Then Kaori fields another call, this one from a concerned friend. "Don't stay out there too late," she says. "North Koreans will abduct you." She's absolutely serious.

The Noto Peninsula is one spooky piece of turf -- Japan's Alien Central, in at least three different ways. For one, China's people smugglers, known as snakeheads, have made the Noto a favorite dumping ground, loosing a tide of desperate illegals onto its remote ocean beaches.

And hysterical friends aside, residents of the Noto do indeed cast worried looks to the sea as twilight falls -- the fishing boats plying the waters off this northern spit are not always what they seem. Just over the empty horizon lies North Korea. Like visitors from a hostile galaxy, spy boats from this planet's most isolated society bristle with bogus trawling gear as they electronically probe the Noto -- a region North Koreans (unlike most Japanese) consider highly significant. Japanese news programs have reported cases of Noto residents snatched from local beaches after stumbling upon paranoid North Korean operatives. These particular alien abductions are very real.

But neither commie spies nor refugees made the Noto a magnet for space cases from all over Japan and beyond. Johsen Takano did that. In July 1996, this Buddhist priest/engineer/Porsche racer distilled the Noto's timeless tradition of strange visitors into a single $50 million edifice. In the little beachfront town of Hakui City, about an hour north of Kanazawa, Takano created Cosmo Isle. The unrevealing name conceals a very singular tourist attraction: the world's biggest self-described "UFO science center and Habitable Zone." Never mind the bus tours -- Takano is aiming for the intergalactic cruise ship trade. "Some people do say it looks like a landing strip," he says with a shy smile.

Twenty-five years ago, Takano was writing science fiction scripts for Japanese TV when he first became interested in extraterrestrials. "I translated books on the UFO phenomenon," he says, naming George Adamski's "UFOs Have Landed" as the first to grab his interest. It's not as though Takano was stuck for career prospects. With an engineering degree from one of Japan's top universities, a flourishing TV writing career and his position as a priest at his family's Buddhist temple, Takano hardly needed the aggravation involved in pioneering a rather unorthodox educational center. Besides, he admits, "I have never seen a UFO." No matter. These kinds of crusades take faith.

	Print story E-mail story

The highway to Hakui City runs along property that would make Donald Trump weep -- long, sandy oceanfront strands that cry out for overdevelopment. Yet, despite the reasonably warm May weather and the fact that this is Golden Week -- the national furlough when most of this workaholic country drops tools for an orgy of travel and tourism -- the beaches are empty save for a scattering of families wading for clams.

As we drive, Kaori assures me that the Japanese like a sand castle as much as the next dude. Still, you get the impression this part of the country does not share the North American worship of sand and surf. Lift the Noto Peninsula into a mother ship, drop it so it sits off the New York coast and you'd have the summer headquarters of every Manhattanite important enough to screen calls. But here -- well, gaze out over the mostly empty sand and you'd be forgiven for assuming Noto is Japanese for "Godforsaken."

Brilliant Careers: Sound and Vision Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles