Kitsukawa Maru Submerged Object Sighting (1957)

The reported sighting

On 19 April 1957, the Japanese fishing boat Kitsukawa Maru (also spelled Kitsukawara Maru) was reportedly in the Pacific east of Japan when its crew saw two objects enter the sea. The NICAP compilation gives the time as 11:52 a.m. and the position as 31°15′N 143°30′E, a spot described as more than 10,000 metres deep. The original report, as quoted there, described "two metal disks" entering the Pacific. Later retellings describe them as silvery, about ten metres long, with no wings. On water entry, according to the account, they produced a violent turbulence. The crew searched the area and found no wreckage.

The story reached English-language readers through the Flying Saucer Review world round-up of 1958 and then through Ivan T. Sanderson's Invisible Residents (1970), which made it a touchstone for underwater UFO claims. Sanderson, a naturalist and writer, catalogued many reports of "unidentified submerged objects" in that book. A history of submerged UFO reports traces the Kitsukawa Maru account back to Sanderson's summary.

Inconsistencies in the record

The details shift between sources. Some versions say all five crew members saw the objects; others say the boatswain and four crew did. The route is given as a voyage from the South Pacific to Japan in one version and a position south of Yokohama in another. The spelling of the vessel's name also varies, and the NICAP compiler noted they could not verify the correct form. A later Official UFO Magazine piece (1977) and a 1992 MUFON UFO Journal reprint each reworded the description, adding "saucer-shaped" in the 1977 version.

The citation trail is short. The NICAP compiler traces the account to the 1958 Flying Saucer Review round-up (p. 147) and also cites Jacques Vallée's Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965, p. 136), which repeats it. A 1977 Official UFO Magazine article reprinted it in more vivid language, and a 1992 MUFON UFO Journal column by Bob Gribble quoted a July 1957 issue of S.P.A.C.E. magazine. Each step adds wording but no new evidence, so the chain is one report repeated rather than several independent ones.

No primary Japanese maritime record, crew statement, or contemporary newspaper report has been identified in the sources reviewed here. Every version traces back to the 1958 round-up and to Sanderson's book.

Assessment

The account is a single, secondhand story with no independent corroboration in the public record. Its significance is mainly in the history of ufology: it is one of the earliest widely cited claims of objects entering the sea, and it fed the later genre of underwater UFO reports that includes the Bermuda-area and "Devil's Sea" legends. The Devil's Sea is itself a region known for ship losses that were later explained in other ways, such as the 1952 volcanic loss of a Japanese research vessel. Those explanations are not established for this 1957 report, and the report should be treated as unverified.

Credibility

The case is rated fringe because it depends on one undocumented source and has no corroborating physical or official record. Readers who want to examine it further should start with Sanderson's book and check the NICAP compilation's citations against the original 1958 round-up. Writers on underwater UFOs often cite it as a claim that is widely repeated but rarely checked.