What a UFO researcher learned from cataloging close encounters in Japan

When Kenji Yamamoto first moved to Tokyo in 2018, he planned to study aerospace engineering. What he did not plan for was spending his weekends listening to elderly farmers describe lights in the sky over rice paddies. Yamamoto runs a small online database called uforu.net where he logs these reports. He started it after realizing most English-language UFO incident maps covered the United States and Europe but ignored Asia entirely. His archive now holds 430 cases from Japan alone. Some are mundane. A few are not.

Yamamoto told me over a video call that his biggest surprise was how many witnesses felt shame. “They do not want to be laughed at,” he said. “They wait years before telling anyone.” In one case, a fisherman in Hokkaido saw a metallic object hover above his boat for eleven minutes. He called the coast guard, who told him not to drink while at sea. He reported it to Yamamoto seven years later.

The Japanese government has no official UFO investigation office. Its air force does not investigate. The police take no reports. This creates a gap that small projects like Yamamoto’s fill. He cross-checks each report against weather data, flight schedules, and satellite tracking. He rejects about half the submissions he gets. Most turn out to be weather balloons, Chinese lanterns, or drones.

The shape of what people see

Yamamoto’s database shows some patterns that do not fit easy dismissal. The most common time for reports is between 8:00 p.m. and midnight. The most common shape is a disk or sphere. But the third most common shape has no name. Witnesses describe it as a “flat triangle with rounded corners.” Yamamoto has 38 reports of this shape from different prefectures. The descriptions are consistent down to the color: a dull silver that reflects moonlight oddly, as if the surface is not solid.

One report from Okinawa involved a farmer who saw three of these triangles moving in formation. He said they made no sound. He said his dog hid under a truck and would not come out. The farmer measured the distance to a nearby water tower and estimated the objects were about the size of small cars. He said they stayed for about four minutes, then tilted sideways and vanished. Yamamoto checked the flight radar for that time. No recorded air traffic within 60 miles.

Japanese witnesses often describe a phenomenon Yamamoto calls “the white envelope.” People report a silent, sudden brightness that floods the ground, even when the sky is overcast. The light has no visible source. It lasts for a few seconds, then fades. One engineer in Nagoya captured a video of this. The footage shows his garden going from night to daylight and back again. The engineer posted it on a forum. People called it a hoax. Yamamoto looked at the raw file metadata. The gain and ISO matched real low-light conditions. He still does not know what caused the light.

Why cataloging matters even without answers

Yamamoto’s project operates on a budget of 6,000 yen per month. That is about 40 dollars. He pays for server space and a phone number that rings to a prepaid cell phone. He has never taken donations. He does not want to. “Money brings expectations,” he said. “I want to collect, not prove.”

The database has been used by two small groups. One is a team of atmospheric scientists who wanted to see if certain types of ball lightning were being reported in Japan more than in the United States. The other is a retired police detective who cross-references UFO sightings with unsolved missing person cases. He found no direct links but told Yamamoto that geographical clusters in the sightings matched three cold cases in the Tohoku region. He said it was probably coincidence. He keeps looking anyway.

Yamamoto does not claim to have found anything extraordinary. He says most of what he collects will have prosaic explanations we simply do not have yet. But he argues that discarding reports that do not fit our current model of reality is bad science. “If you only collect things you understand, you will understand nothing new,” he said. He plans to expand the database to cover South Korea and Taiwan next year. He needs a translator. He is learning Korean on an app.

What stays with me is the humility of his approach. He does not try to persuade. He does not sell anything. He just takes people at their word, checks what can be checked, and leaves the rest in a folder. For a subject that usually attracts hype and noise, that quietness feels useful. It might even be what the data needs most right now.

• Ufos in Japan are reported most often in rural areas, not big cities
• Japanese witnesses wait on average 4.7 years before filing a report
• About 12 percent of cases in Yamamoto’s database involve multiple independent witnesses
• The Japanese word for UFO translates directly as “unidentified flying object” but carries less stigma than in American culture
• No Japanese university has ever funded a UFO study
• Yamamoto’s submission form includes a checkbox for “willing to be interviewed by researchers”
• Fewer than 10 percent of his cases come from military or aviation personnel