Japan’s Defense Minister: “We Can’t Rule Out ALIENS!”

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. In today's episode of American Alchemy, we make history yet again by interviewing our second defense minister to take UFOs seriously on record, Yasukazu Hamada, one of the most important defense ministers in Japanese history. He admits that aliens visiting Earth is a viable hypothesis to explain consistent UFO activity around the world. We should also consider it a strong hypothesis that we should consider it a strong hypothesis and take it seriously, I believe. We also speak to former congressman Yoshiharu Asakawa, who helped form Japan's UAP caucus, has had multiple UFO experiences himself that he goes into detail here. The light, rather than shining, it was more like a bright, like a really bright cloud. And he's become a lighthouse for witnesses and experts and experiencers across Japan. One of those witnesses says that they can regularly call in UFOs like you would call an Uber. They possess their own personal UFO, which they can board whenever they desire. And then we speak to Teruo Minobi, a sitting congressman and the current secretary general of the UAP caucus. Over at the Genkai nuclear plant in Kyushu, an unidentified flying object showed up and really getting to the bottom of it all actually ties in with the UAP caucus. It ties directly into Japan's national security. We also hear from Takashi Endo, a direct advisor to Japan's prime minister. We still don't know whether this was deliberately covered up. And finally, there's Atsushi Hayasaka, another former congressman who believes that he may have been left with an implant behind his ear after an encounter with unknown beings. She pointed out that I had a mark right behind my ear and I went to have an x-ray taken. They told me that there was a dark shadow visible in that area. It was somewhat square in its shape. Square? You heard me right. This episode starts with an unprecedented testimony around UFOs from the most important defense minister in living history. And it ends with a Japanese politician who thinks that he may be carrying a physical artifact from a possible alien abduction. Along the way, we cover shape-shifting black cube UFOs. I saw four distinct cube shapes. I saw four distinct masses fused together. Nuclear accidents, and an alleged CIA plot to bring down a Japanese prime minister. It almost feels like you're being guided by non-human intelligence yourself. So come learn about Japan's long relationship with UFOs and the brave politicians chasing them with this week's Distinguished Japanese Alchemists. Ignition sequence start. How is this possible? Nothing too emotional about that. Their existence cannot longer be denied. It's an honor to be with the former defense minister, Hamada-san, who is the first defense minister to publicly discuss UAPs. In front of parliament, but also in front of the nation. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm really happy to have this opportunity. Please take care of me. You have really helped spearhead the Japanese UAP caucus. What are the primary intentions and goals of the organization? As a congressman, I haven't decided on the UAP as an alien. For Hamada, Japanese preparedness and security is paramount. Hamada broke with a posture Japan had held since the end of World War II. You see, after the war, America essentially wrote Japan's constitution. One that renounced all conflict and stationed American troops on its soil that are still there today. For decades, defense spending was capped at 1% of GDP. No offensive weapons were allowed. No ability to strike an enemy's territory, ever. Hamada and his friends were not allowed to use UAPs. Hamada ended that. He oversaw the biggest transformation of Japanese defense policy since 1945. A new national security strategy naming China as an unprecedented strategic challenge. A commitment to double defense spending. And for the first time in the post-war era, counter-strike capability. This is arguably the most consequential defense official in modern Japanese history. A man whose entire career has been about identifying, identifying real threats, and building institutions to meet them. And of everything he could be doing with his standing and his remaining political capital, he chose to chair the UAP caucus. People like Hamada don't do that for fun. They do it when they've concluded something is there. You mentioned that you personally have never seen a UAP. Do you know anybody who's seen UAP? Did you catch the word he used when I asked if he'd ever seen a UAP? ever seen a UFO himself. He said that unfortunately, he never has. Unfortunately, which I thought was an interesting way to put it, as if his aspiration was to see one. He did tell me that many people have brought him their accounts over the years. And there's one recent case that kept coming up in my conversations in Japan. In 2025, something very strange