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[46] 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
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
