1976 Tehran UFO incident

1976 Tehran UFO incident

Type	Case
Also known as	Tehran UFO incident, Tehran incident, Iran 1976
Date	Night of 18–19 September 1976
Place	Over Tehran, Iran
Witnesses	Civilians, air traffic controller Hossein Pirouzi, Gen. Youssefi, two F-4 crews, an airliner crew
Aircraft	Two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II interceptors
Documented by	USAF memorandum by Lt. Col. Olin Mooy; DIA evaluation; MIJI newsletter

The 1976 Tehran UFO incident was a radar and visual sighting over Tehran, the capital of Iran, in the early hours of 19 September 1976. After civilians reported a bright light in the sky, the Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF) sent two F-4 Phantom II interceptors after it. Both crews reported losing instruments and communications as they approached it, with the equipment returning when they turned away. The crew of the second jet said a smaller light came out of the main one and headed towards them, and that their weapons panel lost power as they tried to fire a missile. A nearby airliner also reported radio failure.^[1][5]

The incident is one of the most cited military UFO cases because of the documentation the United States gathered about it, including a memorandum by a U.S. Air Force officer and a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that called the report "outstanding". Skeptics have attributed the main light to the planet Jupiter, the falling lights to meteors, and the failures to a fighter with a history of electrical faults.^[1][2][4][5]

Background

In 1976 Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi dynasty and was a close ally of the United States. The incident took place during the Cold War, when unexplained objects in the sky were taken seriously as a possible security concern.^[1] According to Brian Dunning, Iran was then relatively peaceful and open to Westerners, the first stirrings of revolution still at least a year away. Among the Americans living there were engineers from contractors that supported the 225 F-4 fighters the United States had sold to Iran over the previous decade, and the two countries' militaries worked closely together.^[5]

The sighting

Late on the night of 18 September, at least four residents of Tehran telephoned with reports of a bright, shining object over the Shemiran district in the north of the city. Hossein Pirouzi, an air traffic controller in the control tower at Mehrabad Airport, took the calls and saw the object himself. He described it as rectangular, with a large light at each end and a small red light circling its middle. According to Dunning, Mehrabad's radar was under repair at the time and not working, and the air base at Shahrokhi near Hamadan, 275 kilometres west-south-west of Tehran, showed nothing on its radar.^[1][5]

Pirouzi reported the sighting to General Youssefi of the IIAF, who went out on his balcony, saw the light — which witnesses described as like a star but much brighter — and authorised an interception, with Pirouzi giving directions.^[1][5]

The first interceptor

At 1:30 a.m. an F-4 flown by Lieutenant Yadollah ("Yaddi") Nazeri, with a weapons officer in the back seat, took off from Shahrokhi. The crew could see the light from about 70 miles (110 km) away. At about 25 nautical miles (46 km) from it, Nazeri lost all his instruments and his UHF radio and intercom, so he broke off and headed back; on the way, his instruments came back to life. In an interview in 1994 Nazeri said that the object had outpaced him even at twice the speed of sound, and that it was then he began to believe he was dealing with something from another world.^[1][5]

The second interceptor

About ten minutes later, at 1:40 a.m., a second F-4 took off, flown by Major Parviz Jafari, an IIAF squadron commander, with First Lieutenant Jalal Damirian as weapons officer. General Youssefi told Jafari that the object was comparable in size to a Boeing 707. Jafari's crew obtained a radar lock on it at a range of 27 nautical miles (50 km), high and straight ahead, closing at 150 knots; the strength of the radar return was similar to that of a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker. At 25 nautical miles the object seemed to move away, as if keeping its distance.^[1][5]

Jafari described the object as flashing red, green, orange and blue lights so intense that he could not see its body; Dunning's account says the colours strobed so quickly that all four seemed visible at once. As the F-4 pursued it south of Tehran, Jafari said, a round object came out of the main light and rushed straight towards him like a missile. He tried to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile at it, but at that moment his weapons control panel lost power, along with his UHF radio and intercom.^[1][5]

Jafari turned and dived away. He said the smaller object took up position behind him at 3 to 4 nautical miles, then turned inside his turn, moved away and rejoined the main object. Accounts say the ejection seat, a mechanical system, had also failed. According to Youssefi, the second F-4 made another attempt to close on the object at twice the speed of sound but could not catch it.^[1]

When he was able to report to air traffic control, Jafari was told to return. Looking to his left, he saw what he called the main, diamond-shaped object, and another bright object came out of it and headed straight for the ground. He expected an explosion that never came; instead, he said, it seemed to slow down and land gently, giving off a bright light that lit up an area 2 to 3 kilometres across. Jafari descended from 25,000 to 15,000 feet to mark its position.^[1][5]

Jafari decided to land at Mehrabad rather than return to Shahrokhi, and on the approach he suffered further on-and-off communication and navigation failures. A commercial airliner in the area also reported losing radio contact, though its crew saw nothing.^[1][5]

The next day

The next day Jafari and Damirian were flown by helicopter to the place where they believed the light had come down. They found nothing there, but as the helicopter circled to the west they picked up the beeping of a radio transponder, which appeared to have come from a military transport aircraft. They followed the signal to a house, whose occupants said they had heard a loud noise and seen a bright flash during the night. Arrangements were made for tests, including radiation checks, at the site; their results were never reported.^[1][5]

Reports and documents

The crews were questioned by Lieutenant General Shapour Azarbarzin, a former commander of the Iranian Air Force. According to him, passing reports of UFO sightings to the U.S. Air Force was standard procedure, and a report was sent. In an interview on 4 January 1977 he gave further details, saying the object's speed had been estimated at three times the speed of sound.^[1]

