CASE HISTORY

The Tehran UFO and the Iranian Fighter Pilot Who Chased It

A historical perspective on the 1976 incident

Ryan Sprague
Point of Contact
Published in
23 min readSep 4, 2022

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It was September 18th, 1976. At approximately 10:30pm in the city of Tehran, Iran, a phone call came into Hussain Perouzi, a night shift supervisor at the air traffic control tower at the Mehrabad Airport. At the time, he was training a small group of air controllers when he answered the phone. The voice of a concerned woman came over the receiver, as she reported to him that she was seeing a strange object, like a sun in the sky, about a thousand meters above her. The colors of the object changed from blue to orange, to red, to yellow. It was interesting, but these types of misidentifications happened all the time. Perouzi was quick to discount the event, telling the woman that they didn’t have any aircraft in that area. He would tell her that it was most likely just a bright star in the night sky.

Mehrabad Airport — Credit: Navid22 / Wikimedia Commons

But then another call came in. This witness would describe a similar object. But this time, they would report that they saw it changing different colors from blue, to yellow, and to red. It then split in two, and would eventually merge…

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