I haven’t watched the current TV hit, the X Files and I risk some level of credibility here with the following saga however, I feel compelled to write about it. I was on duty on a Sunday afternoon in May of 77 and as most Sunday afternoons in Alaska would go, things were pretty quiet. I had received a routine flight plan from the Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center on a Japan Airlines flight from Europe coming across a polar route enroute to Anchorage and then San Francisco. When my phone rang from our site at Barter, I knew the identity of the plot and readily determined a friendly classification. Two to three minutes passed and they called me back with another plot that was immediately West, close to and parallel with the Japan Airlines heavy flight 426. Being near the polar ice cap, my first impulse was anomalous propagation or some type of false radar return coming off the JAL flight. Very quickly, this second radar plot also on a Southerly course, reached speeds of serious concern (2,000 knots at 35,000 feet) and by now had left the JAL flight long behind. Still wanting to believe we had a radar or atmospheric glitch, I was beckoned by another phone call from Fort Yukon and then Indian Mountain Air Force Stations (AFS’s) with voices on the other end asking " Hey Murph, what do we have?" I now had one more phone than I did ears, flashing red lights and several concerned onlookers huddled around my backlit air route plotting table. An SR71 reconnaissance aircraft was the most probable explanation but we had not received notification of such a flightplan. SR71’s never flew in Alaska while I was there. I believe I woke our site commander, Col. Holland from an afternoon nap in his quarters because he arrived in the Ops Center wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I’ll never forget the " this better be good " look on his face as he approached my console.

Three separate radars were currently tracking this high speed unknown object and as we all watched in unison, it reversed it’s heading without making a normal radius turn. After a brief few minutes, all height radars lost contact with it as it apparently shot straight up and out of our coverage. We were ready to scramble fighters when we lost all contact. This event took place during a span of approximately 10 minutes and left all of us wondering just what we had seen. I logged it in as "no action taken, none required".