The Boys Who Claimed They Captured a Palm-Sized UFO in Japan (1972) — Kera Incident (Part 3/10)

Mystery Japan Presents: The Unexplained Japan Files Case File #001 — The Kera Incident (Part 3)

The boys said the palm-sized “UFO” didn’t just sit there — it reacted: buzzing, glowing, and briefly cracking open when hung upside down. Then it began doing something worse: vanishing from sealed bags, reappearing in the field, disappearing again — five or six times. And for the first time, a third-party witness enters the record: a mother who said she saw a strange light flickering inside the backpack.

Missed Part 2? That’s where the boys first examined the object under house lights — measurements, sketches, and the underside “lid.” → Read Part 2 here:

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Case Snapshot

• Location: Hiroshi Mori’s home + nearby rice fields, Kera, Kochi City, Japan • Date: Sep 1972 (reported) • Claim: The object repeatedly vanished and reappeared; it emitted light/sound and briefly opened a “lid” when hung upside down • Witnesses: Nine local junior high students; one mother (reported) • What makes it strange: Disappearances from sealed bags/rooms, reappearance with the same markings, buzzing + pale bluish glow, brief “lid” opening, third-party light testimony

In the previous episode, we followed what the boys in Kera (Kochi City) claimed happened in 1972: a group of junior high students secured a small flying object, brought it home, weighed and measured it, and even left behind sketches.

But what came next is where the Kera Incident shifts from “a strange-looking object” into something harder to file away.

According to their accounts, the object began to display a series of phenomena that don’t yield to an easy, everyday explanation — at least not at first glance. And one moment stands out in particular: when the boys tried to take it apart to see what it really was.

That’s where we’ll begin in Part 3. I won’t rush to a conclusion. Instead, I’ll lay out the testimony and the surviving record side by side — and invite you to think through the possibilities with me.

1. Trying to Take the “Mini UFO” Apart

The first thing the boys wanted to test was simple: could the square, lid-like panel on the underside be opened?

After the measuring and sketching, the curiosity of nine junior high students wasn’t going to stop at documentation. They wanted to know what was inside — what the object really was — so they decided to try dismantling it.

Their obvious target was that underside feature that looked like a square “lid.”

They tried prying at it with a screwdriver and a metal lever, but no matter how much force they applied, it wouldn’t budge.

Next they took a hammer to it — hard. Yet, according to their account, it didn’t dent. It didn’t even scratch.

It wasn’t just “tough.” The resistance felt… strange — hard to explain with ordinary materials. And from there, the boys moved on to more extreme methods.

They wondered if they could shave off a piece of the thin rim with a saw — anything that might reveal what the material actually was. So they set a blade against the object’s narrow edge. But according to their account, no matter how hard they pressed, they couldn’t cut so much as a sliver.

They even tried holding it over a flame. Still, they said, nothing changed.

At one point, one of the boys apparently suggested, half-seriously, “What if we put it in the microwave?” That idea ended instantly when his mother caught wind of it and scolded him — hard.

“Don’t be ridiculous! You’ll ruin the microwave — then we won’t be able to use it for food anymore!”

So the microwave experiment never happened — a small, almost domestic detail that makes the scene feel very real.

Instead, the boys focused on the tiny holes in the square “lid” on the underside. Peering through them with a magnifying glass, they claimed they could see what looked like the inside of a radio — packed with small components.

Someone then tried inserting a nail into one of the holes and striking it. The nail bent, they said, while the hole widened only slightly. That detail appears repeatedly in later retellings.

They also reported that when the object was lifted and shaken, they could hear something rattling inside — a faint clattering, as if parts were knocking against each other. Yet on the outside, there were no screws, no bolts — none of the usual clues that would tell you how to open it.

Something seemed to be inside. And yet it wouldn’t come apart. By this point, the boys may already have been running into the case’s most persistent sensation: an object that behaves like a device — without offering any obvious way in.

2. The Night the “Mini UFO” Vanished Without a Trace

The plastic bag was still there. The backpack was still there. Even the knot in the cord was still tight — yet the contents were gone.

That night, Hiroshi Mori put the object into a plastic bag, then placed the bag inside a backpack. He said he tied the opening shut with a cord — carefully, deliberately — so there would be no way for it to slip out from the inside.

But the next morning, when he checked the backpack, the object that should have been there… wasn’t.

The bag remained. The backpack remained. The cord hadn’t been untied. And yet the object itself was missing.

Shaken, Mori alerted the others: It’s gone.

That evening, the nine boys went back to the rice fields. And there — according to their account — the object was somehow back in the same area again.

They said they captured it a second time.

To be sure, they did what they’d done before: they picked it up and gave it a shake. But this time, something was different. Strangely, they reported hearing no rattling at all from inside — none of the faint clattering they’d noticed earlier.

