Contact in Kofu or how two Japanese boys met long-eared aliens

In 1975, two Japanese boys claimed that they first saw a UFO, and then two aliens. When other people came to the scene of the incident, they began to find evidence there that something strange really happened here. On February 23, 1975, cousins Yamata and Kono were walking home from elementary school in Kofu, Japan. They were walking through the countryside and at some point both saw two bright orange lights in the sky.

One of the lights - the one that was larger in size, flew towards Mount Atago, but the second light began to descend sharply, as if noticing the boys. Soon the brothers realized that some kind of flying machine was descending towards them, from which a black tube came out and began to make a sound like a camera clicking. After that, the boys panicked, ran to a nearby Shinto temple with a cemetery and hid behind tombstones. Then they looked up at the sky and saw the strange device flying away. However, this was only the beginning of the incident.

Thinking that the danger was over, the boys got out of their hiding place and continued their way home. On the way, they passed by a vineyard and suddenly saw that there was something glowing among the many concrete supports stuck into the ground to support the vines. It looked like a big bonfire had been lit there.  The boys went in this direction and soon came to a place where they saw a silver disc standing on the ground. It was about 5 meters in diameter and only 1-2 meters high. On its sides, five strange symbols were painted on both sides, which none of the boys recognized as familiar.

The disk stood on supports and there was a hole in its bottom, from which a ladder with seven steps ran to the ground.  Then a silvery light poured out of the opening of the ship and a humanoid figure appeared from there. In height, she was almost the same height as the boys, he had brown skin and the creature was completely hairless. There were no eyes or nose on his face, only horizontal wrinkles, three large white fangs came out of his mouth.

He had four fingers on his hands, his ears were long and pointed, and his body was dressed in a shiny silver suit. On his shoulder he had something like a weapon in the form of a rifle, and his shoes had such a strange shape, as if the creature had only two toes on its feet. Then the creature tried to talk to the boys, and one of them said that the sounds it was making sounded like someone was repeating and repeating the word "Cue Cue". When the creature turned to Yamata, he was so scared that he fell to the ground, and then decided to pretend to be dead. 

After that, the creature walked around him, as if studying the boy and figuring out what to do with him, but the second boy, Kono, decided to act ahead of the curve. He grabbed Yamata by the arms, brought her to herself, and after that both ran away from the vineyard.  As they were running away, they managed to notice that a second long-eared alien was visible in the hatch of the ship, he was sitting in front of some controls and a TV-like device.

The boys were so interested in this that they decided to go back and see what was inside this saucer.  They came closer and tried to look inside the ship, but the second humanoid immediately turned his head in their direction and they ran away again, this time without returning. They managed to notice that the interior of the ship was quite cramped with several control panels inside.

They both ran to Kono's house and began emotionally explaining to his parents what they saw in the vineyard. Then they told the same thing to Yamata's parents. The boys' mothers decided to go with them to the vineyard and check out what was there. When they arrived, the disk was still there, but this time it was orange, spinning and flashing bright lights at intervals of 5-10 seconds. One of the mothers compared it to watching fireworks. Yamata's mother tried to get closer, but the boys desperately protested and even tried to keep her from moving towards the object. Eventually the mothers returned home and decided to ask the boys' fathers to go there too. However, by the time the men arrived at the vineyard, the disk was no longer on the ground.

But it was still visible in the sky and they stood for a while and watched as the strange object became smaller and smaller until it completely disappeared into the clouds. In order not to frighten the children, the boys' parents decided to tell them that most likely they saw what is called Hitodama in Japan, which can be translated as "human souls" or more precisely "souls of the dead". According to mythology, Hitodama manifests itself in the form of flying fireballs in the night sky.  Despite this explanation, the boys were still deeply concerned about this event. Kono couldn't sleep that night, and Yamata refused to go to school the next morning until one of his parents agreed to go to school with him.

The next day, February 24, 1975, when Yamato and Kono came to school, they were very surprised to see a drawing on the blackboard depicting exactly the same disk as they had seen yesterday. They found out that the drawing was drawn today by another classmate of theirs, who also witnessed a UFO yesterday.

The boy stated that he saw a bright orange light in the sky on the Kofu bypass road while riding in the back seat of his family's car. This observation occurred 30 minutes before the close contact of Yamata and Kono. Then all three boys told their teacher about it, who initially rejected this story as an absurd fiction, but when she saw the boys' completely serious and frightened faces, she decided that they were not lying after all, and actually saw something unusual. So she told the story to the principal of the school, who then contacted The Yamanashi Nichinichi Shimbun newspaper.  After that, the teacher, the school principal and several journalists went to the vineyard to see if there was anything else there.

