On June 24 of this year (World UFO Day), the International UFO Lab was established in Japan. It is housed in the UFO Fureaikan (UFO Friendship Center), a UFO center and museum that was built in 1992 in the town of linomachi (lower case spelling is apparently proper), which is now a prefecture of Fukushima. The facility is city owned and run by the Iinomachi Promotion Corporation. It was built using money from a regional development fund in an effort to help promote the area as a UFO hotspot after numerous sightings, starting in the 1970s, around nearby Mount Senganmori. The Lab is part of a new revitalization effort for Fukushima as a whole. Japan’s history of private UFO research goes back to the 1950s, but the official stance until 2020 was that UFOs weren’t worthy of consideration.

The material housed in the UFO Fureaikan comes from a donation of over 3000 items from early Japanese UFO researcher Kinichi Arai. Arai ran a bookstore in the early 1950s and developed an interest in flying saucers while reading books on the subject that were increasingly being published at the time. Arai felt there was need for serious discussion of the phenomenon and formed Japan’s first UFO organization, the Japanese Flying Saucer Research Association in 1955. Arai was a pacifist, and according to him, “I told myself that if we knew for sure that the aliens were watching us, we would no longer fight. Therefore, I decided to see if I could prove that the aliens were real.”

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