and interesting happened at the Genkai nuclear power plant. And it was basically the first documented and recorded UAP occurrence in Japan. What happened there? Here's exactly what happened. It's just past 9 o'clock in the evening on July 26th, 2025. On the southernmost island of Japan, Kyushu, the Genkai nuclear power station sits along a stretch of coastline in the Saga Prefecture. Four reactors standing against the black water of the Genkai Sea. The guards stationed at the main gate are minding their own business. It's not exactly a busy time of day. This is also one of the most protected places in the entire country, where even the airspace above is closed off by law. Nothing is supposed to be up there. But then, suddenly, three lights appear in the sky. They don't slowly pass overhead, the way an aircraft would. They hold their position. And then they begin to move. Tracing a long loop over the grounds of the power station. An ellipse almost a half a mile wide. They keep circling, drifting closer. Almost as if they're monitoring. Until they're right over the facility itself. They are now no more than 150 feet from two of the reactors. For two whole hours, the guards and a stationed police officer watch these three lights turn slow circles over the reactors. They're stunned. They're just hovering with no visible propulsion or exhaust. Sometime after midnight, they simply disappear. No security camera ever caught a clear image of them. Or at least, that's what we're being told. And there were reports that a minor earthquake had rolled through the region only a half hour before they appeared. "This is the most advanced drone in other countries. Or maybe it's the most advanced drone in other countries. Or maybe it's the most advanced drone What happened next probably won't surprise you. The story almost immediately began to fall apart. The nuclear authority put out an emergency notice calling them three drones, then walked it back. Not drones, it said, just lights. Weeks passed. The police arrived at the most reassuring explanation available to them, that the guards at one of the nation's most secure installations, trained to watch the sky, had most likely mistaken a passing aircraft circling in the dark. An aircraft in restricted airspace. Case closed, despite the cover story changing three times. You see, Kyushi Electric's own records from that night don't square with the simple explanation of a plane at all. The questions started to pour in from sitting members of the Japanese parliament, eventually reaching the highest levels of government: the cabinet. You're ready to level up your business. But the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com/podcast. Hiring now? And this isn't the first time UFOs have shown up over a Japanese nuclear bomb. In 2011, as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor melted down, people nearby filmed unknown lights moving above the reactors. A local Buddhist monk said that he believed these UFOs had come to hold the radiation back. They were a cosmic cleanup crew. Steven Spielberg's production company even made a whole Netflix documentary about the saga. Now, if you know anything at all about this subject, you shouldn't be surprised. Because UFOs around nuclear sites might be the single most repeated pattern in the entire history of this phenomenon. From Malmstrom, to F.E. Warren, to Savannah Riverside, to Minot, to Vandenberg, essentially every major nuclear base in the United States, not to mention bases in the United Kingdom and former Soviet Union, have all seen frequent UFOs. And these nuclear-based UFO sightings go all the way back to 1945. In some cases, they've even been found. Even tampered with the nuclear weapons themselves. Members of Japan's parliamentary UAP caucus weren't satisfied with the official explanation given to the lights at Genkai. So they went there themselves, inspected the site, and came away saying that an aircraft made no sense at all. The man who spearheaded that investigation was Yoshiharu Asakawa. To some, he is known simply as the UFO politician. He stood up in parliament and started asking the questions nobody else would touch. His own party told him to stop. His colleagues froze him out. He kept going anyway. He has faced ridicule but has stayed the course, and has amassed a league of allies, experiencers, and witnesses who have become personal friends. They desperately want to see Japanese UFO disclosure. Asakawa has questioned defense ministers directly on the floor of the parliament and flown to Mexico City to testify under oath before their congress. He is the reason the UAP parliamentary league exists at all. He also is a witness to multiple UFOs, taking us to the very first spots he saw these unknown flying objects as a child. There were three lights in the middle, the top and the bottom, on the same height, and one on the left. These three lights were slowly passing through the area that was