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.[47]
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.
And I can’t doubt what happened. It wasn’t only me. The pilot in my backseat, the two pilots in the first aircraft, the men in the tower, people from headquarters, General Yousefi who was on duty in the Air Force command post—they all saw it. Many people were concerned about us on the ground. And we also captured it on radar from our cockpit. Nobody can say I imagined it. The radar was locked on the object and could determine its size, because we practice refueling 707 tankers, and the return of the UFO on radar indicated they were about the same size.
I have two regrets: One is that we did not have a camera in the plane to get a picture of the UFO; second, that because I was excited and sometimes frightened, I didn’t think to try and call them on the radio, and ask, “Who are you? Please communicate with us!” Later on I wished I had done this. In any case, I hope someday we develop that technology here so we can travel easily to other planets and poke around, too.
CHAPTER 10
Close Combat with a UFO
by Comandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas (Ret.), Peruvian Air Force
On April 11, 1980,[48] at 7:15 a.m., a Friday morning, I was stationed at the La Joya Air Force Base in the Arequipa region of Peru. It was like any other day. There were approximately 1,800 military personnel and civilians at the base, and we were beginning to get ready for our daily exercises.
Even though I was only a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, I already had eight years of military flying experience. I was quite precocious as a military pilot. By nineteen I was flying combat missions, and at twenty I was selected to test-fly Peru’s newest supersonic Sukhoi jet. Having won quite a few trophies as a pilot, I was also known as a top aerial marksman with great skill at shooting from the air.
Little did I know that this expertise would lead to my being selected for a highly unusual and unexpected mission on that routine morning. Along with my air squadron, I was ready at that moment for instant takeoff, as we always are. A chief of service arrived in a van and got out to tell us there was an object that looked like some kind of balloon suspended in the air toward the end of the runway. We stepped outside to see it, and then we knew what we had to do. Four of us pilots stood outside observing the object. The second commander of the unit, Commander FAP Carlos Vasquez Zegarra, ordered that one of the members of the air squad take off and bring the object down. Our chief turned to me and said, “Oscar, you be the one to go.”
The round object was about three miles (five kilometers) away from us, hanging at an altitude of about 2,000 feet (600 meters) above the ground. Since the sky was absolutely clear, the object shone due to the reflection of the sun.
This “balloon” was in restricted air space without authorization, representing a grave challenge to national sovereignty. All civilian and military pilots use aerial charts on which highly protected airspace, such as that over our base, is clearly marked. They all know where these restricted areas are located, and no one ever flies in them, under any circumstances. This thing had not only appeared in such an area, but it was not replying to communications sent on universally recognized frequencies, and it was moving toward the base. It had to come down. La Joya was one of the few bases in South America that possessed Soviet-made warfare equipment, and we were concerned about espionage.
Back in 1980, Peru did not have any aerostatic balloons of any type, such as weather balloons, or passenger balloons. We knew that this was therefore something strange, and it wasn’t from our country. We were familiar with meteorological balloons, but they had antennae and cables and flew only above 45,000 feet. This was lower. We had no idea where it was from, and it was coming closer. We had no option but to destroy it.
The squad commander, Captain Oscar Alegre Valdez, ordered me to take off in my Sukhoi-22 fighter jet to intercept the balloon before it got any closer to our base. I immediately headed over to my jet, without taking my eyes off the thing in the sky, and went over in my mind each step I had to take for this mission. Since the object was within the perimeter of the base and my plane was armed with 30 mm shells, I decided to attack from the northeast to the southeast. This way, the sun would be to my left and I could avoid impacting the base with my weapons.
After takeoff, I made a turn to the right and reached an altitude of 8,000 feet (2,500 meters). I then positioned myself for the attack. Zeroing in on the balloon, I reached the necessary distance and shot a burst of sixty-four 30 mm shells, which created a cone-shaped “wall of fire” that would normally obliterate anything in its
