Part of the fun in reading UFO stories, at least for me, is the descriptions of the aliens themselves. Outside of the usual grays and reptilians, I’ve heard stories of aliens who resemble robots, praying mantises, elves, demons, and perhaps freakiest of all, Scandinavians. When there are pictures of the weirder ones available, I save them to a folder on my computer. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of adding a new species to my collection: bipedal octopus dwarves.

The fine creatures you see above come to us from The Nikoro Incident, a series of encounters that took place in Japan in April 1974. According to an article from a contemporary ufology magazine, Yoshihiro Fujiwara was a 28-year-old man who lived in Kitami, a city in Hokkaido. On April 6, 1974, at 3 AM, Fujiwara’s sleep was disturbed by a sound in his genkan, the traditional entryway in a Japanese home.

When Fujiwara went to investigate the sound, he found that his visitor was a three foot tall alien. Though he tried to make a run for it, Fujiwara was suddenly whisked off his feet and levitated to an orange-colored UFO hovering over a field outside.

Once he got to the UFO, Fujiwara was able to jump off and run to a neighbor’s house for help. Nothing out of the ordinary happened again until the evening, when Fujiwara developed psychic abilities. He now had the awe-inspiring power of bending spoons, and he could also talk to the aliens he saw earlier by telepathy. After two days, and what had to have been a countless number of mind-texts, the aliens told Fujiwara that they wanted to meet again.

At 6:30 PM that night, Fujiwara and two of his friends showed up at the assigned meeting spot, Nikoro Mountain. For whatever reason, Fujiwara’s pals stayed behind, and he went into the mountain alone. There he was picked up by the UFO for a second time, and treated to a trip to outer space. In only an hour-and-a-half, Fujiwara was flown around the moon once, circled around the Earth twice, and then sent back home.

Once back on Earth, Fujiwara’s charitable hosts threw his ass out to the ground so hard that he lost consciousness. Fortunately, he was rescued by a search party, and was apparently well enough to get picked up again on April 13. On this last trip, Fujiwara was flown to a planet that the aliens identified as Jupiter. For proof, he was given an ultra rare Jupiter rock, presumably the only one on the giant gas planet.

Kinichi Arai, the author of my source here, offered some evidence in his article to corroborate Fujiwara’s outlandish account. The night of Fujiwara’s first encounter, for example, a junior high school student named Miyuki Fujita was woken up by a light shining outside her window. Fujita didn’t get up to see where the light was coming from, but she said it was brighter than the moon. Among other things, there were also witnesses who claimed to see Fujiwara’s spoon bending powers and the UFO.

Briefly poking through this case, however, The Nikoto Incident isn’t credible at all. Spoon bending has been repeatedly debunked as an illusion, and though witnesses might have backed up Fujiwara’s UFO, they had no physical evidence. The biggest hole in the story, of course, comes from the third encounter. As everyone knows, Jupiter is a gas planet, and testing showed that Fujiwara’s ultra rare Jupiter rock was actually an extremely common Earth one.

Though it grieves me to say it, bipedal octopus dwarves from beyond the stars don’t really exist. On the bright side, at least I have a cool new picture in my folder. 

Edit (5/19/17): What do you guys think the Nikoro aliens look like? I’m getting debates about their appearance in my inbox! One source on this English language page describes them as “starfish-like,” another calls them “toad-like.” On the other hand, this Japanese page also describes them as octopuses, while another Japanese page says they seem to resemble true toads.

Be sure to check out more weird Japanese mysteries in my e-book, 20 Unsolved Mysteries of Japan, available on Amazon for Kindle.