What was the Nikoro incident?
The Nikoro incident is a UFO incident said to have occurred in April 1974 in Nikoro, Kitami, Hokkaido. A farmer, then 28, said he encountered an alien and a UFO and was taken inside the disc. It is known as a Japanese account of alien abduction, and in the 1970s it was sometimes presented with the Kofu incident and the Kera incident as one of Japan’s three great UFO incidents.
The experience as told
According to the story, before dawn in early April, the man was woken by his dog barking furiously and went outside. There stood a small figure about 1 meter tall, and over a nearby field hovered an orange glowing disc about 8 meters across, it is said. The man was drawn up into the disc, but when it landed he jumped out and fled to a neighbor’s house, the story goes.
Experiences that continued
The man reportedly said he was taken aboard the disc every few days afterward, and eventually even claimed he had been taken to Jupiter. Some accounts describe the aliens as octopus-like. The incident was reported at the time in the bulletins of UFO research groups and elsewhere.
How it was received
However, the story rests on the man’s own testimony and the articles that presented it, and no objective evidence has been confirmed. Details such as the alien’s height and the distance he fled differ between sources. Partly because the story grew bigger over time, it is now told less often than the Kofu or Kera incidents. The representative abduction account is America’s Betty and Barney Hill abduction.
