UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (15 page)

CHAPTER 9

Dogfight over Tehran

by General Parviz Jafari (Ret.), Iranian Air Force

A
t about 11:00 p.m. on the evening of September 18, 1976, citizens were frightened by the circling of an unknown object over Tehran at a low altitude. It looked similar to a star, but bigger and brighter. Some called the air traffic control tower at Mehrebad Airport, where Houssain Pirouzi was the night supervisor in charge. After receiving four calls, he went outside and looked through his binoculars in the direction people had reported. He saw it, too—a bright object flashing colored lights, and changing positions at about 6,000 feet up. It also appeared to be changing shapes.

Pirouzi knew there were no planes or helicopters in the vicinity that night. At around 12:30 a.m., he alerted the Air Force command post. Deputy General Yousefi, who was in charge at the time, walked outside, and he also saw the object. He decided to scramble an Air Force Phantom F-4 II jet from Shahrokhi air base, located outside of Tehran, to investigate. The F-4 carried two people, Captain Aziz Khani and First Lieutenant Hossein Shokri, the navigator.

I was a major and the squadron commander at the time, and one of my pilots, who was among the first men alerted in the area, took off immediately. I left my house and headed for the base in order to be responsive to the operation there.

The F-4 was up when I arrived at the base, and both Khani and Shokri had seen the object and were attempting to chase it. But it was moving close to the speed of sound, so they couldn’t catch it. When they came within a closer distance to it, all of their instrumentation went out, the radio was garbled, and they lost communication. After the F-4 moved away again, it regained all the instruments and could resume communications.

About ten minutes later, I was ordered to take off in a second jet to approach the object, which I was piloting. It was now about 1:30 a.m. on September 19. First Lieutenant Jalal Damirian, my second pilot in the backseat, operated the radar and other equipment; we called him “the backseater.” When we took off, the object looked just like what had been reported. It was so brilliant, flying at a low altitude over the city, and then it started climbing.

Captain Khani had approached the Russian border, and at that point he was told to turn back. When he turned around, he said that he could see the object in front of him at twelve o’clock. I said, “Where exactly do you see it?” He said, “Over the dam, close to Tehran.” I told him, “You go home, I’ll take care of it.” As he headed back, I looked over, and then I saw it.

It was flashing with intense red, green, orange, and blue lights
¹
so bright that I was not able to see its body. The lights formed a diamond shape—just brilliant lights, no solid structure could be seen through or around them. The sequence of flashes was extremely fast, like a strobe light. Maybe the lights were only one part of a bigger object, which we couldn’t see. There was no way to know.

I approached, and I got close to it, maybe seventy miles or so in a climb situation. All of a sudden, it jumped about 10 degrees to the right. In an instant! Ten degrees … and then again it jumped 10 degrees, and then again.… I had to turn 98 degrees to the right from my heading of 70 degrees, so we changed position 168 degrees toward the south of the capital city.

I asked the tower whether they had it on radar. The operator replied, “The radar is out of order. It’s not operational right now.” All of a sudden my backseater, Lieutenant Damirian, said, “Sir, I have it on radar.” I looked on the radar screen and saw the marker. I said, “Okay, brake lock and repaint it.” This was to make sure it wasn’t a ground effect or a mountain that we were picking up on the radar. We now had a good return on the screen, and it was at 27 miles, 30 degrees left; our closing speed was 150 knots and in a climb.

We kept it locked on with radar. The size on the radar scope was comparable to that of a 707 tanker.

At this moment, I thought this was my chance to fire at it. But when it—whatever it was—was close to me, my weapons jammed and my radio communications were garbled. We got closer, to 25 miles at our twelve o’clock position. All of a sudden it jumped back to 27 miles in an instant. I wondered what it was. I was still seeing that giant, brilliant diamond shape with pulsating, colored lights.

Then I was startled by a round object which came out of the primary object and started coming straight toward me at a high rate of speed, almost as if it were a missile. Imagine a brightly lit moon coming out over the horizon—that’s what it looked like. I was really scared, because I thought that maybe they had launched some kind of projectile toward me. I had eight missiles on board, four operated by radar and four heat-seeking ones. The radar was locked on to the larger, diamond object, and I had to make a very fast decision as to what to do. I realized that if this moonlike, second thing
was
a missile, it would have some heat associated with it. So I selected an AIM-9 heat-seeking missile to fire at it.

I attempted to fire, and looked at the panel to confirm my selection of the missile. Suddenly, nothing was working. The weapons control panel was out, and I lost all the instruments, and the radio. The indicator dials were spinning around randomly, and the instruments were fluctuating. At this point, I was even more frightened. I couldn’t communicate with the tower, and had to scream to talk to my backseater. I thought, if it gets closer to me than four miles, I will have to eject before impact to avoid being in the area of the explosion. To prevent this, I had to turn.

So I made a shallow turn to the left to avoid being impacted by the object heading toward us, which was in sight at my four-o’clock position. It came about four or five miles from our aircraft, and then it stopped there at the four-o’clock position. I looked out on my left side briefly to find out where I was over the ground. A second later, when I looked back, the object wasn’t there! I said, “Oh my God,” and Lieutenant Damirian replied, “Sir, it’s at seven o’clock.” I looked back at seven o’clock and there it was. I once again saw the main thing up there, too, and then the smaller object flew gently underneath it and rejoined the primary one.

This all happened quickly, and I didn’t know what to think. But in a few seconds, another one came out! It started circling around us. Once again, all the instruments went out and the radio was garbled. Then, when it moved away, everything became operational again, and all the equipment worked fine. This one, too, looked sort of like the moon—a round, bright light.

