BOAC Flight 911 and the Mount Fuji UFO Photographs

On the afternoon of March 5, 1966, a Boeing 707 of the British Overseas Airways Corporation departed Tokyo’s Haneda Airport bound for Hong Kong as the Pacific leg of a round-the-world charter. Registered as G-APFE and operating as BOAC Flight 911, the aircraft carried 113 passengers and a crew of eleven, including a large group of American tourists at the end of an Asian holiday. The flight had been delayed by deteriorating weather over Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport, and Captain Bernard Dobson had filed a revised plan that would take the 707 northwest of his original track in order to give passengers a clear view of Mount Fuji on a brilliant afternoon.

The detour proved fatal. As the aircraft passed over the southern flank of the volcano at approximately 17,000 feet, it encountered severe clear-air turbulence in the lee wave of Fuji’s summit, broke apart, and crashed into the slopes near Tarobo. There were no survivors. The accident remains the deadliest single-aircraft disaster ever to occur in Japan, and the Japanese government’s investigation eventually attributed the loss to the violent mountain-wave turbulence generated by the unusual atmospheric conditions of that day.

It is what was photographed in the moments before the breakup that has kept the case alive in the literature of unidentified aerial phenomena.

The Photographs

Several of the passengers aboard Flight 911 had been actively photographing Mount Fuji from the windows of the 707. When the wreckage was recovered from the Tarobo slopes, multiple cameras were retrieved with film still inside them, some of it damaged but a portion recoverable. When the surviving negatives were processed, a small number of frames showed what appeared to be small, dark, disc-shaped objects against the snow of the volcano, in positions that did not correspond to any aircraft or natural feature known to be in the area at that time.

The most celebrated of these photographs, taken by an American tourist whose camera was identified by the recovery team, shows Mount Fuji from an oblique angle with the smooth white cone occupying most of the frame. Above and to the left of the summit, a small dark form appears with what some observers have described as a clearly delineated body and shadow against the snow. Other frames in the same sequence show what may be a second object trailing the first. The photographs were released to the press by the Japanese authorities in the weeks following the disaster and were quickly seized upon by ufological writers in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The Coincidence Problem

The Flight 911 case occupies an uncomfortable middle ground in the literature of unidentified aerial phenomena. On the one hand, the photographs are real, taken by real witnesses, recovered from a real disaster, and processed in the presence of accident investigators. On the other hand, the witnesses themselves did not survive to testify to what they had seen, and the photographs were not analysed in the way that might be expected for a paranormal case in less tragic circumstances.

The Japanese aviation authorities, the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and the American National Transportation Safety Board all participated in the recovery and analysis of the wreckage. None of these bodies treated the photographic anomalies as relevant to the cause of the crash, which they uniformly attributed to clear-air turbulence. Independent ufologists, however, have noted that the same mountain produced a separate series of unusual aerial reports earlier on the same day, and that BOAC Flight 911 was the third aircraft in less than a month to encounter difficulty in the immediate vicinity of Fuji.

Earlier and Later Sightings

The skies above Mount Fuji had been the subject of unusual reports for many years before the Flight 911 disaster. Japanese pilots of the foo fighter era of the Second World War had reported strange illuminated objects pacing their aircraft in the area. Postwar ufological literature in Japan, particularly the writings of Jun-ichi Yaoi and the magazine UFO and Space, treated Fuji as a recurring focus of unexplained activity, comparable in some respects to the position occupied by Mount Rainier in the early American UFO record.

In the years following Flight 911, occasional reports of aerial phenomena around the volcano have continued. The Self-Defense Forces have on several occasions been scrambled to investigate radar tracks in the area, most of which have been resolved as commercial traffic or weather phenomena, but a small residue have remained unexplained.

What the Case Means

The Flight 911 photographs are unlikely ever to be definitively explained. The cameras themselves were damaged in the crash, the film stocks were partially fogged by the impact, and the witnesses to the moment of capture are dead. What survives is a small set of images of a famous mountain, taken from a doomed aircraft on a clear afternoon, in which something appears to be present that should not be.

For believers in extraterrestrial visitation, the photographs represent a tantalising glimpse of objects that may have been related to the loss of the aircraft itself. For skeptics, they are most plausibly artefacts of the film itself, dust on the negatives, or birds caught at unfortunate angles. For the families of the 124 dead, they are a haunting last view of the world taken by people who would not survive the next minute. The case has remained, since 1966, one of the strangest convergences of disaster and documentation in the history of commercial aviation.

Sources

• Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission, Ministry of Transport, Japan. Report on the Accident to BOAC Boeing 707-436 G-APFE near Mount Fuji on 5 March 1966. Tokyo, 1967.
• Yaoi, Jun-ichi. UFO Reports from Japan. Tokyo: UFO Library, 1974.
• Good, Timothy. Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
• Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998.