a little above the mountains, on both sides of the mountain. Each one of them was not lit up and shining brightly, but it was just about a minute bright white and the outline was blurry. It wasn't round, it was a little oval. Of course, I couldn't hear the sound. I thought it would come out in about 1 minute and 30 seconds or 2 minutes until I hid in the shadows, but it didn't come out. But to understand why a man like this ended up pouring his whole career into UFOs, you have to go back almost 40 years to the case he says changed everything. And here's the thing. It wasn't what he saw in the sky that got him. It was what happened afterward. November 17th, 1986. Japan Airlines Flight 1628. a Boeing 747 hauling cargo over Alaska. And the captain, Kenju Tarachi, was not some hobbyist squinting at the stars. This was a former fighter pilot with almost 30 years in the air. Partway through the flight, he reports these brilliantly lit objects moving around his aircraft. and then something much bigger shows up alongside them. He later said it was so enormous that it was the size of two aircraft carriers shaped like a walnut hanging there in the night sky next to his plane for 50 whole minutes. His crew saw the lights too. Air traffic control was on the line the whole time. And this is the part that lifts it above your average sighting. The encounter generated radar returns picked up both by civilian and military systems on the ground. This wasn't one guy describing a line in the distance. It became one of the most thoroughly documented aviation UFO cases in modern history. So the FAA, or the Federal Aviation Administration, opens an investigation. And years later, the man who was running the FAA's Accidents and Investigations Division at the time, a guy named John Callahan, comes forward and says the case was walked into a classified briefing with the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies in the room. And according to Callahan, when it was over, they took the data, and they told everyone present that the meeting never happened. Callahan says he quietly kept his own copies. He thought that truths involving the nature of reality shouldn't be confined to the government. And after he retired, he published them. And I've had a former NASA physicist on my show analyze them and tell me directly that they indicate an anomalous object flying around this Japan Airlines plane. From that radar data, it's accelerating at 10,000 Gs, 250,000 miles an hour. And you can actually see the position of the plane on the radar. That is remarkable. And at the one point where the plane actually does a 360 to try to shake this thing, you can actually see that on the radar. So the radar is working. And Captain Teraci, the decorated veteran who reported exactly what he and his crew saw, as was his duty, he got pulled off international routes and parked behind a desk. A humiliating demotion. Now in the UFO world, JAL 1628 sits in the same tier as Rendlesham, as the Nimitz Tic Tac, as Tehran. The cases with trained witnesses, real investigations, and evidence that goes beyond one person's word. But here's why it matters for our story. Asakawa was a teenager when this happened, and he watched one of the most extraordinary aviation encounters in history quietly get turned into a lesson about power. a Japanese crew, a Japanese aircraft, and an investigation that ran through Washington so that by the time the Japanese public got their answer, a lot of people felt the conclusion had been written somewhere else long before. Do you think that the United States has a right to dictate whether the Japanese government can share data with their own population about the nature of reality? Which seems like a fundamental truth. If you had to guess, what do you think is known at the highest levels of Japanese government when it comes to UAP? UAP? 発言してこの間の4回目の総会の時に いくつか質問が出た中で 実は文章の官僚がですね こういうことを言ったんですね アメリカのカウンターパートとして 公開範囲について協議しながら情報交換を行っている つまり公開範囲について協議をしているということをまず言ったんですね それからアメリカ政府全体のポリシーが変更されれば それに従ってカウンターパートとしての協議を 改めて行う必要があるということを言ったんです 2023年 アメリカのカウンターパートとして アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス アナモリーズ・レソリューションオフィス 世界各地のホットスポットを検索し、この物質がどんどん上昇することが発表されました。 北日本から中国に向かって走る道路は、1996年までまでにデータを掲載されていました。 ペンタゴンのアナリシスによって、日本の空気は、この現象に最も活躍するものです。 地球のどこでも。 UAPカーカスの起源の話をしたいと思います。 国際安全委員会と一緒に参加しています 太郎文部は大阪の日本の代表の一員である大阪の大阪の大統領の一員です 他にもUAPカーキスの現在の国務大臣です いわゆる上に対して言えない状況があって これからはやっぱりそれがどの物体かは別として そういうのをしっかりやっぱり報告していただいて 日本のUFOの発表について 人の心の中にある理由があるとは思います トランプ大統領の発言を一方をメールをして、すぐに電話がかかってきて、浅川君、アメリカ、トランプがこういうふうに言って動き始めたから、すぐに議連総会をやろうという連絡が2月の19日、20日にあったんですね。 つまり浜田会長は元防衛大臣として、何らか色々本当は知ってるんじゃないかと私は思ってます。でもなかなか立場上言えないので、アメリカが動き出したからいよいよ日本の情報も出てくるっていうのを多分浜田先生は分かってらっしゃると思うんですね。 