I reported to the tower. General Yousefi was listening on the line, and the operator said, “The order is to come back.” We started to head toward the military air base, and then I noticed that one of these objects was following us on our left side during the descent. I reported this to the base. As I made a turn for the final approach, I saw another object right ahead of me. I called the tower and asked, “I have traffic ahead of me, what is it?” He said, “We have no traffic.” I said, “I am looking at it right now; it’s at my twelve-o’clock position at a low altitude.” He still insisted that I didn’t have any traffic, but there it was, looking like a thin rectangle with a light at each end and one in the middle. It was coming toward me, but when I started turning left for the landing, I lost sight of it. My backseater kept watching and said, “As you were turning, I could see a round dome over it with a dim light inside of it.”

I put the ears down and was focused on making my approach to the base, distracted and worried by all these things happening around me. But it still wasn’t over. I looked to my left side and I saw the primary, diamond-shaped thing up there, and another bright object came out of it and headed directly toward the ground. I thought I would see a huge explosion any moment when it hit, but that did not happen. It seemed to slow down and land gently on the ground, radiating a high bright light, so bright that I could see the sands on the ground from that far, about fifteen miles.

I reported it to the tower and they said that they saw it, too. Now the general, still listening in, ordered me to approach and take a look. So I retracted the gear and the flaps and turned the aircraft. They told me to go above it to see if I could see what it was. As soon as I got about four or five miles from it, once again the radio was garbled and the panel went out; it was the same exact thing all over again. I tried to get out of that area because they couldn’t hear me on the radio, and I told them, “This happens every time I get close to these things.” I thought I really shouldn’t have gone there, but since it was an order, I did it. Finally the general said, “Okay, come back and land.”

We could hear emergency squawk coming from the location where the object had landed on the ground. A squawk sounds like the beeping from an ambulance or a police car, and its purpose is to help find people when they have ejected from an airplane, or if there is a crash landing. It’s a locator tone that says “I’m here.” In this case, the squawking from the UFO was reported by some civil airliners nearby.

After landing, I went to the command post, and then we went to check in with the tower. They said the main thing in the sky had just disappeared, suddenly, in an instant.

First thing that morning, I gave a report at headquarters, and everybody was in the room, all the generals. During this, an American colonel, Olin Mooy, a U.S. Air Force officer with the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group posted in Tehran, sat to my left, and he was turning pages over on his clipboard and taking notes. When I explained how I couldn’t fire the missile because my panel went out, even though I tried, he said, “You’re lucky you couldn’t fire.” Afterward, I wanted to talk to him, and ask if this kind of thing had been seen before, and I had other questions. I looked for him, but he was nowhere to be found.

Next they then took me and Lieutenant Damirian to the hospital. We had a round of tests, especially blood tests. When I was about to leave, a doctor came running after me and said, “Don’t worry about this, but your blood is not coagulating.” So they took another blood sample, and then said, “Okay, you can go.” They ordered us to return to the hospital every month for four months for an examination and more blood tests.
²

I then flew in a helicopter with a pilot and toured the exact area where the bright object had landed. The emergency squawk came from this area, and we flew right over the spot, but there was nothing. Nothing. We landed there, and I walked around to see if there was any sign of heating or burning, or splashing. Still nothing. Everything was smooth and untouched. Yet despite all that, the beeping was sounding. This was very confusing to us.

There were some small houses and gardens nearby and we asked the residents if they had seen anything. People said they had heard a sound the previous night after midnight, but that was it. The emergency squawk continued for days, and it was heard by the commercial airlines in the area, too. That really bothered me.

A group of scientists questioned us over a period of time, but it was all on paper, in letters sent to headquarters, and not in person. They called me in repeatedly from the base and I would go to headquarters and read the papers and answer more questions, again and again. Iranian officials examined and tested the two F-4s for radioactivity, and found none.

Later, a once-classified memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), written by Lieutenant Colonel Mooy, whom I had tried to find after the briefing, was released in America through the Freedom of Information Act. It documented the event in great detail, for over three pages, and it was sent to the NSA, the White House, and the CIA. Another document, dated October 12, 1976, by Major Colonel Roland Evans, provided an assessment of the case for the DIA. It said that “This case is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon.”

To make that point, Evans listed some important facts in his DIA document: There were multiple highly credible witnesses to the objects from different locations; the objects were confirmed on radar; the loss of all instruments happened on three separate aircraft—a commercial jet as well as our two F-4s; and “an inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs.” The evaluation form said that the reliability of the information was “confirmed by other sources” and the value of the information was “high.” It said the information would be potentially useful. This shows the U.S. government took this information very seriously, and it was clear to me at the time that this information was being kept secret there. But within a relatively short time these documents were released. There is likely additional material sitting in U.S. government files, but no one has told me anything more.

In my country, even the Shah of Iran took an interest. I met with the shah when he visited my squadron at Shahrokhi air base in Hamadan and asked about the UFO. He called a meeting attended by a number of generals along with the pilots involved in the encounter. When the base commander told the shah that I was the pilot who had chased the UFO, the shah asked me, “What do you think about it?” I answered, “In my opinion they can not be from our planet, because if anyone on this planet had such power, he would bring the whole planet under his own command.” He simply said, “Yes,” and told us this was not the first report he had received.

To this day I don’t know what I saw. But for sure it was not an aircraft; it was not a flying object that human beings on Earth can make. It moved way too fast. Imagine: I was looking at it about seventy miles out and it jumped all of a sudden 10 degrees to my right. This 10 degrees represented about 6.7 miles per moment, and I don’t say per second because it was much less than a second. Now you can try to calculate the speed it would take for it to move from a stationary position to this second point. This needed very, very high-level technology. Also, it was able to shut down my missile and instruments somehow. Where it came from, I don’t know.