Iran invited the U.S. Air Force section chief in Tehran, Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy, to a debriefing. His "Memorandum for Record", based on his notes from the meeting, is the source of most of the detailed account of the night. It was never classified; two months later it was published in the United States in UFO Investigator, the newsletter of the civilian group NICAP.^[5]

A first report of the incident reached the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on the day it happened. It was also sent to the Secretary of State, the CIA, the White House, the chiefs of the Air Force, Army and Navy, the DIA, the U.S. naval command in the Middle East, the U.S. Air Force in Europe and other commands in Europe — though such distribution was reportedly routine for incidents in the sensitive Middle East region.^[1][4]

A DIA evaluation of the report rated it "outstanding": the object had been seen by several credible witnesses from different places, had been confirmed on radar and had been accompanied by equipment failures. A report by the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, headed by the retired NASA scientist and ufologist Richard Haines, highlighted this assessment and called the case a classic that met all the criteria for a UFO study.^[1][4]

The U.S. Air Force Security Service also published a dramatised narrative of the incident, "Now You See It, Now You Don't!", in its quarterly MIJI newsletter (MIJI stands for meaconing, intrusion, jamming and interference). Because the newsletter required a security clearance it was classified, and it was released only in 1981 after a Freedom of Information Act request. Dunning describes it as a retelling of Mooy's memo offered as a curiosity on the subject of jamming, rather than an official finding.^[3][5]

Analysis

The main light

The journalist and skeptic Philip J. Klass argued that the persistent light that prompted the calls was probably the planet Jupiter, an explanation also put forward by the aerospace writer James Oberg. Ufologists have objected that Jupiter was in the wrong part of the sky, but Dunning argues that the jets were sent to northern Tehran rather than towards the light, and that once there the crews saw it where Jupiter would have been; he also notes that every witness described it as like a star, only much brighter. He concludes that Jupiter almost certainly accounts for some of what was reported, though not necessarily all of it.^[1][5]

Equipment failures

In 1978 Klass tracked down American civilian technicians from Westinghouse and McDonnell Douglas who had been at Shahrokhi. According to Dunning's account of Klass's findings, the Westinghouse technician said only one of the two F-4s had been reported with electrical problems, and the McDonnell Douglas technician said that aircraft had a long history of intermittent electrical faults the IIAF had never managed to fix; he had been called in to adjust its radar about a month after the incident. Sources disagree on which of the two jets this was. Both technicians described the base's maintenance work as poor and its record-keeping as notorious.^[1][5]

Only Jafari attended the official debriefing; Nazeri made no known official report until he had moved to the United States and appeared on the television series Sightings. Martin Bridgstock of Griffith University, summarising Klass, wrote that a temporary fault in an aircraft with that record could hardly be called mysterious, that the crews were tired and rattled and could have mistaken stars or meteors for UFOs and missiles, and that airliners carry backup radios precisely because radio faults are not unusual. He called ufologists' versions of the story an unreliable account of the incident.^[1][5]

The radar lock

A McDonnell Douglas repair supervisor told Klass that the weapons officer could have had the radar in a manual tracking mode without realising it, which could produce a false lock — and Jafari's radar was already known to need adjustment. Dunning adds that the Shahrokhi crews' usual task was intercepting Soviet MiG-25 reconnaissance flights, so something real could have been there; the radar lock alone, he argues, does not prove it.^[1][5]

The falling lights

Dunning points out that 19 September falls at or near the peak of two minor annual meteor showers, the Gamma Piscids and the Southern Piscids, and at the tail end of a third, the Eta Draconids, citing the astronomer Gary Kronk's catalogue of meteor showers. That, he argues, gives ample reason for reports of falling lights and fast-moving bright objects — and for other sightings of bright lights that night around the Mediterranean, which some ufologists have linked to the Tehran case. Klass collected examples of experienced night pilots swerving to avoid meteors they took for aircraft, and learned from the American technicians that the Shahrokhi pilots normally never flew at night: these two sorties were the only night flights the technicians knew of. Mooy's memo records that the pilots found landing at Mehrabad difficult because they had trouble adjusting to the dark.^[1][5]

The beeper

Mooy noted that the beeping transponder found the next day appeared to be from an American C-141 transport. These aircraft carried beacons designed to be released in a crash, but, according to Dunning, there had been trouble with the beacons being shaken loose by turbulence over the mountains just north of Tehran.^[1][5]

Dunning's overall view is that, without the assumption of an alien craft, the only unusual feature of the case is that planes chased celestial objects and had equipment failures on the same flight — both of which, separately, are common. He argues that ruling out explanations one by one cannot show what the light was, and that the honest answer is that it is unknown.^[1][5]

In ufology

Ufologists regard the Tehran incident as one of the most credible cases on record because of the volume of documents and the professional standing of the people involved. Dunning notes that its documentation — declassified U.S. government papers — is exactly the kind of evidence ufologists value most, and that little Iranian documentation survives because of the revolution that soon followed.^[1][5]

Later statements and media

Jafari rose to the rank of general. In 2007 he described the incident publicly at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.^[1]

The television series Sightings covered the case in 1994, interviewing many of those involved. According to Dunning, the programme got several details wrong — saying that Mehrabad's radar was working and that it showed the object to be as large as a KC-135, when radar returns indicate signal strength rather than size — and told the story on the assumption that the light was a hostile, intelligently guided craft, calling it a "mother ship". The incident has also been the subject of an Iranian film, and it was ranked seventh in The Daily Telegraph's top ten UFO sightings and tenth in The Guardian's.^[1][5]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “1976 Tehran UFO incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.