The 1976 Tehran UFO Incident (Dogfight over Tehran)

Just after midnight on 19 September 1976, an Iranian air force command post took four phone calls from residents of Shemiran, in north Tehran. Some described a kind of bird-like object. Others saw a helicopter with a light on. There were no helicopters airborne at that time.

The officer on duty, named in later accounts as Brigadier General Nader Yousefi, told them it was only stars. Then he looked for himself. He saw "an object in the sky similar to a star bigger and brighter." He ordered an F-4 scrambled from Shahrokhi Air Force Base.

At 01:30 Lieutenant Yadollah Nazeri took off. The object was visible from 70 miles away. At 25 nautical miles his instruments and radios died. He turned for home. Once he turned away, everything came back.

At 01:40 a second F-4 followed, crewed by Major Parviz Jafari and First Lieutenant Jalal Damirian. The backseater locked on at 27 nautical miles. The radar return was comparable to a 707 tanker. The object moved away and held its distance. Its strobes flashed blue, green, red and orange so fast that all the colours could be seen at once.

Then a second object came out of the first and headed straight toward the jet. Jafari tried to fire an AIM-9 missile. At that instant his weapons control panel went off and his radios failed. He dove away. The object fell in trail, cut inside his turn, then returned to the primary object for a perfect rejoin. Moments later a third object dropped straight down and appeared to come to rest gently on the earth, lighting an area of about 2 to 3 kilometers.

Coming home, the crew lost their radios each time they crossed a bearing of 150 degrees from Mehrabad. An approaching airliner lost communications in the same area. On final approach a cylinder with bright lights at each end and a flasher in the middle passed over the F-4. Mehrabad Tower saw it once the pilot told them where to look.

In daylight a helicopter searched the dry lake bed. Nothing was there. But a very noticeable beeper signal led to a small house with a garden. The people there spoke of a loud noise and a very bright light like lightning.

The US Defense Attaché Office sent its report to the Joint Chiefs, the CIA and the White House. A DIA evaluation by Major Roland B. Evans rated it "High (unique, timely, and of major significance)", citing reliable witnesses, radar confirmation and electromagnetic effects on three aircraft. The message was released under FOIA on 31 August 1977. The promised follow-up never surfaced.

Skeptic Philip J. Klass argued the main light was Jupiter, that one of the jets had a long history of electrical faults, that a meteor coincided with the sighting, and that the beeper was a lost C-141 emergency beacon. James Oberg and Robert Sheaffer also favoured Jupiter. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid added three meteor showers. Critics note that many details came through Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer. One rebuttal notes that no maintenance orders documenting the beacon problem have been found.

Jafari later became a general and told his story at the National Press Club in 2007 and in Leslie Kean's 2010 book. "To this day, I don't know what I saw," he wrote. "But for sure, it was not an aircraft." The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian both placed the case in their top ten UFO lists.