This is in a series of anniversary UFO incident investigations. See also Roswell at 80, Tehran at 50 (this post), Phoenix Lights at 30 (March 2027), and the Washington DC Flap at 75 (July 2027).

Image from a 1980s Iranian made film about the incident. The movie served both as a documentary of the incident and a propaganda film against the Shah’s military.

On the night when September 18th became the 19th in 1976, something strange happened above the skies of Tehran, Imperial State of Iran. What would happen would involve the planes encountering mysterious problems, American military intelligence, an active astronomical night, and strangely located equipment.

The Course of Events

The general course of events, based on contemporary and later on witness statements, including interviews done by an American air force attache based in Tehran, was as follows.

11:00 pm to 12:30 am: Mehrabad Airport air traffic controller Hossein Pirouzi and the Imperial Iranian Air Force received four reports of a bright, colorful object hovering over Tehran. Pirouzi stepped outside with binoculars and saw a bright, shape-shifting object rocking like a seesaw roughly 6,000 feet (~1,800 meters) in the air. The airport also made a radar lock on an unknown object in the location where Pirouzi could see the visible object.
Ordered and Scrambled: The air force scrambled a F-4 Phantom II jet from Shahrokhi Air Force Base, about 150 miles (250 kilometers) away. Flown by Lieutenant Yaddi Nazeri and crewed by a weapons officer, the jet raced toward Tehran. Nazeri reported seeing a bright object from 70 miles (about 115 kilometers) away.
The First Plane Incident: As Nazeri closed to about 30 miles (45 kilometers) of the object, his F-4 suffered a loss of instruments and radio communication. He broke off and flew away. As soon as he did so, all failed equipment somehow was restored.
The Second Scramble: While the first plane was still in the air, the air force scrambled a second F-4, this one piloted by Major Parviz Jafari and crewed by a weapons officer. The weapons officer aquired a lock at about 30 miles (45 kilometers) away.
Systems Failure: As Jafari chased the object to the skies of southern Tehran, a smaller object detached from the primary object. This secondary object flew toward Jafari’s jet at high speed. Jafari attempted to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile but his weapons console died and radio communication was lost. He performed a hard turn; with the secondary object following him before it broke off and rejoined the larger, original object.
Third Object at 2:00 am: A third object emerged from the primary object and fell to the grpimd, landing in a dry lake bed between Tehran and a nearby city named Karaj. Jafari noted that its bright glow illuminated a 1 to 2 mile (roughly 2 to 3 kilometer) radius on the ground.
Landing: As Jafari’s F-4 was preparing to land at Tehran Mehrabad Airport, it suffered repeated radio and inertial navigation failures. A commercial airliner landing at the same time experiences a radio failure as well.
Sunrise at Helicopter Ride: The air force flew Jafari and a inspections team by helicopter to the third object’s landing site. They found no burn marks or craters. However, their equipment picked up an emergency beeper signal concentrating around a local farmhouse, whose inhabitants reported hearing a massive noise and seeing a blinding flash of light during the night.
Americans Get Involved: American technical advisors stationed in Iran received the initial reports about the incident and went to work on the aircraft, which was a normal routine as the Americans were contracted to maintain the aircraft for the Iranians. Meanwhile, the Defense Attache Office at the American embassy learned about the incident and dispatched a military intelligence officer to write an Intelligence Information Report. The report would be sent to a standard distribution list that included the White House.

As an American attache written intelligence report documented, the incident was notable because of

The credibility of many of the witnesses, such as an Iranian air force general, qualified aircrews, and experienced tower operators.
Radar confirmed visual sightings. Three separate aircraft witnessed the same object.
There were physiological effects on crew members, such as loss of night vision because of the brightness of the object.
An inordinate amount of maneuverability displayed by the objects.

A follow on National Security Agency report stated the agency was studying the incident as an example of a hostile force using jamming technology on American-made equipment.

Oddities of a Different Sort

Things become weird when one looks into the factors that influenced the night’s events.

First, the astronomy. On that night, Earth was passing through the maximum peaks of the Southern Piscids and Gamma Piscids meteor showers. At the same time, Jupiter was at its brightest of the year, and a few days after it and the Moon were conjoined in the sky, and was in the sky north of the city. These events are factors, as the pilots based at Shahrokhi Air Base rarely flew night sorties, and that these two flights were the only night missions that the pilots flew during the American technicians’ entire deployment. This opens up the possibility of pilots not knowing exactly what they were seeing during the chase, such as Jupiter and meteors being mistaken for UFOs.

Additionally, per a report in Skeptoid, the American tech crew noted Jafari’s plane had a documented history of chronic and unresolved equipment electrical outages. Nazeri’s account was only made known in 1994. (Note: the Skeptoid report claimed only the second plane had reported equipment failures that night, though the original attache report indicated both planes had problems when encountering the object.)

Finally, and little reported, was that original attache report stated something was recovered when the Iranians went to the third object landing site: an C-141 transport aircraft emergency crash beacon. Those aircraft were noted to have issues with turbulence related to the mountains around Tehran.

So what happened?

Taking these points into account creates oddities. The sky that night was active with natural astronomical events, and the pilots had little night exposure, yet for citizens of Iran and the air traffic controller, Jupiter waxing and waning would be a known thing, as would multi-day long meteor showers. People definitely observed something peculiar and odd in the sky, but who knows what that was. Both planes had difficulties when encountering the object, yet the American tech crew report only indicated one plane having documented troubles beforehand. Finally, the presence of the C-141 beacon is weird, as there were no indications of an Iranian C-141 losing its beacon that night, yet there it is. How the heck is the normal beacon there, and what is its association with the reported landing light?

So what happened? This is a genuine case of the unknown. We have an event; we have some factors that could explain away some of the incident, but not all of it. Yet, we have little to no evidence to say anything else. Any assessment requires numerous assumptions while being extremely low confidence. Tehran’s 1976 incident is one of those mysteries that may never be solved.

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Fifty Years Since the Tehran UFO Incident