The Nikoro Incident: Yoshihiro Fujiwara and the Octopus-Like Beings of Kitami, 1974

Nikoro is a farming district of Kitami City, Hokkaido. Above it rises Mount Nikoro, 829.2 meters high, about 15 km northwest of central Kitami. In 1974 Yoshihiro Fujiwara grew vegetables there. He was 28. By one account, he had shown little interest in the paranormal.

April 6, 1974. About 3:00 a.m. Fujiwara's dog would not stop barking. Someone knocked. He heard a sound in his genkan, the entryway, and found a small being at the door, lit by moonlight. It raised an arm. A powerful hot draught struck, a wind that seemed to blow up from beneath his feet.

He ran to his bedroom. Through the window he saw a flying saucer, 1.50 meters high and 8 meters in diameter, floating a few meters above the ground and emitting orange rays. Then, as one retelling puts it, he "found himself literally absorbed in the object."

He woke on the floor, held by two beings. One told him: "No danger. We promise to release you close to your house." The room was dark blue and box-shaped, with lamps along the walls, air vents, a seat and a large mask covered in writing like Japanese characters. The smell was nauseating. At approximately 04:30 the disc landed within 3 kilometers of his house. A small door stood half open. Fujiwara jumped out and asked for shelter at a nearby house.

He described them as about 1 meter tall, with brownish, toad-like skin dotted with yellow and blue bumps like suction cups. Four tentacle-like limbs. A round, octopus-like head. Slanted triangular eyes that gave off an intense light. They wore see-through, vinyl-like suits and blue cone-shaped helmets with antennas. They spoke by telepathy. That same night, a junior-high student named Miyuki Fujita woke to a light outside her window brighter than the moon.

That evening Fujiwara felt sharp pain in his ears, odd heat in his fingertips, and an urge to write strange hieroglyphs. One message read: "When the disc lands on the mountain, you will come and board by yourself." He said he could now bend spoons, and that the beings had placed a receiver in his left earlobe and a transmitter in his right.

At 6:30 p.m. on a later evening, he and two friends reached Mount Nikoro. The friends stayed behind. He went on alone. In an hour and a half, by one account, he was flown around the Moon once, around the Earth twice, and sent home. A friend reported a strange UFO moving erratically in the sky, and footprints that stopped at a cliff edge. On April 13 came the farthest trip, to a planet the beings identified as Jupiter. He returned with a rock as proof. Other versions place the landing on Titan.

The rock went to a laboratory in Kitami. It proved to be limestone from the stalactites of a cave in the Kitami area, though later accounts call the result disputed. Critics note that Jupiter is a gas giant, and that spoon-bending belonged to Japan's 1974 psychic boom. The poet and UFO researcher Hirano Imao visited Fujiwara's home and came away skeptical. Patrick Gross classed the case as a fable of the contactee type, "typical claims of the alleged Western 'contactees'." There were no photographs, no radar and no official investigation. No one has confessed to a hoax.

Weekly Playboy and Weekly Yomiuri covered the story in 1974, and Albert Rosales later logged it among his 1974 humanoid reports. Fujiwara went on to claim more than 1,000 abductions, founded a Space Science Development Promotion Organization, and from 2010 performed piano, releasing a CD called Clinthorn. He died in 2021. On July 6, 2024, a 50th-anniversary party was held at Koenji Pandit in Tokyo. The case is still discussed alongside Japan's Kera and Kōfu incidents.