later, it had already vanished.
But there were quite a few other people who were in the area who also reported seeing a strange light in the sky, be it orange or white-blue, or an actual object flying. Dogs were noted to be barking more that usual during that time, too. Some people even reported seeing a luminous object later during the night of that same day, zig zagging and swooping down.
Again, the boy’s told their story with emotions that just couldn’t be faked, it’s said. Even skeptical people found that the story never faltered no matter who they told or what questions were asked. All the details and the order of what happened remained consistent.
It was also claimed that there was physical damage to the vineyard, marks in the soil, a concrete pillar leaning over, and even possible radioactive material left on the ground. About that last one, I looked a little deeper into that. This is what I found: A teacher at a high school just happened to have a national qualification as a radiation protection supervisor, so he went over and measured the area. He took forty soil samples and tested them over a period of a month. The samples showed higher than normal radiation that decayed rapidly over time, which is characteristic of artificial radioactivity. Something was there, then it left.
In 1982 the two boys were willingly hypnotized and questioned again about the encounter and they repeated the same story. Katsuhiro Yamahata, the boy who was tapped on the shoulder and had to be carried by his cousin, says to this day that the incident was so frightening that he can’t spend time alone. For a long time he stopped talking about it completely because of the backlash he was getting. But recently he’s speaking out more, especially since Kōfu has decided to embrace the incident.
Now they have Kōfu UFO Day and their own character called Kōfu Seijin as well as UFO shaped sweets, all kinds of branded merch, shirts, hats, tumblers, stickers, totes, etc. Yes. I bought a t-shirt.
3.
For number three we have the Nikoro Incident. While I’d heard lightly of the Kera Incident and the Kōfu Incident, I had never heard of this one and while researching I found that it was wonderfully bonkers and yet there is a part of the story that sounded familiar and I had to track down where I’d heard it before which led me to a totally different encounter but very specific details that match up. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Okay, first, Nikoro is not as tidy as Kera or Kōfu. It’s often said to be the least believable of the three for a reason I’ll get to in a minute, but that reason was actually misreporting.
This one, too, involves a real reported abduction that occurred three times. The first encounter happened on April 6, 1974 at around 3am in rural Hokkaido, Nikoro, Kitami City. Here we meet Yoshihiro Fujiwara, a young honest farmer who lived with his mother. Side note: He’s said to have no interest at all in UFOs before this incident. Anyway, he was woken up in the middle of the night because of a loud knocking on his front door and his dog/dogs barking outside. He got dressed, went out and was met by a strange alien being. Nearby over his fields hovered a disc glowing orange.
The little alien creature was wild. Yoshiro actually made a sketch I’ll put that up on the website and the video if you’re watching that. But let me see if I can describe it.
First, he said it was child-sized, about one meter (three feet) tall with brownish slimy, frog-like skin, all of it covered in small yellow and blue protrusions. Over that though it appeared to be wearing a transparent, vinyl-like suit. He said that there were some kind of electromagnetic waves or electricity that was constantly flowing around the creature and he thought the suit protected him from them. It had four longish tentacles. Its head was octopus-like with slanted diamond-shaped eyes, pointy ears (like the Kōfu incident), and a V-shaped nose. It was wearing a helmet that and an oval-shaped object on top.
Understandably, he tried to run away, but a blast of something like hot air suddenly rose up from beneath his feet and he was sucked into the disc. Now, I was reading about this in English and Japanese and the stories differ. One says that from there he was able to jump down, escape, and run back into the house. Another couple places say he was taken away, threw a fit until the “let him go” or he escaped and ended up several kilometers from his house and had to run home.
That evening his ears grew hot and his fingertips trembled. When he touched a spoon it bent limply in his hand. Coincidence that this was also the era of Uri Geller? Ermm. In another place I read this ability happened later and he showed it to friends. But what is most important is that suddenly he was able to telepathically talk with the alien creatures.
So that was April 6th. On the 8th at around 6:30pm he received a message designating a meeting place. So off he went, with two friends. Again, I’ve read that he was told that he was selected and that no one else would be taken along in the craft because they wouldn’t survive, but also versions that say none of that. In the mountains he went off alone at some point and was taken again by the craft. Since this was the second time, he was calmer and paid attention to what the insides looked like. He also made a drawing of this I’ll put on the website and video. One place I found that his friends later found his footsteps leading to the ledge of a cliff. At least one saying they saw a UAP around that time as well.
Here Yoshihiro Fujiwara and his alien friend made one orbit around the moon and two around the earth and was unceremoniously thrown from the craft around 8pm. His friends found him in the snow unconscious, near comatose.