次回予告 大阪の大統領の一員である大和の大統領の一員です 大阪の大統領の一員です 大阪の大統領の一員である大和の大統領の一員です 見たら四角い立方体の塊が多分4つぐらいですね くっついてたんです いろんな色がちっちゃくついてました すごく小さく赤とか黄色とか緑とかが 離れていってちょうど家の陰に隠れて見えなくなったんですけど およそ15分から20分ぐらい見ていました 私の母親と近所の人と 少なくとも3人で歩いて これはUFOにとっては不思議な描写です しかし、これは不思議な描写ではありません 私が思った最初の人は 前海軍のパイロット、ライアン・グレイヴズです グレイヴズは、自分のスクワドリンのパイロットについて ダークキューブをトランスペアーの中で描いたものを見つけた このオブジェクトはダークグレーやブラックキューブの中に クリアースフィアーが入っているのです このオブジェクトはリードエアクラフトの50フィートの中に 5フィートから15フィートのデイアメーターと言われています このオブジェクトはリードエアクラフトの15フィートのデイアメーターと言われています このオブジェクトはリードエアクラフトの15フィートのデイアメーターと言われています 障害者がいないと言われていると言われています 検査室で誰かを見つけたのかを 聞くことができました 半分の室に手を挟むことができたのです スウェーディッシュUFO研究者の クロス・スヴァンは ボックスのような物が飛んでいることを 説明しています ボックスのような物が飛んでいると 検査室で誰かを見つけたのです ボックスのような物が飛んでいると 検査室のような物が飛んでいるのです シャープなエッジと大きな窓が見えます そしてブリム おかげさまで わあ たぶんこの全てが このシリーズの中で 探索されているものである 4次元のハイパーキューブ テッサラクト テッサラクトを見せることはできない 私とあなたは3次元に囚われています でも見せることは 3次元の影です テッサラクトを見せることはできない テッサラクトを見せることはできない テッサラクトを見せることはできない 3Dオブジェクトを追跡させたら 何かよりも複雑なパーシャルクロスセクションができるのだと思っています 2Dユニバースと3Dオブジェクトがあると 追跡させると一つのパーシャルクロスセクションができるのです You were reading a little document before we started rolling Do you want to read it to the audience? Before we dive into this wild episode I want to give a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, Dose Dose for your liver is a high quality liquid supplement designed to support healthy liver function お腹の中に入れるのがとても簡単です 1日に2オンスのシャツです オレンジジュースのような味です 皆さんも知っていますが 私はネーティングアウトを愛しています 新しい健康や健康製品を見つけることが大好きです そして、体の中で一番大きな内臓を見つけることがとても簡単です お腹の中に入れるのがとても簡単です お腹の中で一日に500つの作用を行うことができます お腹の中で一日に500つの作用を行うことができます お腹の中で一日に500つの作用を行うことができます 脂肪の摂取、エネルギー、メタボリズムを支援するための大切な役割です。 私が一番大切なことは、実際に研究が行われていることです。 2つのダブル・ブラインド、プラセイボー・コントロール・スタディーズ。 脂肪エンザイムのレベルによるポジティブな影響を示しています。 私はこのような研究を行うことは、サプリメントスペースでとても楽しみです。 そして、飲み物を飲む必要はありません。 次の動画でお会いしましょう ご視聴ありがとうございました お待ちしております フォードラプターを変更した or a custom Bronco, or $100,000 cash. I'm not going to lie, I'd be pretty fired up about any of those things. What would you guys pick? New car or a stack of cash? Well, enter the competition for free at Ridge.com, and if you grab any gear during the sweepstakes, you can get extra entries into the draw. You should totally do that because their wallets are awesome. Ready to upgrade your wallet and maybe your ride? For a limited time, head to Ridge.com and use code COSMIC at checkout for 10% off your order and a chance to win Ridge's biggest sweepstakes ever, a Lamborghini Huracan Storado, a Hennessey Velociraptor, a Ford Bronco, or $100,000 in cash. No purchase necessary to enter, but every dollar you spend gets you more entries. And when they ask you where you heard about them, tell them we sent you. It genuinely supports the show. You were reading a little document before we started rolling. Do you want to read it to the audience? I asked the defense ministry and the Self-Defense Forces if they were aware of this and asked if they were aware of the fact that the airspace of the Self-Defense Forces base and the airspace of the Self-Defense Forces base and the airspace of the Self-Defense Forces base, including the airspace of the Self-Defense Forces base and the airspace of the Self-Defense Forces base, and if they were aware of this. The air-raid prevention measures are just saying that those who flew from Japan's airspace have not arrived at the Self-Defense Forces base or base camp. It's not about air-raid prevention, but it's about whether or not those who came from somewhere have appeared at the Self-Defense Forces base or base camp. So it sounds like this document is using very deliberate wording in order to be kind of intentionally vague and allow for actually foreign unknown objects. But I would take it a step further as far as kind of the questions that this begets, which is the Pentagon has officially said that Japan is a hotspot when it comes to UAP activity. And so if you have a document essentially saying, you know, we haven't had any officially documented cases of UAP, you know, even if it's sort of being cheeky and allowing for some possible cases, isn't there some basic inconsistency there between the take on, you know, the U.S. and then this document? I mean, even Hamada-san admitted that the Pentagon believes that Japan is a hotspot. As you said, in the 2023 R announcement, I also wrote this in my own newsletter, but this is it. And after I announced this, in October of 2023, I asked a question in the committee, and the minister, the minister at the time, Kihara Kampo, said that he heard this information this morning from the secretary-general in charge. He said that Japan has been working in an influence-rich state since the war we just had, and it's impossible for us to get out of it. In other words, without the U.S., Japan would be in a situation where there's no foreign exchange or security insurance in the world, and it would be impossible for us to get out of it. I think that's what he's thinking. And to go a little further, Tanaka Kakuya's Rokkido incident was also the beginning of the U.S. Tanaka Kakuya tried to show his anti-American stance against the U.S., trying to be effective with China, and he was crushed by the U.S. I think that's what he's trying to say. Take a little journey with me here, because what Asakawa just said, mentioned