In 2014, Finnish media reported a claim by two of the flight's pilots that the Soviet Union had fired a missile at the aircraft, which exploded less than 30 seconds before impact.

The allegations came out only in September 2014, when Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper, published an extensive article on the matter.

Co-captain Kaukiainen said that the Finnair pilots decided to speak out on the matter after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down in Ukraine on 17 July 2014.

This made it possible to cover the 5,413 nautical miles (10,025 km; 6,229 mi) from Tokyo to Helsinki on a non-stop flight that lasted 13 hours.

Japanese airlines did not fly non-stop over Siberia, as they thought that the Soviet Union would have demanded bilateral flight rights in return.

Before the Bering Strait, the plane crossed the International Date Line over the Aleutian Islands and thus for some time flew during the previous day, 22 December.

[7] According to the pilots' 2014 report of the incident, when the aircraft was over the Edgeøya island of Svalbard, between 1 and 2 p.m. Finnish time, the assistant pilot in command Esko Kaukiainen and assistant first officer Markku Soininen saw a rocket approaching the aircraft ahead, at 30 degrees to the left of the flight path of the plane.

At first, they thought it was a Soviet weather rocket on its way to the troposphere, but when it reached the cruising altitude of the aircraft, it turned and came straight at it.

[1] Professor Stefan Forss Ph.D. from the Strategic and Defence Studies of the National Defence University of Finland, a specialist in the technology of war, especially that of nuclear weapons systems,[9][10][11] pointed out that missile could not have been a conventional ground-launched ballistic or cruise missiles with intermediate range, which were due to be eliminated as a result of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces or INF Treaty ratified between the United States and the Soviet Union ratified in early 1987, as the elimination of these missiles began only in late July the following year.

Lappi thought that the missile could have been a S-125 Pechora, which within NATO is called SA-3 Goa, of which there is a version that is used on surface vessels.

Lauri J. Laine, retired director of flights for Finnair at the time, confirmed that no report was ever written about the incident.

One Finnair official from the flights direction team, who chose to remain anonymous, told Helsingin Sanomat that he had heard about the incident at the time: "It was talked about.

In 2014 the Finnish Transport Safety Agency (TraFi) had no knowledge of the matter, and reports or flight log books for 1987 no longer existed.

Tiitinen said that "the matter would absolutely been of interest within the Security Intelligence Service … Information concerning an incident like this should have been passed on automatically from civil servants in the aviation branch to the authorities — then just as now.

He considers the incident to have been "outrageous", and he continued saying that "it would not have been civilized behaviour, it would have been low-life military gangsterism, if the description of the events is accurate."