The bus from Fukushima Station takes about thirty minutes. The route runs through suburban sprawl, then rice paddies, then forested hills. Nothing about the landscape prepares visitors for what is happening at the other end.

On November 11, 2023, the third annual Iino UFO Festival drew an estimated 4,000 visitors to a town whose resident population hovers around 5,000. By mid-morning, the main street of Iino-machi was wall-to-wall with people in alien costumes. Silver bodysuits. White robes with oversized black-eyed masks. A group in matching green spandex. Someone in a fully articulated robot suit made from what appeared to be repurposed kitchen appliances.

The Costume Parade

The centrepiece of the festival is the Alien Costume Parade, which winds through the Iino-machi shopping street. Participants range from families in coordinated silver jumpsuits to individual entries of staggering ambition: hand-built mecha suits, elaborate traditional Japanese dress fused with alien headpieces, a man in a full business suit with an alien mask and a briefcase (labelled, in English, “TOP SECRET”).

The judging categories are specific. Contestants compete for best alien lookalike, best crowd entertainment, and, in what may be the festival’s most distinctive award category, most convincing UFO summoning act. Winners receive cash prizes and locally themed gifts.

What makes the parade striking is not just the costumes but the crowd. Families with young children. Elderly couples in matching silver capes. Teenagers in alien face paint eating yakisoba from paper trays. The festival is not ironic. People are having fun, and the fun is communal.

The Town

Outside the festival zone, Iino itself tells the story. Stone alien statues stand at street corners, placed there not for the festival but as permanent fixtures.

There are alien motifs on lampposts, shop signs, and the local sake label. This is not a town that adopted a UFO theme for tourism. This is a community that has lived alongside reports of unexplained lights over Mount Senkanmori for decades and decided to build its civic identity around them. The UFO Interactive Hall opened in 1992. The town has been UFO no Sato (UFO Village) for longer than many of its festival-goers have been alive.

The Stage

The main stage programme runs through the afternoon. Comedy acts perform between costume contest rounds. Local food and drink stalls line the street, selling Fukushima specialities alongside UFO-branded merchandise. The atmosphere is closer to a community fair than a niche convention.

The talk event featuring Takeharu Mikami, director of the International UFO Laboratory and editor-in-chief of Monthly Mu magazine, draws a standing crowd. Mikami’s presentation style is sharp, well-paced, and punctuated by audience laughter. He moves between serious research findings and deadpan humour with the ease of someone who has been doing this for decades.

The Senkanmori Mystery Tour

Why It Matters

Japan’s UFO culture is often treated as curiosity or eccentricity by Western media. The reality is more serious. In June 2024, over 80 Japanese lawmakers formed the Parliamentary League for Unraveling UAP. By 2026, the league had proposed a dedicated government body for UAP intelligence under the Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary for Crisis Management. The Genkai Nuclear Power Station incident in July 2025 prompted closed-door parliamentary hearings.

Iino’s festival is not separate from this political trajectory. It is one expression of a broader Japanese engagement with the phenomenon: grassroots, institutional, and legislative strands running in parallel. The town that built a museum around its local sightings in 1992 was thirty years ahead of the parliament that formed a research league in 2024.

The next UFO Festival is typically announced around October each year on the UFO no Sato website and social media channels.