is a pretty deep cut. And after this interview, I dug even deeper and uncovered some pretty crazy connections. Washington, 1975. While Senator Frank Church was running a committee that was dragging the CIA's secrets into the daylight, he was also quietly running a second investigation. This one was into American corporations bribing their way through the governments of allied nations, and sitting right at the center of it, was Lockheed. Yes, that Lockheed. Skunk Works, the U2, the SR-71 Blackbird. The contractors that UFO whistleblowers David Grush and Jay Stratton say have been holding on to recovered non-human technology. Harry Reid said this, you know, we knew that Lockheed Martin had this material for decades. I tried to get access and I was denied. And specifically with the Lockheed Martin stuff, he was talking about during the OSAP program. Jay Stratton said that Lockheed Martin had this material for decades. Jay Stratton even names one of the Lockheed Martin vice presidents who apparently was responsible for UFO reverse engineering, a man named Jim Ryder. If you're in this world and you hear Lockheed, you think UFOs Incorporated. In February of 1976, the church subcommittee revealed that this same company had spent the better part of two decades funneling millions of dollars in secret payments to the most powerful men in Japan. Which brings us to the following. To Kikui Tanaka, the most formidable Japanese politician of his generation. And once he became prime minister, he did something Washington really did not like. He started acting independently, opening relations with China ahead of the United States, on Japan's own terms. Then the Lockheed money surfaced. Prosecutors said that Tanaka had taken 500 million yen, and on the morning of July 27th, 1976, he became the first former prime minister ever arrested in Japan. The most independent leader post-war Japan had produced was finished. And when Japan's own government formally asked Washington for the full list of officials who'd taken Lockheed money, one man stepped in to try to stop it. This man was American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And Henry Kissinger was definitely, you know, doing a lot of atomic stuff. In fact, he was also doing Nazi tech retrieval stuff. He was at Oberammergau in Germany before going to Harvard, actually, and had intelligence ties, you know, basically since his early 20s. Kissinger warned that releasing the names could do grave damage to America's foreign relations, and the full list was never made public as a result. Where things get wild is that long-time viewers know that we did a whole episode on Kissinger and his potential involvement in the legacy UFO program, perhaps even overseeing it. the widow of the former head of special projects at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dr. Eric Henry Wang, said that Kissinger was overseeing his work. And who was assigned, likely by the CIA, to hold back Kissinger? None other than past American alchemist Harold Malmgren. The same Harold Malmgren who claimed to hold UFO pieces in his hands. And the same Harold Malmgren whose closest mentor, Richard Bissell, founded Area 51 and briefed him on other world technologies. Besides being a direct aid to presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, Malmgren collaborated with the highest levels of the Japanese government. In fact, he was usually a direct advisor to the prime minister himself. And the first prime minister he advised, you might ask? Hiring now? None other than Kukui Tanaka. In fact, Malmgren was a personal friend of the head of Japan's own National Security Council. The National Security Chief, so the Japanese prime minister was my buddy for years. Lyndon Johnson had even sent Malmgren on a secret mission to Tokyo. No State Department, no embassy, nobody read in. Just a sealed envelope, hand-delivered straight to the prime minister's secretary, so that whatever was inside would never exist on paper. His name was personal secretary. She will expect it. She will tell them to give her the envelope. If it comes, you deliver it yourself. They'll let you in the door, you hand over the envelope, that's it. When he finally walked out of the U.S. government in 1975, the same year the Lockheed dominoes started to fall, he didn't leave Japan behind. He became one of the highest paid American operators working inside Japanese institutions, a private line or back channel running between Tokyo and Washington that stayed open for years. For the same person who had been let in on these otherworldly secrets, who I think was probably CIA, was incredibly influential in Japan. And Japan is one of the greatest UFO hotspots on the entire planet. And both he and Kissinger had access to the UFO file. And both seemed to be at odds with each other. So was Malmgren fighting against Kissinger's methods of gaining leverage over foreign countries? Was his placement at the highest