During this second abduction he was told telepathically that he had a tiny receiver placed into his left earlobe and a transmitter into his right earlobe.
The final trip happened on April 13th. Lots of different reports about this one. One said the he contacted them and asked it to come back, that he wanted proof that he’d been abducted. Here’s where the stories get weird and you’ll find the big “Sure Jan” moment. A lot say that this time he was taken to Jupiter and given a rock from the surface to show people as proof. We all know that Jupiter is a gas giant so that immediately negates his whole story.
But Yoshihiro’s defense, I read that it wasn’t Jupiter, but Titan they visited and another report saying that HE never said that. His brother was interviewed and threw the idea out there and the newspapers ran with it. It was said to have been tested and the two things I’ve found is that either 1. there was some elements that were not found on earth on it or 2. it was inconclusive.
But! There seems to be some corroborating details. Someone also reported seeing and extremely bright light outside on his first abduction. But he was too afraid to look out. Friends and witnesses could verify that he could suddenly bend spoons, and he really was found unconscious in the snow by people. And after the third abduction where he was again found in the snow, it was the NHK vilm crew who found him and there is a recording where he the intensity and realism of his statements is such that no one there believed it could have been staged.
Fujiwara believed himself to be a contact man for this other non human life and things kind of got weird with him saying his role is to delay natural disasters and saying he could teleport. He died in 2021.
With this one I couldn’t help noticing the similarity to a man named Whitley Strieber, who also claims to have a mysterious alien implant in his earlobe. I don’t know much about his story, just interesting that they both said the same thing and when I found that about Fujiwara it was written in Japanese, so I’m pretty sure Strieber wouldn’t have heard of it. Interesting.
Okay, this fourth one might be the most credible of all, and it’s the most recent. It’s called the Kaiyō Maru Case and has all kinds of real documentation. While the Big Three (the Kera, the Kōfu, and the Nikoro) are pretty well known and talked about, they also occurred during the Showa Era occult and UFO boom, and happened so long ago that the stories are getting murky.
But this one happened in the 1980s. The Kaiyō Maru is a government research vessel equipped for high precision resource surveys and ocean environment surveys. We’re talking a 2,644 ton ship that carried out fisheries surveys all across the world’s waters. And it had two encounters a couple years apart.
The first one, 1984, the ship was near the Falkland Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, this was December 18th to be exact. A navigation officer on watch saw a strange light near Orion, moving in a zig zagging fashion before suddenly accelerating and disappearing. Then another would appear, again moving haphazardly across the sky. This happened again and again and again. Eight times actually in roughly ten minute intervals. Two of the times the object brightened suddenly. The officer said before he went on duty his commanding officer told him (and, I don’t know, but I think this is very telling), “If you see anything strange wake me up. I don’t care what it is, anything you think is off, wake me up immediately.” Like, why would he say that, you wonder. But he did and because that he was woken and could witness for himself the last one or two moving lights.
The exact locations, directions, and times of the different moving lights is recorded.
Then the second sighting was in 1986 on the western side of Midway Island in the central Pacific. On December 21st at around six pm, second officer Yoji Sasaki who was on the bridge at the time spotted a huge oval-shaped object on the radar five kilometers to the port of the ship. It was still light out, but nothing was there. He searched where the object should be through his binoculars, nothing.
Then around 10:30 pm, third officer, Masaki Shimojō, who had taken over watch duty along with four others confirmed again that the radar started picking up a huge object nearby. It was around 300 meters across. Again, they couldn’t confirm it visually. This UFO then circled the ship very quickly several times, made a sharp turn heading directly toward the ship then just before it hit it made another sharp turn and zoomed away. The speed they measured was more than 4,900 kilometers an hour.
Once more, an hour or so later, one of the crew watching the radar saw the huge craft appear again on radar directly behind the ship. Everyone scrambled to look for it, but despite the moon being out, they saw nothing. This time, too, sped up, once more aiming for the ship. One of the men screamed it’s going to hit us, but there was no impact. Instead it disappeared from the radar and everyone heard a roaring sound that they described as something cutting the air, a sound they’d never heard before, something like a roaring sound from overhead. The sound stopped and they saw a huge intense, red and yellow light ahead of them that flew off at an incredible speed.
These incidences were reported in newspapers and TV and because there were nine witnesses altogether, all scientists, and plenty of notes and recordings of what happened, the story was even written up in the Nikkei Science Journal (September 1988).
Okay, I’ll leave you here. Keep and eye out or ear out for my revisiting of the utsuro-bune, the hollow ship, later this week.
Thank you so much for listening, stay safe and well, and I’ll talk to you again in a few days.
Bye bye.
