The Kōfu Incident (甲府事件)

At dusk on February 23, 1975, in the city of Kōfu, Yamanashi Prefecture, two second-grade boys hurrying home testified that they had been pursued by a flying object blazing orange against the fading sky. They attempted to take cover in a nearby cemetery, but the object soon descended into a vineyard.

The descriptions of the being that appeared there are unsettling in their consistency — chocolate-brown skin, deeply furrowed wrinkles, a face as blank and featureless as smoothed clay. Whatever it was, it gently tapped Boy A on the shoulder from behind. Unable to move from terror, A was left where he stood while Boy B ran to fetch their family. By the time the adults arrived, the occupant had vanished, and only a smoldering afterglow trembled over the vineyard. The mother's voice was recorded and later broadcast on television.

The investigation of the site yielded troubling evidence. Three concrete posts had been toppled, a wire fence was grotesquely deformed, and the ground bore a series of rut-like depressions. Some reports claimed that artificial radioactivity with a short half-life was detected at the estimated landing point. Yet the surrounding trees bore not a single mark, and observers noted that a craft of the reported size could not physically have passed between the posts — deepening the mystery rather than resolving it.

Seven years after the incident, in 1982, a woman driving near the site reported encountering a figure resembling the being from that night. These sightings, recurring across time, lend the case a strange and persistent continuity.

One of the boys involved endured years of interviews before eventually falling silent about what he had experienced. It is said he withdrew because, while some believed him, others dismissed the entire account as a fabrication concocted by his family. On February 23, 2025, the incident reached its fiftieth year.

What truly descended into that twilight vineyard remains unanswered. And whether the figure said to have reappeared seven years later was the same entity — that question, too, has never been resolved.