ΠΟΛΥ ΣΗΜΑΝΤΙΚΗ ΠΕΡΙΠΤΩΣΙΣ
Bob Pratt
A Plain old nuts and bolts case that yielded strong evidence of the existence of UFOs as real physical objects occurred in Tehran, Iran, on the night of September 18, 1976, back when the Shah was still alive and in power. It was a case that a Pentagon military intelligence analyst called a "classic that meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon."
In
an hours-long drama, first one Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom
jet fighter and
then a second one chased a UFO across the Iranian skies at up to twice the
speed of sound.
At
least one of the pilots tried to fire a missile at the UFO but the UFO was
somehow able to jam not only his weapons control system but his navigational
and communications systems as well. It also was able to neutralize the navigational
and communications systems of the second jet and an airliner that was passing
through the area.
At
one time, the UFO even sent out a smaller object to chase one of the jets
back to Tehran before breaking off and returning to the mother ship.
The
incident began about ten thirty in the evening when Hossain Pirouzi was on
duty at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport with three air controller trainees. Pirouzi,
thirty-five, was then night shift supervisor at the air traffic control tower.
"A
lady telephoned and said, 'I see a strange object, like a sun in the sky,
about a thousand meters above me,” said Pirouzi. "She said
the colors changed from blue to orange to red to yellow. I told her we didn't
have any aircraft in that area. Our radar was not working. It was out of operation
for maintenance, so we had nothing on radar either.
SEES
OBJECT THROUGH BINOCULARS
"I
did nothing about it then because I was busy with over-flying aircraft and,
frankly, I thought she was seeing a star. About ten minutes later another
lady called from the same general area of northeast Tehran and said, 'I was
walking on the roof of my house with my child and I suddenly saw, and I am
still seeing now, a strange object, lighting up and changing direction and
sometimes dividing in two and joining together again.’
“I
began to wonder what was happening. I had three trainees on duty with me and
asked them if they could see anything. They couldn't.
"Then
came a third call, this time from a man living in the northeast area, and
he said, 'I'm sure I’m seeing an object that is not an aircraft, what is it?'
It was now after eleven and I was busy for the next ten minutes with traffic.
Then one of the trainees took another phone call, which was like the others.
"I
went out onto the terrace with my binoculars and after about five minutes
I saw the
object in the northeast part of Tehran. It was a rectangular shape about five
miles away at a height of about six thousand feet. The right end was blue,
the left end was blue and in the middle was a flashing red light. The object
was seesawing up and down and moving towards the north very, very slowly.
"Suddenly,
it appeared to disappear and then suddenly re-appear a mile further on just
seconds later. I could see it this time as bright as the sun. It was all yellow,
like a star, but much bigger. Then it appeared to me to be like a starfish.
I can't be sure of the colors but there were blue, orange, red and yellow
lights. I gave the binoculars to one of the others
on duty and he said he saw the object as a half-circle in the same colors.
EMERGENCY
SIGNALS HEARD
"We
had no aircraft expected to land, although around this time several aircraft
were due to cross into our flight information region. They started to report
by radio that they could hear emergency signals coming from an automatic
aircraft distress transmitter.
“The
first report in was a BOAC airliner, who called and said, 'Do you have a crashed
aircraft in your area? We are receiving an automatic signal on 121.12 megacycles.'
We said we had no crashed aircraft or missing ones in our area nor had any
made a forced landing.
"Then
a Swissair, a Lufthansa and an Iran Airlines plane all reported hearing the
emergency signal. I decided to report the whole thing to the air force base
because by now I was getting really worried."
At
twelve thirty in the morning Pirouzi phoned the local air force headquarters
and reported what was going on. He said he could see the object himself at
six thousand feet. The air force officer on duty phoned Brigadier General
Abdullah Yousefi, the senior officer in charge that night.
"The
general himself called me," said Pirouzi. “He went out onto the porch
of his house and said to me on the telephone, 'Yes, I can see something. It
isn’t a star.’ So he ordered one of the Phantom jets on standby
at Hamadon, also known as Shahrokhi air base, two hundred miles away, to scramble.
“This
was about ten minutes flight time away. One took off and arrived over Tehran
at one a.m. and came under my control. The pilot reported he was over Tehran
and I gave him radio instructions. At this time the object was at about fifteen
thousand feet.
PILOT
DESCRIBES OBJECT
"I
was getting instructions from General Yousefi and passing them on to the pilot
by radio. I told him to go higher and he said, 'Yes, I can see it – are you
sure it’s not an aircraft?' I told him to get close and describe its shape
but to do no more.
