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traffic control and say, "Hey, do you have traffic at my altitude?" And the controller panics, looks at the scope, and says, "No, we don't have any traffic at your altitude." Air traffic would then question the 747 pilot asking for more information: what type of aircraft, any visible markings, color, or numbers on the tail, etc., and then the controller would advise, "We will track that guy and have flight standards meet him at the airport when he lands. We'll write him up; pull his ticket. We'll do whatever we have to do to find the pilot of the unknown aircraft." If his ticket was pulled, the pilot was no longer authorized to fly. In this case, the pilot responded by saying, "It's a UFO," because he could see it so clearly. But who believes in UFOs? This is the type of attitude the air traffic control had at the time, and in any case, neither the controller nor the FAA was equipped to track something like this. The FAA has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft, but it has no procedures for controlling UFOs. After receiving the call concerning the UFO from the Alaskan region almost two months after the UFO event occurred, I briefed my boss Harvey Safer, who alerted the FAA administrator Admiral Engen. Safer and I drove up to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to observe the computer playback of the event and learn more about what had happened. The FAA had developed a computer program capable of re-creating the traffic on the controllers' scope, called plan view display (PVD). I instructed the FAA specialist to synchronize the voice tapes with the radar data—that way, we could hear everything the controller and pilot said, while simultaneously watching the radar scope. It would be just as if you were standing behind the controller in Alaska, watching everything that was going on while he conversed with the JAL pilot and crew. I videotaped the radar display as the event was played back. Later that day, I asked the FAA automation specialists to plot the radar targets along the route of flight on a chart and explain what each target was doing along the 747's flight path. The hardware and software engineers put together a large chart that showed every target along the flight of the 747 during its reported encounter with the UFO. They hung it on the wall and pointed out: This is when we first saw the UFO; this is when the pilot saw the UFO; this is when the military saw the UFO; all the way down the whole chart. I videotaped the chart. The printout and radar playback displayed primary targets in the vicinity of the 747. These target returns were displayed about the same time and place as the pilot reported viewing the UFO. The pilot and crew viewed the target on their own radar and were able to actually see the huge UFO simultaneously, as it approached their aircraft. Anyone who watches this play back can see and hear this, but of course when the CIA saw it, their people said you can't see it because it's not there. The question I