3. The Boys’ “Experiments” — and the Object’s Response

Water was supposed to do nothing. Instead, it was what finally stirred the silent object.

After taking the object again, the boys carried out a series of simple “tests.” The first was straightforward: they tried pouring water into the interior through the small holes on the underside.

Using a watering can, they dripped water in little by little, watching for any sign of change. For a while, nothing happened. Disappointed, they eventually left the object alone — assuming it was inert after all.

Then, moments later, something changed.

They heard a sudden ziii… — a thin buzzing sound, compared in some accounts to the chirp of a cicada — and the inside of the object began to glow.

According to the boys’ testimony, a pale bluish light leaked from the underside and blinked at a slow, steady rhythm. They also claimed that around the holes, a whitish, cotton-like cloudiness appeared, as if something had formed inside and obscured their view.

4. The Moment It Was Hung, the “Lid” Cracked Open

They said it happened in an instant — only at the moment they hung it up, the “lid” opened slightly.

Next, the boys threaded an enamel-coated wire through one of the holes on the underside and suspended the object upside down. They hung it from the kamoi in a tatami room — the horizontal wooden beam above sliding doors.

And then, according to their testimony, something strange occurred. The square, lid-like panel on the bottom lifted — just a little — opening at an angle of roughly ten degrees.

Through the narrow gap, they claimed they glimpsed something like the inside of a radio: tightly packed, delicate-looking components.

But the moment they rushed closer for a better look, the panel snapped shut with a sharp clack. After that, they said, it wouldn’t open again — no matter what they tried.

5. They Held It Down — And It Still Vanished

They tried to make sure it couldn’t “get away” this time. And yet, they said, it disappeared again.

The brief moment when the square panel cracked open startled the boys enough that they decided they wouldn’t let the object slip out of their control a second time. They stacked several floor cushions on top of it, and then one of them sat on the pile — an improvised attempt at “containment.”

After that, Hiroshi Mori went outside to alert the others, leaving Yasuo Mori and Michio Seo to stand guard. The two boys kept the cushion stack clutched down against the floor, reportedly trying to wait it out — reading manga as they watched, determined not to let it out of their sight.

But even so. The object they were supposedly guarding vanished without a trace — once again.

6. Doubt Breeds Doubt

Before anyone could make sense of the “phenomenon,” suspicion started spreading between the boys.

Not long after, Mori returned — this time with Keiko Fujimoto. But the thing they’d supposedly been guarding was gone.

The mood shifted immediately. You can almost feel it in the accounts: Fujimoto’s expression changes, the room goes tense, and the unspoken question hangs in the air — Was any of this real?

Voices start piling on.

“See? There was never a UFO in the first place.” “No — there was. It was real.” “Then you hid it somewhere while we were gone.”

As Yasuo and Michio tried to explain, even Mori himself began to waver. Confusion turned into irritation — and then into an accusation he couldn’t take back:

“You guys are liars.”

At this point, the story becomes unsettling in a different way. You’re no longer sure whether the object is the strange part — or whether what’s really breaking down is the trust between the boys themselves.

7. Found in an Unexpected Place

The object that was supposed to be gone turned up somewhere else — and the situation only got messier.

A few hours later, the boys say, it was found again — not inside the house, but in a completely different spot.

Kei Kojima was outside in the Mori family yard, playing volleyball. The ball rolled out beyond the garden, and as Kei chased it to the roadside, he noticed something near a drainage ditch just outside the property line.

It was the object.

When Kei brought it back, the argument flared up all over again.

“How did it vanish in the first place?” “Did someone hide it?”

And more unsettling than either question: was this really the same “thing” that had disappeared earlier?

8. Marking It to Prove It Was the Same Object

To avoid any suspicion of a swap, the boys chose a simple solution: they would mark it.

By this point, the object was behaving — at least in their telling — like a magician’s prop, vanishing and reappearing when no one expected it. The uncertainty was starting to swallow the story. So Mori decided to create a way to confirm identity if it “disappeared” again.

He painted a small section of the rim with silver enamel. Then Kiyomitsu Ohara added another mark on the rim using permanent ink.

If the object vanished and turned up somewhere else once more, they wanted to be able to tell — immediately — whether it was truly the same one. In their own way, it was an attempt to build a chain of evidence.

9. Vanishing, Returning, Vanishing Again

From this point on, the story is no longer about a single odd incident. It’s told as a repeating pattern.

Just as the boys feared, the object vanished again — and then “returned” to the same rice fields where it had first been found.

After that, they say it became almost routine: each time they managed to secure it, sooner or later it was gone again. This happened five or six times, according to later accounts.

One detail, however, stood out as especially important to them. The permanent-ink mark Kiyomitsu Ohara had placed on the rim was still there on the object when it turned up again after disappearing.

