The Tehran Incident: The Night Fighter Jets Chased a Light and Their Weapons Went Dark
Shortly after midnight on 19 September 1976, the telephone in the control tower of Tehran's Mehrabad Airport began to ring. Residents in the northern districts of the city were reporting a strange, brilliant light hanging in the sky — something that pulsed and shifted, nothing like a star or an airliner. The duty controller, Hossein Pirouzi, had no scheduled traffic to explain it. When the calls reached the Imperial Iranian Air Force, a deputy commander, General Yousefi, stepped outside, saw the object with his own eyes and ordered a fighter into the air.
At 01:30 an F-4 Phantom II took off to intercept. According to the accounts recorded afterward, when the jet closed to roughly 25 nautical miles from the light, its instruments and communications failed. The pilot broke off the approach — and his systems came back to life.
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