In the vineyard, they found several strange finds confirming that something really happened there. At first they saw that one concrete support in the field had completely collapsed and split when it hit the ground. And the steel mesh on the supports was deformed as if a very heavy object was leaning on it. Two other concrete columns were damaged.

In the place where, according to the boys, the ship landed, there were several holes in the ground, another hole in the ground measuring 50-60 centimeters and in the center of it was a white powdery substance resembling ash.  A high school professor visited this place and took soil samples from that place for testing. When he checked the samples, he found that they contained unnaturally high levels of radiation.

Later, other professors and experts confirmed his conclusions and determined that the radiation most likely came from a foreign object in contact with the soil, whether it was a UFO, a meteorite or some radioactive substance thrown out near the soil. The professor who conducted the initial test was Susumu Maeda, he specialized in radiology. After the local newspaper published the story, the journalist and the police interviewed other people in the area, and it turned out that several other people also saw something in the sky that day. A man whom the press referred to simply as "Mr. A.", who was the manager of the Kofu Urban Environmental Center, reported that he saw a flickering yellow light in the sky. 

He only noticed it because his dog was barking loudly and continuously, and when he went to see what happened, he saw a streak of yellow light moving across the sky and leaving a trail behind it before disappearing behind some buildings. Mr. A. decided that it was a shooting star. Another eyewitness was a 59-year-old priest of the Jokoji Temple, who saw a bright light zigzag in the sky before it shrank in size and disappeared. A girl of unknown age, who was named simply as Di-chan, saw from the balcony of her house a zigzag light . There was another witness, an insurance agent named Midori, but she did not report her observations until 1982.

The reason she kept silent was because she was afraid of being ridiculed, and the reason she did tell about it was because many people encouraged her to do so. Midori stated that she was driving along the road, where she saw suspiciously small figures standing on the side of the road. She honked at them twice, but they didn't move, so she continued on her way, but drove slowly, and when she was about to drive past them, one of them came up to her car, and his hand was on her windshield.  She stated that the creature's palm was pitch black and covered with wrinkles, the wrist was also completely black and covered with wrinkles. The eyes on the figure's face were also wrinkled, or rather the eyes themselves were open, and the eyelids were wrinkled.

Unlike the description of the creatures told by Kono and Yamata, she reported that this figure had eyes and a nose on its face.  The woman was shocked by what she saw and hurried to leave there as soon as possible. Several theories have been considered to explain the incident. Several people in Japan pointed out that the figures described by the boys resemble the characters present in the Japanese TV series "Ultraman": several episodes of the 7th season of this series were broadcast in 1975, and the last episode was broadcast on March 28, 1975.

It was suggested that even if the boys actually saw something strange, the image of the creatures they saw could arise in their brain based on watching a fantasy series.  Another theory was that the boys were just witnessing an ordinary farmer spraying pesticides on a grape field. Japanese farmers often wear a special protective suit, including shiny materials, and a protective mask during such work. And the balloon with pesticides hanging over their shoulders, the boys could allegedly be confused with a "rifle".

However, both of these theories did not take into account the physical evidence left at the scene, such as a collapsed concrete support, a deformed network, two other damaged concrete supports and a high level of radiation detected in the soil. On that day, the Japanese Meteorological Service reported that February 23, 1975 was a very calm day, without rain, with only a week's wind, and that the sky was clear, without clouds, which made the stars clearly visible, and Venus and Jupiter were visible to the naked eye in the western sky. The Japanese Ministry of Transport also reported that 11 planes flew over the area that day.

The fact that the witnesses in this case were mostly respectable people is also additional proof that something really happened here, since in Japan lying about such an event would cause more ridicule and shame than in the West. None of them sought attention or fame, and gave only brief interviews years later and during the event. Yamata and Kono never doubted their story, and in 1982, at the age of 14, both revisited the scene of the incident. In 2001, they took part in a show during which both were separated into different rooms and subjected to hypnosis. During hypnosis, they again told what they had told earlier.  Now both are over 50 years old and they continue to insist that they saw exactly what they saw.

---

About author:

Serg Toporkov Ufologist, Ph.D., blogger, I go on my own expeditions for UFOs. I use scientific methods to investigate the UAP phenomenon. Write to me

---

Related tags:

Alien  UFO sightings  1975  Japanese  Japan  monster  Kofu  flying saucer