Same mark. Same rim. In other words, the boys felt increasingly confident that this wasn’t a simple swap — that whatever was happening, it seemed to involve the same object.

10. Why It Always Seemed to Vanish From the Backpack

One strange pattern keeps repeating in the boys’ accounts: when the object “disappeared,” it almost always did so from inside a backpack.

They say that every time they secured it, they carried it the same way — wrapped in cloth and tucked into a knapsack for transport and storage. And yet, oddly, the object was described as vanishing from the knapsack itself.

On one occasion, Hiroshi Mori wrapped it in cloth, placed it in the backpack, and slung it over his shoulder. As he started walking, he thought he heard a faint sound — something subtle enough to make him stop and check. When he opened the bag, it was empty. The backpack was there, the wrapping was there — but the “contents” he’d just put inside were gone.

On another day, Keiko Fujimoto tried to be even more careful. He reportedly sealed the object inside a plastic bag, closed it tightly, placed that bag into the backpack, and kept watch — claiming he never took his eyes off it.

Even then, he said, the backpack was empty when he checked.

Watching it didn’t help. In the moment, the shock was strong enough that Fujimoto reportedly felt a chill and threw the backpack into the road.

But the story twists again. After a short while, Toshiaki Kuzuoka picked the backpack up and looked inside — and this time, the object was back in it.

An empty bag that “refills” itself. Moments like this are where the boys’ testimony seems to hit a wall — where ordinary explanations start to feel, at least to them, like they don’t quite reach.

11. It Vanished From a Sealed Upstairs Room

Even in a room with the exits supposedly blocked, the object “disappeared” — and what remained was the shape of the cord.

On another day, Toshiaki Kuzuoka reportedly decided he wouldn’t let it “escape” again. He wrapped an electrical cord around the object and tied it down, then left it in an upstairs room. He also shut the windows tightly, making sure there was no obvious way for anything to get out.

And yet, after stepping out for only a short time, he returned to find the object gone once more.

The strangest part was what happened after.

Only the cord remained on the floor. And according to the account, it didn’t lie there loose and collapsed as you’d expect. It was still bent into the same softened outline it had held when it had been wrapped around the object — as if it had been left behind in the object’s shape.

The windows were still closed. The cord wasn’t untied. It didn’t look cut or broken. Kuzuoka couldn’t make sense of how the “contents” could vanish from a sealed room without the knot being undone or the cord being severed.

And this, the boys said, wasn’t a one-off. Similar episodes happened more than once. If they began to feel genuinely unnerved, it’s hard to blame them.

12. It Glowed Inside the Backpack — A Mother’s Testimony

For the first time, the story brings in a witness outside the boys’ circle: a mother who says she saw the light.

On the day Toshiaki Kuzuoka went with the Mori brothers to secure the object and bring it home in a backpack, his mother, Aiko Kuzuoka, later recalled seeing a strange flicker coming from inside the bag — an unnatural light blinking where there should have been only darkness.

Up to this point, the case has relied almost entirely on the boys’ own experiences. But the moment a family member claims to have seen the same phenomenon — light — the situation becomes harder to wave away. Not necessarily easier to explain, but more difficult to ignore.

A sealed upstairs room, an object gone, a cord left behind holding its shape. A backpack that empties itself — and then, in another moment, appears to glow from within.

After enough episodes like this, the boys could no longer stay calm.

They caught it — and it vanished. They tied it down — and it vanished. They watched it — and it vanished.

And yet the object — bearing the same rim markings — kept turning up again. Then, finally, someone else saw it too.

At that point, it was no longer a story the boys could keep among themselves. They felt they had to show it to someone.

So they turned to adults.

Next: Case File #001 — Kera Incident (Part 4/10)

→ [Episode 4]

[embed]The Boys Who Claimed They Captured a Palm-Sized UFO in Japan (1972) — Kera Incident (Part 4/6) Mystery Japan Presents: The Unexplained Japan Files Case File #001 — The Kera Incident (Part 4)medium.otakupapa.net

Series stance: This project does not argue for belief or debunking. I organize sources and testimony (including contradictions) and leave conclusions to the reader.

Selected sources include: MYSTERY PHOTONICLE (May 2016) and Junichi Yaoi, Junichi Yaoi’s Complete UFO Collection, among others.

Author Profile

Haruto Rein, Ph.D. (羅院春人)

Former quantum physicist turned independent writer and researcher. He writes Mystery Japan, a case-file series on Japan’s recorded anomalies — built from reports, documents, and testimony, with facts separated from inference and conclusions left to the reader. He also authored ToEST (Shinto philosophy in dialogue) and writes the Shinto Girl series on consciousness and “Spiritual Science.”

© 2025–2026 Mystery Japan / Shinto Girl Project. Written by Haruto Rein, Ph.D. (羅院春人). All rights reserved.