“A
few minutes later he reported passing the speed of Mach Two and radioed, ‘I’m
going Mach Two and I'm fifty miles behind the object. I can’t catch him. It's
no use to follow any more.’ He described the object as rectangular shaped.
"I
told him to return to Tehran and he headed back. When he was about a hundred
and fifty miles away and still coming back, the object suddenly appeared over
Tehran again. It had beaten him back and was now ahead of the Phantom jet
fighter. The pilot radioed, 'I see the object ahead of me, the same shape
as before.'
"By
now the pilot was about fourteen miles away from the tower and he reported
that every time he came close to the object it affected his radio and all
his instruments. 'My navigational aids are not working,' he radioed and asked,
'What was that emergency call?'
“I
told him that four other planes had already heard the emergency call and he
said, 'Yes, I am getting some emergency signals now.' But every time he got
close to the object his navigation aids went out and his radio went dead but
his engines were working normally and the lights on his instrument panel were
working. One time as he was talking to me, his radio went dead.
SECOND
PILOT TAKES OVER
"Later
I ordered him to close again and when he came within twenty miles of the object,
he lost all of his electronic equipment. Finally he said he would have to
return to base because his fuel was running low. At that point the object
was about fifteen miles from me at about twelve thousand feet.
"By
now a second jet had been scrambled by the air force and the pilot called
the other on the radio and said, 'You go back to the base. I'll follow the
object. ' The first pilot asked, 'Can you see the object?' and the second
pilot, who was still a hundred miles away, said, 'Yes I can.'
"The
second plane then got within twenty-five to thirty miles of the object and
the pilot suddenly reported, 'I've lost all my navigational aids. I cannot
get near the object because I've lost every aid I had. What can I do?'
"General
Yousefi ordered him to remain over Tehran, circling at fifteen thousand feet.
At this time the object was below him. The general could hear all our radio
conversations and I was passing on his orders.
"Then
the second pilot reported, ‘I can see his lights. He keeps changing his position
very fast. I cannot follow the path of the object. I can see his position
but cannot follow his track. He appears here, suddenly he appears there and
I can’t track him.' We could all see the object with the naked eye.
"The
pilot decided to come back to land but when the object was about ten miles
away he radioed, 'It has divided in two and an illuminated object has separated
and is following me! It keeps coming towards me!’
"He
swung his jet around in a tight turn and the light followed him, and as they
swept over the tower in Tehran the object that was chasing him was by now
five hundred feet above and just behind him. I saw the light for the first
time, though only for a few seconds.
‘TOO DANGEROUS’ TO GO CLOSER
“Then
the pilot reported that the light had gone back and rejoined the main object.
This was about fifteen miles away from the control tower and the pilot reported,
'Now they have joined together.'
"The
pilot said it was too dangerous to go any closer and he decided to come in
and land. He reported that every time he got close his navigation and all
his electronic systems went crazy.
"Then
he radioed, 'OH! The illuminated object has separated again and is going toward
the ground. Now he is settling on the ground. Can you see him?'
"I
couldn’t because we weren't high enough. The pilot radioed that the object
had settled on the ground southeast of Tehran near a place called Rey and
he said, 'The main object is orbiting slowly over the illuminated object on
the ground and it is so bright I can see stones on the ground. It is like
daytime.’”
The
UFO finally disappeared shortly after four in the morning, becoming smaller
and smaller as it climbed ever higher until it was gone from sight.
That
is only part of the story, as obtained by John Checkley, then a National Enquirer
reporter based in London, and Vahe Petrossian, a freelance journalist then
living in Tehran. The military was releasing no details of the incident and
Pirouzi, the air traffic controller, was the only one who would talk about
it at that time.
Additional
interesting details were provided in a classified message sent to
the Pentagon by Colonel Frank B. McKenzie, the defense attaché at the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran. It said in part:
"A second F-4 was launched at 1:40 a.m. The backseater
acquired a radar lock on at 27 NM (nautical miles), 12 o'clock high position
with the rate of closure at 15 mph. As the range decreased to 25 NM the object
moved away at a speed that was visible on the radarscope and stayed at 25
NM.
"The size of the radar return was comparable to that
of a 707 tanker. The visual size of the object was difficult to discern because
of its intense brilliance. The light that it gave off was that of flashing
strobe lights arranged in a rectangular pattern and alternating blue, green,
red and orange in color. The sequence of lights was so fast that all the colors
could be seen at once.
