The Kera Incident (介良事件)

Summer, 1972. The Kera district, on the eastern edge of Kōchi City, Kōchi Prefecture. It is said that something small and luminous drifted low through the air, cleaving the night mist that hung over the paddies. Those who saw it were a handful of local middle-school boys — and they did not merely look up at it. In time, they would hold it in their hands.

That September, the boys discovered the object resting on the ground, captured it, and brought it home. Silver in color. Roughly 1.3 to 1.5 kilograms. About seven centimeters tall and eighteen centimeters across. Its shape resembled a bowler hat. The underside was engraved with a wave pattern and a bird motif, and through a small aperture at its center one could glimpse an interior structure that looked something like radio components. Nine middle-school students and several of their parents reportedly examined the object with their own eyes.

What followed was stranger still. While in storage, the object vanished without a sound — only to be captured again nearby a short while later. This cycle of disappearance and reappearance repeated itself, and after the final vanishing it was never seen again. Every attempt to photograph it in detail ended in failure; only a single distant shot is said to have survived.

Eventually, one of the boys telephoned the radio program of amateur astronomer Tsutomu Seki, and the story slipped into the wider world. Astronomy magazines picked it up, and then Nippon Television's late-night program *11PM*. The case drew considerable public attention, yet no formal investigation or official verification was ever conducted.

In later years, skeptical voices began to surface. Only four witnesses claimed to have seen the object in flight; the rest had observed it solely at rest. One of the boys who captured it was said to be skilled at sleight of hand, and the possibility that an elaborate prank had simply been believed has long been raised. In a 2016 NHK Radio broadcast, Seki himself recounted that the central figure among the boys had eventually told him it had all been fabricated — and Seki stated that, for him, the matter was "settled." One of the adults who had seen the object in person recalled that it looked like "a tobacco tray — an ashtray — painted silver," and a cast-metal ashtray closely matching the descriptions is said to have been identified.

And yet — the question hangs in the air, unresolved. That first sighting, the one in which a luminous object flew above the paddies of Kera, has never been clearly explained. Was what the boys held truly an ashtray? Or had something else altogether slipped into that night in Kera — something that has never been accounted for?