Iran.Tehran 1976

At about 00:30 on 19 September 1976, according to the U.S. cable, the Imperial Iranian Air Force command post received four telephone calls from residents of the Shemiran area of northern Tehran reporting 'strange objects' in the sky: some described something bird-like, others a helicopter with a light, and no helicopters were airborne. The command post called Brigadier General Yousefi, assistant deputy commander of operations, who first said it was only stars; after talking to Mehrabad tower he went out to look, saw an object 'similar to a star, bigger and brighter', and ordered an F-4 scrambled from Shahrokhi air base (Hamadan). The tower's night supervisor, Hossein Pirouzi, later told the press and investigators that he had taken the first calls from 22:30, saw the object through binoculars and that the airport radar was under repair; by his account, the Babolsar and Shahrokhi radars had no target in that position.

The first F-4 took off at 01:30 and headed for a point about 40 nautical miles north of Tehran; the light was visible 70 miles away because of its brilliance. At a range of about 25 nautical miles (some 46 km) it lost all instrumentation and UHF and intercom communications; it broke off the intercept and, as it turned away, regained all systems.

A second F-4 took off at 01:40. Its backseater acquired a radar lock at 27 nautical miles, 12 o'clock high, with a closure rate of 150 knots; as the range fell to 25 miles the target moved away and held that separation. The cable says the airborne radar return was comparable in size to a 707 tanker and that the light was flashing blue, green, red and orange strobes in a rectangular pattern. A second bright object, half to one third the apparent size of the Moon, came out of the first and headed toward the fighter; the pilot tried to fire an AIM-9 missile and at that instant his weapons control panel went off and he lost communications. He turned and dived under negative G, the object fell in trail at about 3 to 4 miles and then rejoined the primary. A third object descended at high speed and appeared to come to rest gently on the ground, lighting an area of 2 to 3 km. On approach to Mehrabad the crew again lost communications and the inertial navigation system fluctuated each time they crossed the 150° magnetic bearing from the airport; an airliner approaching at the time had a communications failure in the same area but saw nothing. The crew also saw a cylinder-shaped object with steady lights at each end and a flasher in the middle, which the tower picked up once told where to look. In daylight a helicopter found nothing at the dry lake bed where they thought the object had come down, but picked up a beeper signal next to a house whose occupants spoke of a loud noise and a light like lightning; the cable says radiation checks were planned, and no result is on record.

Message IR 6 846 0139 76 was sent by the U.S. Defense Attaché Office in Tehran (USDAO) on 23 September 1976, signed by Colonel Frank B. McKenzie, and distributed to the DIA, the Secretary of Defense, the White House, the State Department, the CIA and the NSA. The cable itself warns that the information 'was obtained from source in conversation with a sub-source, and IIAF pilot of one of the F-4s'; according to later accounts it was drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy, who sat in on the interview of the second pilot. The DIA evaluation (Form 1396), which secondary sources attribute to Major Roland B. Evans (the evaluator's box is not legible on the scanned copy), marked reliability as 'confirmed by other sources' and value as 'high (unique, timely, and of major significance)', and called the case 'an outstanding report' and 'a classic': the object was seen by multiple witnesses from different locations (Shemiran, Mehrabad and the dry lake bed) and viewpoints, both airborne and from the ground; a general and qualified aircrews; 'visual sightings were confirmed by radar'; electromagnetic effects on three aircraft; 'physiological effects on some crew members', the loss of night vision due to the brightness of the object; and 'an inordinate amount of maneuverability'. The 'confirmed by other sources' box does not say what those sources were, everything the evaluation lists is already in the cable, and the radar it cites is the second F-4's airborne set.

A U.S. intelligence agency put a favourable assessment of the case in writing, and the case combines a pilot reporting an airborne radar lock, communications losses on two fighters and an airliner, and ground sightings by a general and by Mehrabad tower. The cable also describes a sequence: two different aircraft lose systems as they close on the light and regain them as they pull away, and the second loses its weapons panel just as it tries to fire.

The primary record, however, has limits. The cable is second-hand, draws mainly on the interview of the second pilot, and the DIA evaluation, though it ticks 'confirmed by other sources', does not identify them and lists nothing that is not already in that text; there are no sworn statements and no ground radar data, and according to Pirouzi the Mehrabad radar was out of service and the Babolsar and Shahrokhi radars saw nothing. The Tehran press contradicts itself: the Tehran Journal reported on 21 September that Lieutenant Jafari flew the first fighter, whereas in his accounts decades later, including his 2007 press conference, Parviz Jafari presents himself as the pilot who tried to fire, whom the cable places in the second jet; and the same day Kayhan International quoted an official source denying any attempt to fire and any equipment failure, while admitting it had no explanation for what the pilot saw. Bruce Maccabee also recorded the account of a Westinghouse technician who checked the aircraft days later and found the electronics working normally.

Philip J. Klass proposed that the initial light was Jupiter and that the failures were genuine faults in poorly maintained aircraft. Ephemeris calculation supports the first part only for the early calls: at 23:15 Tehran time Jupiter, at magnitude −2.4 and the brightest object in the sky, stood about 24° up in the east, where Pirouzi said he looked; but the first fighter was sent north of the city, not toward Jupiter, which at 01:30 was about 50° up in the east. The beacon signal several aircraft heard before the scramble points to an emergency locator beacon on the ground, with no demonstrated link to the light. No single explanation covers the sighting, the airborne radar return, the secondary objects and the range-correlated failures at once; but all of that is known through a second-hand account that nobody could check against flight records, and the prosaic reading of a bright star or planet plus coincident faults cannot be ruled out.