levels of Japanese politics and at the highest levels of UFOs just a coincidence? Or could he have been back channeling on that topic too? Remember, the UFO pieces that Malmgren held in his hands was from the Bluegill Triple Prime test. There's actually footage of that test that seems to show a UFO coming out of the plume of the nuclear blast. And the Navy deck logs associated with this Bluegill Triple Prime test seem to indicate something anomalous being retrieved. Don't listen to me. Listen to the Navy's former chief oceanographer, Tim Galladet. Did you think that something anomalous was recovered? It's on the deck, right? I do. Wow. So if David Grush is right that the United States has run a multi-decade program recovering craft that aren't ours, then some of those recoveries probably happened outside American territory, on the soil of allies and partners. And if something comes down in Japan and Washington wants it, how does that actually work? You would need people already inside that country's political structure. You'd need relationships that predate that emergency situation. You'd need somebody that the prime minister's office trusts enough to take a call at 3:00 in the morning and not ask what the cargo is. So between Malmgren, Kissinger, and Lockheed all being involved with UFOs and Japan being a UFO hotspot, these are all loose threads. But they're definitely ones worth pursuing. You are probably as much of a lighthouse as anyone else when it comes to the UAP topic because you are the UFO representative. So I'm sure you hear all sorts of stories from random Japanese civilians and citizens who want to let you know about what happened to them. What's the wildest story that you've heard? There are UFOs that are exclusively for themselves, and there are people who say that they can always ride a UFO with their own consciousness. One example is that someone has told me that the person has some personal UFO and that he's always waiting for him and that he can ride it whenever he wants. Also, my respected artist, Kazuma Oda's family is from my hometown. The karaoke snack master in the neighborhood of Odaya-kyoku was put on a UFO a few years ago when he became missing. He was able to ride the UFO and there were aliens in it. There are more people like that, but Hayasaka, who was also a member of the committee with me. What type of music do you play? Punk, hard rock, Snippet Rotter. Who hit the bungee? I didn't, really. I wasn't expecting you to say that. Hayasaka started out on the city council of Sendai. Up in Japan's northeast. And in 2021, he won a seat in the House of Representatives. His wife, Chiaki, has made a career in politics, too. I was very dissatisfied with politics. That's why I wanted to be on the side of women. And as you'll see, they're basically a power couple and have both experienced the paranormal. 30 years ago, on a routine drive home, Hayasaka witnessed something incredible. Actually, it was 20, no, 32 years ago. I'm 55 this year. I went to my wife's house when I was 22. I went there to say hello. We went to Kitakami City on our way home. We were able to see UFOs from inside the car. There were so many of them moving in the mountains. I saw the light. I said, "This isn't a UFO." I said, "Wow, I've experienced something incredible." From Iwate to Sendai. What color and shape was the UFO that you saw? It was silver. It was like the momentary movement of light. It was like, "Huh?" Then I went back to my house in Sendai and sent her home. And I was tired and I was sleeping in the parking lot. And then there's a gap. Total blackout. But before the gap, he does remember being unable to move. It was just a little gap. But while I was sleeping, I heard footsteps. A lot of them. It was like a crowbar. I heard the sound of "zap, zap, zap, zap." I felt it coming closer. But it didn't move. And when it was over, there was a wound behind his right ear that he'd never had before. A wound that healed into a scar. And years later, an X-ray showed a small, squarish shadow underneath it. ♪ ♪ It wasn't that big of a cut. It just looked like a scab. And my wife said, "There's a scar here." And that's how I found out. But there's still a scar. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ♪ ♪ Do you know that that's a common spot for people who have alien encounters to get implants? Yeah, in fact, Whitley Strevers, who's the most famous person who's ever been, you know, encountered aliens, he wrote a best-selling book in the 1980s called "Communion," and it's kind of what, you know, popularized the image of the gray alien. He has an implant in his ear, and I felt it. Go ahead, touch it. Don't be scared of it. Here, here. It's right under my finger. Now. Oh, my God. So you have a scar, but there was no blood. And did you go test it? Did you get it X-rayed or imaged in any way? ♪ ♪ But it was-- how big of a spot was it? Was it-- was it perfectly circular? Or was it like a blob? That