Tehran 1976: the F-4s that lost their instruments

Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. It is just after midnight on the nineteenth of September 1976, and telephones are ringing in Tehran. According to the message American intelligence later received[dia-1976], residents were calling in about a bright light in the sky. The calls came from Shemiran, the district on the northern edge of the city; the file is careful to note that Shemiran is where the calls came from, not a radar site[dia-1976].

The Imperial Iranian Air Force decided to look. From Shahrokhi air base it launched a first F-4, and then a second[dia-1976]. The first jet, flown according to the record by Lt. Jalal Damirian[dia-1976], could see the light from far off. As it closed in, the report says[dia-1976] its instruments and radio failed. The pilot broke off, and as he turned away, the systems came back.

The second F-4 went up with Lt. Parviz Jafari[dia-1976] at the controls. In the teletype's account[dia-1976] this crew got a radar lock, on a return they compared to the size of a large tanker aircraft. As they closed, the light moved, flashing in colours too bright to make out a shape behind them.

Then, the message says[dia-1976], a second, smaller object seemed to come away from the first and head toward the jet. The pilot tried to fire a missile. At that moment his weapons control panel went dead and he lost communications. He turned and dived away. The smaller object, according to the account, went back and rejoined the larger one. A further object appeared to descend toward the ground and light up an area below.

The timeline in this file sums the night up in a single plain line: two jets launched after civilian calls, and crews report equipment failures near the light[dia-1976].

I want to stop here, because the next sentence matters more than any of the drama. Everything you have just read comes from one document, and it is not an Iranian document. The file doesn't say what the pilots felt, what they said on the radio, or what the controllers saw on their screens. It says what an American office was told afterwards.

So before we ask what was in the sky, we have to ask who wrote it down, and when.

The paper trail begins a few days after the night, in an American office in Tehran.

The core document is a teletype from the US Defense Attaché Office in Tehran to the Defense Intelligence Agency[dia-1976] about the 19 September sighting. The cover and inline images in this dossier are pages from that message. The analysis records that it was drafted by Lt. Col. Olin R. Mooy[dia-1976]. The attaché's office did not fly that night. It relayed what Iranian sources told it, and the file's own summary says so: a US intelligence message relaying the Iranian account[dia-1976].

The message names the Iranian officers. Beside the two pilots, it mentions Gen. Shapour Azarbarzin of IIAF operations[dia-1976]; the dossier notes his name has sometimes been given wrongly as Abdullah, and lists the exact spellings and roles as still to be checked against the primary record[dia-1976].

The second document is stapled to the first, and it is the reason this case is famous. It is a Defense Information Report Evaluation, credited to Maj. Roland B. Evans[dia-1976]. An evaluation sheet grades how useful an intelligence report is. In the NICAP transcription and notes[nicap-docs], this one is described as rating the Tehran message highly. The date on that form, October 1976, is still on the file's to-verify list[dia-1976].

The third step is release. The timeline gives 31 August 1977[nicap-docs] as the date the message came out under the Freedom of Information Act, and the Black Vault holds a copy of that FOIA release[blackvault-dia-teletype]. I should flag a wrinkle: the file's notes on the images also mention a later release of the same pages, so the exact stamp is listed for verification[blackvault-dia-teletype]. The Black Vault also keeps a case file gathering DIA, NSA and other FOIA records[blackvault-iran] on the incident.

The fourth item is not a primary record at all. In October 1978, Capt. Henry Shields published a dramatized retelling of the Mooy account in the MIJI Quarterly[nsa-iran-case], later part of the NSA's UFO release. It is vivid and widely quoted, and the file classes it plainly as secondary.

Line them up and the trail is thin in a particular way. It is all American paper about an Iranian event, two steps removed from the cockpits. The next step in the story came from one of those cockpits, three decades later.

For thirty years, the Tehran case lived on paper. The pilots were names in a teletype; the night was a relayed account[dia-1976] and an evaluation sheet[nicap-docs].

Then one of the names stood up. On 12 November 2007, retired general Parviz Jafari, pilot of the second F-4[jafari-npc-2007], described the 1976 chase on a panel at the National Press Club in Washington. A man who had been a lieutenant in the message was now a retired general, telling it in his own voice.

That is the turn, and I want to be precise about what kind of turn it is. Jafari's appearance gave the case a face. It did not give it a new document. He spoke more than thirty years after the night[jafari-npc-2007], and the file has no radar recording, flight log or Iranian report to set his account against. A testimony that late is valuable and fragile at the same time.

The other side has been waiting patiently, and it deserves a full hearing. The sceptic Philip Klass argued that the bright light was most likely a planet or star[klass-1983], and that the F-4s had a history of maintenance problems. On his reading, the failures need not be linked to the light at all[klass-1983]. The jets were complex, the night was dark, and a brilliant point of light low in the sky has fooled trained crews before. The exact page of his Tehran discussion is still to be confirmed[klass-1983].

It is worth noticing where each side stands. The highly graded evaluation says the report was useful and credible as intelligence[nicap-docs]. It does not say the object was a craft. Klass says the failures could be coincidence. He did not have the maintenance logs either. Both readings work from the same thin pile.

And there is the 1978 retelling[nsa-iran-case], which travelled widely and added drama. Part of the job here is simply to keep it in its place: secondary, later, not a witness.

So the official story never really tilted toward an answer. It tilted toward a person, and a person cannot settle what the paperwork left out.

Here is what the documents do not settle.

• The Iranian file. What is documented is an American message and its evaluation sheet[dia-1976]. What is not documented, as the analysis puts it, is the radar recordings or the Iranian investigation[dia-1976]. Does the Iranian Air Force file still exist? If it does, it has never surfaced.
• The equipment. The record reports instrument, radio and weapons-panel failures, but the open question is whether those failures were ever independently checked[dia-1976]. Klass's maintenance argument[klass-1983] and the encounter reading both depend on that missing check.
• The light itself. A planet or star, as Klass proposed[klass-1983], or something else. The file contains no positional data that would test either.
• The paper details. The FOIA release stamp[blackvault-dia-teletype], the date of the evaluation form[dia-1976], and the spelling and roles of the Iranian officers[dia-1976] are all on the file's to-verify list.
• Memory and drama. How much of the later public story comes from the 2007 testimony[jafari-npc-2007], and how much from the dramatized 1978 retelling[nsa-iran-case], rather than from the teletype?

I keep coming back to one simple fact. The best-known thing in this dossier is not the light, but a grading sheet. US intelligence received a detailed account, circulated it and rated it[nicap-docs]. That tells us the report was taken seriously. It does not tell us what the object was, or that it caused anything.

The grade and finding stay where the file puts them, documented and unexplained, because the pieces that would close it have never come out of the drawer. The message, the evaluation and the timeline are below.