Japan is full of UFO ‘hot spots’ — and they all have this in common

Japan has become one of the world’s biggest “hot spots” to see a UFO, according to newly declassified Pentagon documents dating back to 1996.

This new government information and simplified map — part of the Defense Department’s freshly unveiled, online “unidentified anomalous phenomena” reporting system — highlights southern Japan as one of Earth’s most popular regions where UFOs have been sighted.

Since 2020, the Japanese military has also been instructed to take photos and record all that is inexplicable in the skies.

Japan’s most popular sighting areas throughout the island nation all have one distinct commonality: a major nuclear incident.

The map’s hot spot includes the greater regions around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities where American forces detonated the atom bombs that ended World War II in 1945.

Further north, another town in the Fukushima Prefecture — famously known for its nuclear power plant meltdown brought on by a 2011 tsunami — has billed itself as the Roswell of Japan and “the home of UFOs.”

The small and rural neighborhood of Iino has become a tourist destination as its nearby pyramid-shaped Mount Senganmori has been “known for many UFO sightings, unexplained lights, and mysterious events,” according to a government tourism guide.

Like the American Southwest — another hot spot on the map also famous for nuclear testing — Iino has leaned into the fame brought on by the phenomena. The town has operated a UFO museum since 1992 in addition to “a range of extraterrestrial sculptures and carvings.”

In 2021, a “UFO lab” was also opened in Fukushima City, and last year they released a half-dozen images believed to be authentic extraterrestrial vessels.

The most typically reported sightings are of a rounded object between 1 and 4 meters, according to the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the formal name of the Pentagon’s new tracking website.

Sighted UFOs are most commonly white, silver or “translucent” and spotted between 10,000 and 30,000 feet above ground. Thermal exhaust isn’t often seen on these objects that can be “stationary” or moving as fast as Mach 2, either.

Among the global hot spots was also the Arabian Peninsula of the Middle East. It’s a region that has also been subject to extraterrestrial notoriety over the years — the most notable being an incident with the Imperial Iranian Air Force over Tehran in 1976.

Two F-4 Phantom II jets reported that a “UFO” was playing “cat and mouse” games with them at the time, according to NSA documents. It had been “‘paralyzing’ their weapons and electronics systems when the jets attempted to open fire on it.”

Also on the list of popular sightings was the southern end of America’s Eastern Seaboard, an area where President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO while he was governor of Georgia.