Japan a hotspot for UFOs, says new Pentagon website

The Pentagon has identified western and southern Japan as a major hotspot for UFO sightings, using 27 years of data that has been made public for the first time.

The US Government has launched a new website it says will act as a “one-stop shop” for the reporting of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAP), the official term for UFOs and unidentified objects in the sea.

A map released on the website of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) shows where the most sightings have been recorded using data from between 1996 and 2023.

The image shows one of the world’s biggest hotspots around western and southern Japan, near the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States dropped atomic bombs in August 1945.

The area is one of the three most prominent locations for UFOs in the world, along with a patch of the Middle East that includes Iraq and Syria, and in the southeastern United States, over South Carolina.

UFO Town

Since 2020, the Japanese military has been instructed to record sightings of unidentified objects in the sky.

Although the Japanese government says its pilots have never encountered UFOs, the country’s Self Defence Force was concerned about three videos released by the US Department of Defense that showed unexplained objects moving across the sky.

Other, unconfirmed, UFO sightings have produced a tourist hotspot in Iinomachi, in Japan’s Fukushima province, which is known colloquially as “UFO town”.

The town’s authorities have installed UFO-themed bus shelters and street lights in a bid to attract visitors interested in extraterrestrial life.

It is home to the International UFO Lab, a research institute, which released six images of “likely UFOs” in June.

The group said it had received 494 reports of suspected UFOs in the past year, but that most appeared to be drones, birds, reflections of light, aeroplanes or insects.

Takeharu Mikami, the leader of the lab and editor of a cult magazine, said he believed the images could show alien spacecraft.

“It may be possible to create these images with computer graphics. But if they’re real UFOs, aliens may be onboard,” he said at a press conference in Fukushima.

UFOs are now a ‘significant political issue’ in the US

The US Government established an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that is working on recording and attempting to explain the appearance of unknown objects.

The new AARO website is accepting submissions of suspected UAP sightings from military and other government personnel, but not from the public.

Civilian pilots have been encouraged to report any suspected UFOs to air traffic controllers, who feed information back to the Government.

The US government says there have been more than 500 sightings of UAPs – including objects in the water – and the majority of reports have been made by air force pilots and navy personnel.

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, the AARO’s director, has said the organisation “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”

UAPs have become a significant political issue in the United States since David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, told Congress in July that the Government had withheld information about them from the public.

Mr Grusch told the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee that the Government had run “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” that had recovered “biologics” from crash sites.

He said he had interviewed officials who had recovered craft they believed had “nonhuman” origins.