UFO Festival

For one day at the end of October the shopping street of Iino, a district of Fukushima city, is closed to traffic and filled with people dressed as aliens — about two thousand of them, from Japan and from abroad. The organisers say it is the largest event in the country given over to UFOs. The town has the name for it: it calls itself the UFO village, after Senganmori, the conical hill of 462 metres behind it. Locals have long reported lights over it, and there is a UFO museum at its foot.

Anyone may join. Those taking part sign in at the tent on the event ground in the morning, and changing rooms are provided nearby. The parade sets off after the opening and works its way along the closed street for about three quarters of an hour, stopping constantly to be photographed.

Judges pick out about eight from the crowd. Those eight go up on the stage, where the final test is to perform a summoning of a UFO in front of the audience. The best of them takes 50,000 yen. Other prizes go to whoever looked most like an alien, whoever called a craft down most convincingly, and whoever did most to raise the mood of the day; one of them is five kilograms of local rice.

There is a stage with drumming, a school dance troupe and a comedy act, and stalls selling food, among them gyoza sold under the name UFO gyoza. The director of the town's UFO laboratory, who edits a monthly magazine devoted to the unexplained, gives a talk about whether anything is coming. The day ends with a mock roof-raising ceremony of the kind held when a house is framed.

On the day after the festival a party climbs Senganmori with the laboratory's director, eats lunch at the summit and spends a while trying to call down a craft. That is a separate outing, booked in advance and paid for.