Two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom jets intercepted a UFO over Tehran in September 1976. Both lost all instrumentation on approach. When one pilot tried to fire, his weapons system went dead. A U.S. DIA report reached the White House within weeks.
Just after midnight on September 19, 1976, the control tower at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran began receiving calls from residents of the Shemiran neighborhood in the north of the city. Something was in the sky - bright, multi-colored, and moving in a way that did not match any aircraft the callers recognized. Controller Hossein Pirouzi logged their descriptions: a shape with two large lights at either end and a smaller red light orbiting its midsection.
The Imperial Iranian Air Force scrambled two F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors. Both pilots experienced total instrumentation failure as they approached the object. One of them attempted to fire a missile. His weapons system went dead.
The account is not rumor or secondhand testimony. It is recorded in a four-page Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report that was declassified through the Freedom of Information Act and formally distributed - upon completion - to the White House, the Secretary of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the National Security Agency. The DIA’s evaluating officer wrote that the encounter was “outstanding” and described it as “a classic that meets all the criteria for a ufological study.”
At approximately 1:30 AM, Lieutenant Yaddi Nazeri and his weapons officer launched in the first F-4 to investigate. As Nazeri closed to within 25 nautical miles of the object, he lost all instrumentation and UHF/intercom communications simultaneously. He turned the aircraft back toward base. His instruments returned the moment his distance from the object increased.
General Youssefi, the air force commander monitoring the situation from the ground, estimated the object was traveling at speeds close to Mach 3 - roughly 2,300 miles per hour - beyond the performance envelope of any aircraft known to be operating in the region at the time. A second F-4 was scrambled minutes after the first returned.
Major Parviz Jafari, a squadron commander, took the second aircraft with First Lieutenant Jalal Damirian as weapons officer. Jafari acquired a radar return at 27 nautical miles. The return was, according to the DIA report, roughly the size of a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker - a large air refueling aircraft. The object maintained a consistent distance at 25 nautical miles as Jafari closed in, as if pacing him.
Jafari attempted to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile. At the moment of the attempt, the power to his weapons control panel cut out completely. He could not fire. Seconds later, his UHF communications failed. Then his internal intercom. In a detail that the DIA report specifically noted, even his ejection seat - a mechanical backup designed to function independently of the aircraft’s electronics - became unresponsive.
A secondary object then detached from the primary object and moved toward Jafari’s aircraft at speed. He described it later as “almost as if it were a missile.” He performed a sharp negative-G dive to evade. The secondary object reversed course, returned to the primary object, and the two merged. Jafari’s instruments and communications recovered after the object departed.
The DIA compiled its assessment in October 1976, drawing on debriefings of Jafari, Damirian, and radar operators at Mehrabad Airport conducted by U.S. military attachés in Tehran. Multiple ground-based radar stations had independently tracked the object. The instrumentation effects - loss of communications and weapons systems, with full recovery upon withdrawal - were consistent across both aircraft and both crews.
The distribution list for the resulting intelligence cable was unusually extensive for a field observation: the White House, the Secretary of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force Chief of Staff, the CIA, the DIA, and U.S. commanders across Europe and the Middle East.
The document is accessible today through the NSA’s declassified records collection. The Black Vault, which archives FOIA releases, holds the original filing. Researchers and analysts have examined it for decades without arriving at a consensus conventional explanation.
General Jafari - he reached that rank before retiring - testified publicly about the encounter at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in 2007, alongside other former military officers who had reported UAP encounters. His account was consistent with the intelligence documentation prepared thirty years earlier.
Most UAP cases from this era exist as civilian testimonies without institutional corroboration. The Tehran encounter has something different: a classified intelligence cable. A named primary witness who later testified under his own name before a public audience. Radar confirmation from multiple independent stations. And a formal assessment by U.S. intelligence that described the encounter - without hedging - as a legitimate case worthy of serious study.
The Pentagon’s current UAP investigation office, AARO, was not established until 2022, forty-six years after the incident. The Tehran files were produced under a completely different institutional framework, in a different geopolitical era, by analysts who had no reason to expect the documents would ever be read by the public.
Fifty years on, they are. The case, in the government’s own characterization at the time, remains unresolved.
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