The Tehran F-4 incident

In the early hours of 19 September 1976, after citizen calls about a bright light over Tehran, the Imperial Iranian Air Force scrambled an F-4 Phantom from Shahrokhi Air Base. As it closed on the object, the aircraft reportedly lost instrumentation and communications, recovering them on turning away. A second F-4 acquired the object on radar with a return likened to a tanker aircraft; when a smaller object detached and approached head-on, the pilot, Lt. Parviz Jafari, attempted to fire an AIM-9 and reported his weapons panel and communications dead until the object fell back. A further detached object appeared to descend to the ground and glow; the crews landed with night vision difficulties, and a ground search the next day found nothing at the site.

The case would be one more foreign press item but for its paper trail. A U.S. Defense Attaché Office message from Tehran recounting the incident was distributed to the White House, State Department, CIA and NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency's internal evaluation — released under FOIA — graded the report high on every axis, calling it 'a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon': credible multiple witnesses, three sets of electromagnetic effects on separate aircraft, and radar corroboration.

Skeptical analyses attribute the primary light to Jupiter and the equipment failures to a known maintenance history in the Iranian F-4 fleet; Jafari, later a general, maintained his account until his death. No agency has published a resolution. The DIA evaluation sheet — praise from an intelligence body with no stake in the answer — is the reason the case anchors the documentary record outside the United States.