Honshu Island, Japan, May 1949May 1949

Insufficient Data

Summary

On May 31, 1949, at 1110 (11:10 a.m.), a U.S. Air Force pilot flying an F-80 jet at 20,000 feet over Honshu Island, Japan, spotted a silvery, flickering object in the sky. The pilot, 1st Lieutenant James J. Giles, was on a routine training flight near Misawa Air Force Base. He estimated the object was about 20 to 30 miles away from the coast, above 30,000 feet, and moving north at high speed. He watched it move 7 to 10 miles across the sky before it disappeared into clouds above. The entire sighting lasted about ten minutes.

Giles believed he was seeing reflected sunlight bouncing off an aircraft in flight. The brightness of the reflection, he said, looked roughly equal to what a B-29 bomber would produce. The object appeared circular when Giles tried to identify its shape, though he acknowledged he could not determine its exact form. No sound or other effects were observed.

The Air Force investigated by contacting other military units in the area. They found that no weather aircraft, military planes, tactical aircraft, or civil aircraft were operating in that part of the sky at the time. The pilot confirmed that he had kept both the other F-80 on his mission in sight and that the object could not have been the shadow of either jet. Giles held the rank of communication officer and had logged 1,700 hours of flying time across various aircraft types. His commanding officer rated him as reliable, conscientious, and trustworthy.

In their official conclusion, the Air Force noted that the object could have been the planet Venus, which would have been visible in the daytime sky at that location and time, or possibly a foreign aircraft conducting reconnaissance. The file does not make a definitive determination between these two possibilities, and the object was ultimately classified as unknown.

The complete case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives across 10 pages.

Reported location

Honshu Island, Japan, May 1949

Date of incident

May 1949

State / country

? / XX

Page count

10 scanned pages

USAF evaluation

unknown

Microfilm

T1206, Roll 5

Original case file scans

Original case file · scanned by NARAPage 1 of 10

View transcribed text

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Source: National Archives Catalog · NAID 28935179