Hara-Yadori, near Tokyo, Japan — 22 February 1803
Female visitor
A saucer-shaped “ship” of iron and glass floated ashore. It was 6 meters wide and carried a young woman with very white skin. The episode began when a group of fishermen and villagers saw a ‘boat’ just off the shore of Hara-yadori in the territory of Ogasawara etchuu-no-kami. (1) People approached the object in their own small boats and managed to tow it to the beach. The object was round. The upper half was composed of glass-fitted windows with lattice, shielded by a kind of putty, and the lower hemisphere consisted of metal plates. Through the glass dome the witnesses could see letters written in an unknown language and a bottle containing a liquid, perhaps water. Fig. 58: Japanese object and occupant The villagers arrested the girl and tried to decide what to do with her. One of the villagers, who had heard of a similar case that had happened at another beach not far from there, suggested that the woman was possibly a foreign princess, exiled by her father because of an extramarital love affair. The box, he said, may even contain her lover’s head. If this was so, it would be a political problem, and that would imply some sort of cost: “We may be ordered to spend a lot of money to investigate this woman and boat. Since there is a precedent for casting this kind of boat back out to sea, we had better put her inside the boat and send it away. From a humanitarian viewpoint, this treatment is cruel for her. However, this treatment would be her destiny.” Backing their decision with such straightforward logic, they forced the visitor back into the domed object, pushed it out, and it drifted out of sight. This is not the only version of the story but it is probably the earliest. It comes from the Japanese Toen-Shosetsu, a compilation of stories written in 1825 by various authors, including Bakin Takizawa, a Japanese novelist. There was even a reproduction of a sketch of the object, showing something like a typical round, domed flying saucer. A second version of the story was published in 1844 in a book called Ume no Chiri, written by Nagahashi Matajirou. This version said the incident took place on 24 March 1803. The beach was now named Haratono-hama. The girl was 1.5 meters tall and her dress was strange, made of an unknown material. Her skin was white as snow. She spoke to the astonished crowd in a language they were at a loss to interpret. She also had a strange cup of a design unknown to the witnesses. Was there a precedent for a tale of this kind in Japan? Kazuo Tanaka explains that the report seems to be based on a variety of Japanese folklore known as Utsuro-fune or Utsubo-fune, a series of stories handed down over generations that preserved “the ancient national memory of Japanese immigration.” In these tales, a founding member of a family, usually a noblewoman, would be said to have come across the sea by boat. If the tale was believable it could raise one’s family to a higher social status. In the lyrics of one folkloric song from Kyushu Island we find references to “a daughter of a nobleman” who was sent to sea in a boat with glass windows. It even mentions that “the food in the boat was delicious cake.” (2) Could the whole report, then, have been a fiction based on much older hearsay? Tanaka draws this conclusion: no official document of the period mentions the incident of the woman in the round boat, and there are no references to beaches called Haratono-hama or Hara-yadori, which would be suspicious omissions if the story were true. On the other hand, the erudite ufologist Junji Numakawa has pointed out that the name of the beach could easily have changed over time. If the beach was originally named Kyochi-gama, as he postulates, this could be meaningful, as ‘gama’ or ‘kama’ means pot or cauldron, and the pot-like recipients used at the time were not unlike the craft in which the mysterious woman arrived. (3) Sources: (1) Kazuo Tanaka Did a Close Encounter of the Third Kind Occur on a Japanese Beach in 1803? Skeptical Inquirer Volume 24, Number 4 July/August 2000. Masaru Mori, The Female Alien in a Hollow Vessel, Fortean Times No. 48, Spring 1987, 48-50 and The UFO Criticism by J. N. from Japan, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2001. The latter is the English version of a privately published newsletter (UFO Hihyo) written and distributed by Tokyo-based researcher Junji Numakawa. (2) This song was collected by the great Japanese folklorist Yanagida Kunio (1875-1962) and reproduced in a paper of his titled The Story of Utsubo-fune in 1925. (3) The UFO Criticism by J. N. from Japan, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2001.
Source: Case: W521