Japan Air Lines Flight 1628

In November 1986, the crew of a Japan Air Lines cargo jet flying over Alaska toward Anchorage reported unidentified objects pacing their aircraft.

The Debrief sets out the flight: a Boeing 747 cargo plane on its way from Paris to Tokyo with a stop in Anchorage, and a crew of three under Captain Kenju Terauchi. Terauchi reported the encounter over northern Alaska as the plane neared Anchorage. Discovery UK's feature Long Haul says the crew described several objects keeping up with the jet at great speed, and that the plane's own radar and radar on the ground had trouble working out what they were.

Skeptoid's Brian Dunning reports that Philip Klass, editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology and a leading debunker with CSICOP, noted that Jupiter, shining brightly, sat right where Terauchi placed the large craft he called a mothership, and that Terauchi never mentioned seeing both. Klass added that the other two crew members watched the two smaller craft for 20 minutes and described them as looking just like stars. Dunning says nobody will ever know for sure what the crew saw.

According to Wikipedia, an FAA data package called Terauchi a "UFO repeater", with two sightings before this one and two more the following January. On 11 January 1987, over roughly the same stretch of Alaska, he reported pulsing lights and a big dark mass ahead of the plane. FAA radar found nothing there, and that sighting was later put down to the glow of small villages seen through thin ice-crystal cloud.