by Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we took a look at a case from Kofu, Japan, that involved two seven-year-old boys, Masato Kono and Katushiro Yamahata, who reported seeing a saucer-shaped UFO and its occupants in a vineyard in 1975. The creatures were described as having brown heads with pinky-sized, horizontal wrinkles where a face would be; three silver, metallic, two-inch fang-like features where a mouth would be; and two rabbit-like ears with a hole in the middle of each one. One of the creatures confronted the boys and emitted a noise like a sped-up tape recorder in what seemed to be an attempt to communicate. They ran away to Kono’s home where their parents were having dinner and they excitedly told their story. Kono’s mother thought they had made it up as an excuse for being late, but the boys insisted it was true and pleaded with their mothers to go with them and see for themselves. The boys would soon be forgiven for being late and would become the center of attention for many interested parties.
Masako Kono and Hanae Yamahata followed their boys out to a road on the west side of the Hinode Complex where the Konos lived. With them were Hanae’s one-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. From there, they had a view of the vineyard where the boys said they’d seen the saucer and the creatures.
When they looked where their sons were pointing, Masako and Hanae were surprised to see a glowing, orange, basketball-sized object. She said “It looked more like it was floating in the air rather than it was on the ground.” Hanae said, “It was spinning and glowing!” Masako described it as pulsating with a five to ten second cycle with “a beautiful color like fireworks.” After about five minutes it became dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared in a flash.
Hanae wanted to get closer, but when she went to move, the boys held on to her saying, “Don’t go. They’ll take you! Don’t go!” She said their faces were so serious that they stopped her from going.
Hanae went back to the house and told the boys’ fathers, Minoru Yamahata and Toshiro Kono, what they had seen. A few minutes later, the men were at the vineyard with sticks in their hands, but the object was gone.
According to Masako, Masato cried that night. According to Hanae, Katsushiro would no longer go out alone after dark. This caused a problem, as he was enrolled in an abacus class that started at 5:00 p.m.
On Monday, February 24, the boys told their story to their classmates at Yamashiro Elementary School. They drew pictures of the saucer and the creature and caused quite a stir. According to the boys’ homeroom teacher, Miyoshi Ueda, her students were excited and she wanted to know why. She was told that the boys had seen some aliens and she told Kono and Yamahata that aliens didn’t exist.
The boys surprised Ueda by insisting their story was true. She was impressed by their earnestness and had them give a presentation describing their experience in front of the class. The boys did so and drew pictures on the blackboard to help illustrate what they’d seen. Ueda noted how quickly the boys drew the pictures and thought they might have been influenced by portrayals of UFOs in manga magazines or on television, as the subject was quite popular in Japan at that time. Even so, she felt that the boys were telling the truth as they knew it.
Ueda told her fellow teachers about the story and they thought there might be something to it. They arranged for the boys to tell their story in the staff room. Miyoshi was impressed by the fact that they told it just as they had in the classroom. Miyoshi, a teacher with 31 years of experience, had this to say:
After my own research, I can say with certainty that they are not lying. After many years of experience, I can tell if a child is lying or not by looking at their facial expressions.
The teachers were impressed and someone told the principal, Nabuyoshi Kaneko about the boys and their story.
Researcher Lon Strickler wrote a blog about this case and posted it on his site, Phantoms and Monsters. According to Strickler, one of the boys’ classmates, eight-year-old Ichiro Minegishi, reported that a half hour before Kono and Yamahata had their encounter he had seen a shining object flying around the area.
The principal and others from the school went to the vineyard and saw that two concrete posts had been knocked over near where the boys said the craft had landed and that there was a ring pattern in the soil. There was also a series of holes filled with powdery ash.
A high school teacher, Susumo Maedo, who had a national qualification for handling radiation, tested the soil and “found unnaturally high levels of radiation.”
The case was investigated initially by Masaro Mori, who interviewed the boys and the people at the school. Mori described their stories as being very consistent.
Japan Space Phenomena Society Senior Researcher T. Kira wrote an article titled, Scientific Evidence for the Existence of UFO! Re-Analysis of M-Report, and posted on the Space Phenomena Observatory blogspot site.
In the article, Maedo is identified as “Mr. M,” and it is pointed out that he had written a report in 1975 describing his radiation readings. Maedo collected 35 samples and found radiation levels 1.3 times above background in two of them. According to Kira, this is actually not unusual and is close to the difference between east and west Japan. What was unusual was the rate of decay.
Maedo made measurements over time and realized that there was a half-life of ten days. Kiro did his own analysis of the data and found that the actual average of the samples was closer to fifteen days. He then went about trying to determine what sort of radiation source had that sort of half-life. He found six: radium 225, europium 156, bismuth 205, osmium 191, vanadium 48, and phosphorous 32.
Because phosphorous 31 is used as fertilizer, Kira assumes it was present in the vineyard. According to Kira, one way to convert phosphorous 31 to phosphorous 32 is to put it into a nuclear reactor and “expose it to neutron rays.” Kira concludes that there must have been a nuclear reactor in the vineyard and that it “could strongly be estimated to be a Real UFO!” He combines this with Kono’s and Yamahata’s testimonies to conclude that “UFOs exist!”