In some comments recently, I've recommended Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Pilots, Generals and Government Officials Go On the Record. But admittedly I don't know very much about the UFO phenomenon, so it occurred to me that I ought to try to check the book's presentation against the efforts of skeptical debunkers. The case I chose to look into was the one that impressed me the most, the so-called "dogfight over Tehran" that took place in 1976. What follows is a series of excerpts from Kean's book interspersed with excerpts from the best debunking effort I could find online, along with my comments.
Chapter 9 of Kean's book is devoted to the incident. It was written by General Parviz Jafari (Ret.), formerly of the Iranian Air Force under the Shah. Presumably Jafari's account was translated into English and perhaps cleaned up a little, but it stands as the most thorough first-person report of the incident that I've seen.
For the debunking account, I chose "The Tehran 1976 UFO," by Brian Dunning, posted on the website Skeptoid. This article appears to be the primary source for Wikipedia's entry on the subject.
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Jafari: At about 11:00 PM on the evening of September 18, 1976, citizens were frightened by the circling of an unknown object over Tehran at a low altitude. It looked similar to a star, but bigger and brighter. Some called the air traffic control tower at Mehrebad Airport, where Houssain Pirouzi was the night supervisor in charge. After 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 6000 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 AM, 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 F4 II jet …
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Skeptoid: The story goes that sometime before midnight on September 19, four Tehran residents began telephoning the local Mehrabad airport stating that they saw a bright light in the sky. Mehrabad's radar was under repair and was not operational, so General Yousefi phoned Shahrokhi Air Force Base at Hamadan, 275 kilometers west southwest of Tehran. They showed nothing on radar. Yousefi went outside and saw the bright light for himself. He then ordered a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighter plane, piloted by Lt. Yaddi Nazeri plus a backseat weapons officer, to have a look.
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MP: The Skeptoid story makes no mention of flashing colored lights, changing positions or changing shapes, or "circling ... at a low altitude." It also omits the role of the night supervisor, Pirouzi, skipping up to chain of command to a deputy general.
But what was this bright light that resulted in calls to the Air Force base, and got the attention of the night supervisor and the deputy general, to the point where a fighter plane had to be scrambled?
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Skeptoid: [As for] that persistent light in the sky that prompted the phone calls, aroused Yousefi's curiosity, and led the pilots on their merry chase across the skies ... journalist Philip Klass suggested that it was the planet Jupiter, an explanation echoed by aerospace researcher James Oberg.... The F-4s ... saw the light just where Jupiter would have been.... Yousefi and the telephone witnesses all described the light as similar to a star but much brighter. Considering the fact that Jupiter was in the sky, my own conclusion is that it's almost certain that Jupiter was responsible for some percentage of what was reported that night, though not necessarily everything.
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MP: It should be pointed out that "journalist Philip Klass" and "aerospace researcher James Oberg" are both well-known as hard-core skeptical debunkers of UFOs. This doesn't mean we should ignore their opinions, but it might have been helpful if Skeptoid had pointed this out, rather than characterizing them in neutral terms.
In any event, I find it hard to believe that experienced pilots, ground personnel, and the deputy general would all mistake Jupiter for a possible enemy aircraft. But I suppose such things have happened.
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Jafari: When [the first flight crew] came within a closer distance to [the UFO], 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.
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Skeptoid: [According to Klass, a] Westinghouse tech at Shahrokhi confirmed that only the second F-4 was reported to have experienced any electrical problems during the flight; the first F-4 was never sent in for maintenance.
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MP: Skeptoid, per Klass, says the first F-4 did not suffer a loss of instrumentation. Jafari says it did.
At any rate, Jafari and his "backseater," Lieutenant Jalal Damirian, took off at about 1:30 AM.
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Jafari: 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.… It was flashing with intense red, green, orange, and blue lights 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.
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Skeptoid: Jafari reported that its lights consisted of alternating strobes of blue, green, red, and orange, so fast that all four were visible at once.
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MP: Skeptoid's summary agrees with Jafari's up to a point, but Skeptoid never addresses the reported appearance of the UFO. The strobing varicolored lights are mentioned in this one sentence and never again. There is no mention at all of the intense brightness of the lights, which surely exceeds anything one would see from a normal celestial object. The diamond shape, which Jafari mentions more than once, also goes unmentioned in the Skeptoid piece.
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Jafari: 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.…
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MP: There's nothing to quote from Skeptoid regarding this detail, which isn't mentioned, even though it appears to have impressed Jafari as much as any other aspect of his experience.
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Jafari: 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 radar. We now had a good return on the screen, and it was a 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.
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Skeptoid: The compelling radar lock obtained by Jafari's backseat weapons officer [has been interpreted to mean] there had to be something up there. Maybe there was; most of what these pilots did was to intercept enemy MiG-25 fighters on surveillance missions, whether Jupiter was in the sky or not. But there were also two other possibilities. Note that Jafari's radar was known to be defective, or at least in need of adjustment. [A] McDonnell Douglas supervisor [at Shahrokhi] noted that the weapons officer "could have been in manual track or something like that and not really realized it." Whichever of the three possibilities was true, it's not necessarily a fact that a radar lock meant something was there. Maybe there was; maybe there wasn't....
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MP: Since I'm far from being an expert on radar, I don't know how plausible the alternate explanations are. I doubt that a MiG-25 would be anything close to the size of a 707 tanker, though. Later in his account, Jafari elaborates, "The radar was locked on the object and we 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."
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Jafari: 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.