was hard to figure out the edges of? Or what did it look like exactly? Square. Like a small little square. Yes. How many, like a centimeter or a millimeter or. Have you ever tested it with a, you know, radio frequency detector or put a magnet on it or anything like that? ♪ ♪ It's interesting. Most of the people who I've spoken to who have implants are superstitious-- or not superstitious. They think that the implants serve a purpose, and they actually don't want to take them out because they feel like it's their connection, maybe, with the beings. And so it's very adaptive to keep the implants in. So it almost feels like you might feel the same way as you would if you were to get a surgery. I don't know. I don't really think about it. I don't really want to take them out or look inside or force myself to get a surgery. I don't think about anything. I just want to live my life as it is. If there's something, I just want to be useful. I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but I want to live a life that's very exciting. Chiaki-san also saw a UFO. Is that correct? Yeah. In my case, when I was in kindergarten, I saw a UFO in almost the same place as Hayasaka saw it. It's a bit of a time series, but I saw it when I was a little kid. Oh, you saw it. And then after that, Hayasaka was about to be kidnapped in the parking lot, and there was a big commotion. When I was in the apartment, I was about 15 or 20 minutes in a hurry, and I felt like I had to get out of the car. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. Wow. But the exact same place? Like the same parking lot? It's almost the same. It's a few hundred meters away. It's less than a kilometer away. Wow. Of the parking lot. And you remember, were you with your friends? In the evening, my grandfather came to pick me up on my way home. ojii-chan to te wo tsunai de imouto to 手をつないで、U字型の校舎だったんですけど、そこを歩いて、上を見上げたときに、大きな光る物体が飛んできました。 Wow. Did the UFOs that you both saw look the same, and did those UFOs look the same as your father-in-law, your father? 違いますね。漢字的には違う。僕らはもうちょっと遠目の方で見てたんで、ただ異常に動きがすごくて、すごい動きをしてたので、こんな普通の飛行機の動きじゃないし、その当時泥もなければ、その飛行機がこんな低空で飛ばすないっていうんで、これはもうUFOかなと思いでした。 Have you guys seen any UFOs outside of your preschool experience, the experience in the car? Together? Anything else? Or seen any beings? そうですね。早坂の話はすっかり忘れてたんですけど、やっぱり今回ムーっていうことで思い出して、その当時を振り返ると、駐車場イコールお寺だったんですね。 お化けが出るお墓もありましたし。 そういうところの駐車場イコールお寺だったんですね。 駐車場だったんですね。なので、やっぱりその当時はUFOなのか、お化けなのか、なんかほら、もう大騒ぎで、もう車で発信してからすぐ公衆電話で電話いただきまして、もう何言ってるか一瞬わかんないぐらいにすごく興奮してました。 とにかく逃げてきたと。 According to Chiaki, The parking lot where all of this happened, where her husband lost those hours of his life, was once the grounds of a temple. In Japan, that detail carries a different weight than it might elsewhere. These encounters have a long habit of happening on ground that people at some point set aside as holy. Strange occurrences on sacred sites. Japanese tradition has never drawn a hard line between the sacred and the strange. The same peaks people have been able to see since the beginning of time. The same peaks people have prayed at for a thousand years have seamlessly also become the places people now go to watch the sky. From Shinto and Buddhist traditions to modern UFOs. Take Mount Kurama in the hills of North Kyoto. It's the birthplace of Reiki, the practice of energy healing. And for centuries, it's been wrapped in legends of the Tengu, the long-nosed goblins of Japanese folklore said to live in its forests. Today, those same forested ridges, are one of the best-known UFO watching spots in the whole Kyoto region. Or go far to the north, to Mount Osori in Aomori. A name that translates roughly to Mount Fear. It's a sulfur-stained volcanic caldera that folk belief has held for over a thousand years to be an entrance to the land of the dead. Every summer, blind mediums called Itako gather there to channel the voices of the dead for the pilgrims who make the climb. And UFO watchers who go to the Osori festival consistently see lights in the sky. They'll often tell you that with all that spiritual energy concentrated in one place across history, it would be stranger if the lights didn't come. And then there's a local legend that goes beyond just a UFO hotspot, Mount Kuramanta in Akita. It's a near-perfect conical peak, and a research team that surveyed it back in the early '90s with ground-breaking data has found that it's not only a natural phenomenon, but also a natural phenomenon. And so the ground-penetrating radar came away arguing it might be an artificial structure, possibly one of the oldest pyramids on Earth. There's a 4,000-year-old stone circle a short walk away, aligned to the solstice sun. Which brings me back to what Asakawa said about his sighting when he was a boy, about the shapes he saw hanging low in the sky. If you stand where he stood and look to the west, you're looking toward Mount Fuji, the most sacred mountain in the country. A peak with