In October 1975, an event occurred in South Korea that remains the most famous incident in the country’s military UFO history—the South Korean Air Force’s radar system detected an unidentified object flying over the capital, Seoul, and the Air Force immediately dispatched F-5E fighter jets to intercept it.

📍 Location	📅 Date	🔍 Category
Seoul, South Korea	1975-10	Military / Fighter Intercept

It happened on a calm night. An air defense radar station of the South Korean Air Force, located north of Seoul, suddenly detected a target flying in from the north at an “abnormally high speed.” The flight speed of this target far exceeded the maximum speed of any fighter jet in the South Korean Air Force at the time.

The radar operator immediately reported to the central air defense command post. The commander ordered the troops to enter second-level combat readiness and commanded two F-5E Freedom Fighter jets to take off urgently. The F-5E was the main fighter jet of the South Korean Air Force at the time, with a maximum speed of Mach 1.6 (approximately 1,900 kilometers per hour).

But when the fighter jets approached the target’s location, the pilots reported seeing an object emitting “intense white light”—they said this light was “much brighter than the moon, making it impossible to look directly at.” When they tried to get closer, the object changed direction with “incredible acceleration” and quickly disappeared from sight.

Radar records showed that the target’s speed instantly accelerated from about 800 kilometers per hour to over 4,000 kilometers per hour—an acceleration force exceeding the human body’s tolerance limit by 10 times. South Korean Air Force technicians later admitted that these data were “physically inexplicable.”

This event is known in South Korea’s UFO research community as the “1975 Air Force Confidential Incident.” South Korean UFO researcher Dr. Kim (pseudonym) successfully obtained some related documents in the early 2000s through the Defense Ministry’s information disclosure law. The documents showed that the South Korean Air Force established an investigation committee that day, but the investigation results were classified as “national defense secrets.”

Although the South Korean government has not fully disclosed this matter to this day, several of the pilots and radar operators from that time gave media interviews after retiring. Their descriptions were very consistent—what they saw was definitely not an ordinary aircraft or natural phenomenon.

📚 Sources

• South Korean Air Force Operations Command, “Record of Air Defense Radar Case, October 1975” (partially declassified)
• Kim, Dr. (pseudonym), “South Korean Military UFO Secrets” (2002), Korea UFO Research Association
• Interview records of retired South Korean Air Force pilots (2005), UFO Korea Journal