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Skeptoid: The McDonnell Douglas tech at Shahrokhi noted that the second F-4 had a long history of intermittent electrical outages that the IIAF had never been able to fix. He was personally called in to adjust that F-4's radar about a month after the event. Both techs stated that the Shahrokhi base was notorious for low quality work and poor record keeping.
So we have reason to expect that Jafari's F-4 would have had electrical problems regardless of whether he was under attack by a UFO or not....
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MP: Anything is possible, but what makes the equipment outages significant in this case is that they seemed to occur only when Jafari was getting ready to fire on the UFO, as we will see. It's the timing of the outages (assuming Jafari's account is accurate) that makes them so interesting. Skeptoid does not really address this issue. In fact, the debunking article does not even mention this first instance of Jafari's systems going out. The lines I just quoted address the second such instance, described below.
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Jafari: 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.…
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Skeptoid: Twice a year, the Earth's orbit takes us through the debris trail left by Halley's Comet, causing meteor showers. We also pass through various other clouds and trails at the same time each year.... On September 19, we are at or near the maximums of two minor annual showers, the Gamma Piscids (PIE-sids) and Southern Piscids, and at the tail end of a third shower, the Eta Draconids. There was more than enough expected meteor activity to account for all of the reports of falling lights and rapidly moving bright objects.
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MP: So the "round object which came out of the primary object and started coming straight toward me at a high rate of speed," looking like "a brightly lit moon," was a meteor. This could be true only if Jafari is a remarkably poor observer.
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Jafari: 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.
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MP: Skeptoid presents this as the first time Jafari's systems went on the blink, when according to him it was the second time. Again, it's the coincidence of the systems failing whenever the plane poses a potential threat to the UFO that's most interesting.
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Jafari: 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 objects 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 look worked fine. This one, too, looked sort of like the moon – a round, bright light.
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MP: Skeptoid's meteorite explanation seems less persuasive when these details are considered. This third outage of Jafari's instruments isn't mentioned.
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Jafari: We started to head towards 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.… 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 looked to my left side and 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 bright light, so bright that I could see the sands on the ground from that far, about 15 miles.
I reported it to the tower and they said that they saw it, too…. 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 exact same it was the same exact thing all over again.
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Skeptoid: Moments later another bright object came out and went straight down into the ground, leaving a bright trail, and lighting up a large 2-3 kilometer wide area....
Jafari prepared to land at Mehrabad rather than return to Shahrokhi, and during approach experienced further intermittent communications and navigation failures.
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MP: The first sentence quoted above apparently refers to the soft landing witnessed by Jafari, though it seems to be placed too early in the chronology. The claim that the object slowed down and landed gently (behavior hardly characteristic of a meteorite) is not mentioned. Later, Skeptoid describes this object as "the one that descended to the ground with a flash." A "flash" does not seem to match Jafari's description of "radiating a bright light," which I would take to mean a sustained output of light.
The second sentence is Skeptoid's entire summary of Jafari's return flight. There is no mention of the object ahead of Jafari, or on his left side, or of Lieutenant Damirian's observation, or of the control tower's verification of the soft landing.
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Jafari: 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.
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Skeptoid: [US Air Force Lt. Col. Olin] Mooy noted that the beeping transponder appeared to be from an American C-141. These large transport aircraft carried such transponders designed to be released in the event of a crash, but they'd been having problems with the beepers being ejected simply by turbulence over the mountains just north of Tehran.
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MP: In itself, this sounds reasonable enough, although again, the coincidence in timing is curious.
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Jafari: 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.
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MP: This isn't mentioned in the Skeptoid article.
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Jafari: [A] 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 2F fours; and “an inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs.” The evaluation form said that the reality without reliability of the information was “confirmed by other sources” and the value of the information was “high.”
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MP: Evans' report isn't mentioned by Skeptoid. I should point out that "Major Colonel" is not a rank in the US military, as far as I know. Other sources list Evans sometimes as a major, sometimes as a colonel. The report clearly exists, regardless of any confusion about the author's rank.
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Jafari: 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.
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Skeptoid: Once we look at all the story's elements without the presumption of an alien spaceship, the only thing unusual about the Tehran 1976 UFO case is that planes were chasing celestial objects and had equipment failures. There have been many cases where planes had equipment failures, and there have been many cases where planes misidentified celestial objects. Once in a while, both will happen on the same flight....
What was the Tehran 1976 UFO? I don't know, but there's insufficient evidence to convince me to get excited about it.
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MP: I'm not sure that Skeptoid has actually looked at "all the story's elements." Essentially, the skeptical position is that the pilots and some observers on the ground mistook Jupiter for an aircraft, and that Jafari and his weapons officer mistook meteorites for probes or weapons launched by an aircraft. The radar lock was probably some kind of technical malfunction. The repeated equipment failures that occurred whenever Jafari tried to fire on the UFO were another mechanical problem. The first plane that went up may not have suffered any equipment failures, even though Jafari reports that it did. Details such as the diamond-like appearance of the craft, or the soft landing of a very bright object ejected by the craft, or the strobing lights in different colors that were blindingly bright, are apparently not important enough to consider.
Skeptoid does make some good points. For instance, we're told, "Klass learned from the American technicians ... that the Shahrokhi pilots never flew at night [and] these two night sorties chasing the UFO were the only known night flights during the whole time the technicians were stationed there." A lack of nocturnal flying experience could call the pilots' observations into question.
Overall, though, Skeptoid's explanation strikes me as about as far-fetched as anything the most uncritical UFO enthusiasts might dream up. It's not quite on the level of Men in Black's famous "swamp gas from a weather balloon ... trapped in a thermal pocket [that] reflected the light from Venus," but ... it's getting there.
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