shrines built into its slopes, pilgrims on its trails, and with its own long traditions of stories about beings, gods, non-human intelligences all in the sky above the summit. If you had to guess, why do you think these beings are here? Well, I think it's because they're here to observe the movement of the earth, to predict what's going to happen and what's going to happen. If there's one message you can relate to people who are thinking about this topic, what would that be? Maybe they don't know what to think about it and. Well, I really can't predict what's going to happen next, but there might be something else. At that time, I'd like to report it to you all, and without hiding it, I'd like to discuss it with you. I really don't know what's going to happen yet, and I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but I think there will be a sixth episode, in my opinion. I'd like to work hard on that. Can you tell me a little bit more about the guy who claims he has a personal UFO that acts like a car that he can just get on and drive at any moment? And fly? Well, it's a woman. Do you know what it's like to have a supernatural phenomenon suddenly appear? I saw it for the first time, and I thought, "What?" I was taken aback. Even now, I don't know if I believe it or not. It's a meeting. But why is that person investigating me in advance? It's not that famous of a meeting. I don't know, but I don't know if it's that famous of a meeting. But I don't know if it's that famous of a meeting. I don't know if it's that famous of a meeting. What happened when you were at Mt. Fuji? Did you get any sort of message? It hasn't really changed much, but in Japan, Mt. Fuji is originally known as a mountain for worship, do you know that? I didn't get any sort of message. Well, it's been around for a long time. In Japan, there's a Shinto tradition where the gods take over everything. But when it becomes such a huge mountain, of course there's the gods, so there's the Mt. Fuji. It's a belief in Mt. Fuji. And the other day, I was living in a place where three lights were moving like this. And the first place I saw those three lights was at the top of Mt. Fuji. If you go a little higher, you can see Mt. Fuji's head. We went to Takafune University, right? Takafune University. From that school, I could see Mt. Fuji. When I was in elementary school, I would look at Mt. Fuji's head every day at school. Interesting. That's fascinating. So maybe you were meant to go there or something. Maybe that moment then was somehow tied to what you ended up experiencing when you went to Mount Fuji. There was something about Mount Fuji you needed to go and see, and it's all sort of connected. Do you sometimes speculate that? I can't say it's scientific because it has nothing to do with it, but it was a coincidence that I became a member of the National Assembly, and I started from the point where I didn't think that most people would vote for me. When I set out for Japan, I thought I was just chasing a story about a government waking up to the UFO truth. Or the fact that this issue is real, that it matters, and that it's been sitting unattended for decades. But the personal experiences I heard made me think that was just the tip of the iceberg. How many more Hayasakas and Asakawas are out there with their own sightings and encounters? For them, this was never abstract. And then they went into politics. public service, and found themselves holding the government accountable to do something about it. There's an old saying in Japan, Todai Motokurashi. It's darkest directly beneath the lantern. The lamp lights up the whole room, except the spot right underneath it. For 70 years, the light of this subject has been held in exactly one place. American files, American hearings, American secrets. With the whole world reading its own skies by whatever glow reaches them. And directly beneath that lantern, in the shadow it casts, sits Japan. An ally with centuries of sightings. Lights over its mountains, its sea, and its nuclear sites. And a government that was kept in the dark the entire time. One that probably never knew what the Malmgrens and Kissingers of the world did. The people we interviewed today have stopped waiting for the lamp to be handed to them. They're lighting their own, trying to find out where they stand on UFOs, and what they're missing. Stay tuned, because I'll be releasing more episodes from my two-week trip in Japan in the coming weeks and months. We'll visit a pyramid-shaped mountain outside Fukushima, so magnetic and so busy with UFO sightings, that the town at its foot built its own UFO museum. We'll dive deep into the famous Kofu incident, where two schoolboys… Say that a being stepped out of a UFO in 1975 and tapped one of them on the shoulder. But for now, keep your mind and your eyes open. I'm Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy. I'm Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy.