The Tehran F-4 Incident

Major Parviz Jafari tried to fire a missile at the smaller object closing on his F-4, and his weapons control panel went dead. The smaller object had separated from a brilliant main craft he had locked on radar, a return one telling gives as the size of a 707. His radio jammed and he dived away. Another smaller object came down on a mountaintop and shone there. One telling has the main object follow his jet back towards Mehrabad and make a low pass, during which the base lost power. The night began shortly after midnight on 19 September 1976, when air traffic control and citizens reported a brilliant object over Tehran. A first F-4 was scrambled and lost instrumentation and communications as it approached, recovering them only when it turned away.

What is on the record

Seven claimants are listed across three channels and eleven videos. Jafari counts once, though the tellings call him Major Jafari, Parviz Jafari and Hussein Jafari. General Sabahat and Hossain Perouzi are named, along with a brigadier general whose name the tellings render as Giuseppe or Usempi. The other three entries are groups: the F-4 crews, the Tehran airport controllers and citizens. One telling cites the night as a failed attempt to bring a craft down. Another says officers who seemed American arrived the next morning and told the pilots not to talk.

Some tellings add that a Defense Intelligence Agency memo rated the case a classic UFO report and that a US satellite tracked an anomalous return in the area. Brad Sparks questioned whether the satellite caught the object or the jets. Those are the sources' claims and not documents the archive holds.

Four items sit in the file: a Department of War paper on UFOs and defence, a CIA FOIA document and two UK Ministry of Defence files. All four are classed as reporting and none is the DIA memo. The Ministry of Defence files are Britain's own UFO paperwork and have no established connection to a night over Tehran.

Why it sits where it does

Tehran grades L3 on testimony alone, with no primary document behind it in this archive. Three of the seven are groups rather than single people, but pilots, controllers and officers still converge on the same night. What closed on those two aircraft over Tehran is not resolved here.