The Kera UFO incident: the "tiny UFO" caught by Japanese schoolboys

What the story says happened

No physical object survives from the Kera UFO incident, and that absence is the central fact of the case. In August and September 1972, middle school boys in the Kera district (介良) of Kochi City, Kochi Prefecture, said they saw, chased and briefly held a small flying object that vanished and reappeared before disappearing for good. ASIOS, Japan's organization for the skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, ranks it alongside the 1975 Kofu incident as one of the country's two best-known close encounters.

A small object over a rice paddy

According to Kyodo News, the boys first saw a luminous object floating about one meter above a rice paddy on August 25, 1972. Descriptions of it vary: the Kochi Shimbun, the prefecture's main newspaper, calls it a small flying saucer about 20 centimeters across, while the occult magazine Mu describes a silver, hat-shaped object closer to 15 to 18 centimeters in diameter. Every account agrees on one point: it was small enough to fit in a boy's hands.

How the boys caught it, and how it got away

On September 6, Kyodo News reports, the boys struck the landed object with concrete blocks, sealed it in a vinyl bag and carried it home in a backpack. TOCANA, an occult-news site, describes a different capture, with paperweights and a screwdriver instead. Both agree on what happened next: attempts to photograph the object failed for no clear reason, and it disappeared from where the boys stored it, reappearing nearby several times before vanishing for good. No photograph, sample or the object itself has ever been produced.

Where the story first reached the public

The case reached a wider audience within a few years. Mu, the occult magazine that has covered the story for decades, writes that novelist Shusaku Endo discussed it in a 1976 essay collection and, despite his usual skepticism toward paranormal claims, found the boys' accounts hard to dismiss as invention. Mu also says the case featured in a 1978 special issue of Bungeishunju Deluxe on UFOs, presented by paranormal investigator Jun'ichi Yaoi.

What witnesses have said since

The people involved stayed out of public view for decades. ASIOS notes that participants in the incident first appeared on television only on April 8, 2020, on the Fuji Television program "Sekai no Nandakore!? Mystery," nearly 48 years after the event. TOCANA reported in October 2022, the case's 50th anniversary, that it had gathered new testimony from witnesses, though the outlet did not spell out that testimony in the material available to this record.

Mu interviewed one of the former boys, now a Shinto priest in the Kera district, for the 50th anniversary. He described antenna-like protrusions on the object's underside that he said do not match the ashtray researchers now point to, and said the real object felt lighter. Shown a comparison ashtray, he told Mu, "It looks exactly like what we saw," before adding that the weight and the antenna still do not match his memory.

The skeptical explanation: an ashtray

The leading skeptical account is what Japanese researchers call the ashtray theory. ASIOS member Hiroki Sakuragi found auction listings for cast-metal ashtrays with a wave pattern similar to marks the boys described on the object's underside, and Tatsuya Honjo, ASIOS's founder and representative, brought a matching ashtray to the original site in 2022 for comparison. ASIOS is careful not to overstate the case, stating that a definitive identification of the object as one of these ashtrays remains incomplete.

Where investigators stand today

ASIOS's own assessment is cautious rather than dismissive. It states that firsthand physical evidence is absent, and that witnesses repeating the same account after 50 years has limited investigative value on its own. Kyodo News reaches a similar middle ground, calling the story's credibility "somewhat low" given the chance the boys were playing a prank, while noting that nine middle school students and some of their parents said at the time that they saw the object, which the news agency says makes a simple hoax explanation less than fully convincing.

Verdict

Real or Legend stamps this disputed. Every source agrees on the central fact: no photograph, fragment or replica of the original object has ever been produced, only a similar-looking ashtray that researchers offered decades later, and even ASIOS calls that identification unconfirmed. Nine students and some of their parents said, at the time and again decades later, that they saw something unusual, and the boys say they held it. That is not proof an extraordinary object existed, but it is more than a simple prank claim usually leaves behind.