"The object and the pursuing F-4 continued a course to
the south of Tehran when another brightly lighted object, estimated to be
one half to one third the apparent size of the moon, came out of the original
object. This second object headed straight toward the F-4 at a very fast rate.
The pilot attempted to fire an AIM-9 missile at the object but at that instant
his weapons control panel went off and he lost all communications (UHF and
interphone). At this point the pilot initiated a turn and negative G dive
to get away. As he turned the object fell in trail at what appeared to be
about 3-4 NM. As he continued his turn away from the primary object, the second
object went to the inside of his turn and then returned to the primary object
for a perfect rejoin.
"Shortly after the second object joined up with the primary
object, another object appeared to come out of the other side of the primary
object going straight down at a great rate of speed. The F-4 crew had regained
communications and the weapons control panel and watched the object approach
the ground, anticipating a large explosion. This object appeared to come to
rest gently on the earth and cast a very bright light over an area of about
2-3 kilometers.
"The crew then descended from their altitude of 26,000
to 15,000 and continued to observe and mark the object's position. They had
some difficulty in adjusting their night visibility for landing so after orbiting
Mehrabad a few times they went out for a straight in landing. There was a
lot of interference on the UHF and each time they passed through a magnetic
bearing of 150 degrees from Mehrabad they lost their communications (UHF and
Interphone) and the INS fluctuated from 30 degrees to 50 degrees. The one
civil airliner that was approaching Mehrabad during this time experienced
communications failure in the same vicinity (Kilo Zulu) but did not report
seeing anything.
"While the F-4 was on a long final approach the crew
noticed another cylinder shaped object (about the size of a T-bird at 10,000)
with bright steady lights on each end and a flasher in the middle. When queried,
the tower stated there was no other known traffic in the area. During the
time that the object passed over the F-4, the tower did not have a visual
on it but picked it up after the pilot told them to look between the mountains
and the refinery.
"During daylight the F-4 crew was taken out to the area
in a helicopter where the object apparently had landed. Nothing was noticed
at the spot where they thought the object landed (a dry lake bed) but as they
circled off to the west of the area they picked up a very noticeable beeper
signal. At the point where the return was loudest was a small house with a
garden. They landed and asked the people within if they had noticed anything
strange last night. The people talked about a loud noise and a very bright
light like lightning.”
This
latter information did not become available until nearly a year after the
incident, although much of it was published in the November 1976 newsletter
of
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a civilian UFO
organization that is now defunct. NICAP had obtained a copy of McKenzie's
classified message from some still-unrevealed source inside the Pentagon.
The
document itself was finally declassified and released, largely through the
persistent efforts of Charles Huffer, an American who then taught mathematics
at the U.S. Armed Forces High School in Berlin. He spent much of his summer
vacation in 1977 filing Freedom of Information requests and appeals and going
from office to office in the Pentagon until his efforts paid off.
Long
before the document (part of which is shown at left below) became available,
Lieutenant
General Abdullah Azarbarzin confirmed some of the details. At that time he
was deputy commander in chief of operations for the Imperial Iranian Air Force.
I
phoned him on January 3, 1977, and he acknowledged that the incident had occurred
and promised to give me more details later. I was to call him the next day
but got assigned to something else late in the day and John Cathcart, who
was then my editor, phoned him instead.
Some
of the things Azarbarzin said were rather startling. He acknowledged that
both jets had locked onto the object with their radars but had received very
strong jamming, as had an airliner passing through the area at the time. One
Phantom pilot got close enough to see the size, shape and color of the UFO.
"According
to the report from one of the pilots who was almost crossing under the UFO,
he explained the shape of the cockpit and the kind of lighting and all these
things," General Azarbarzin told Cathcart.
"It
was quite circled and just like a saucer and the shape of the cockpit was
a half ball, and the color of lighting inside the cockpit was different than
what it had on the outside. It was close to yellow. It was not like any vehicle
we have up in the sky."
GIVE
INFORMATION TO U.S. AIR FORCE
Then
he dropped a shocker. John Cathcart asked him if he had come up with any information
as to what UFOs were.
“No,
we don't know yet," General Azarbarzin replied, adding: "Of course,
we passed all the information on to the U.S. Air Force."
Asked
to elaborate, General Azarbarzin said: "We have this procedure, if we
have some information on UFOs we just exchange it and we did it. We gave all
the information to the U.S. Of course, that was the request from the U.S.
We have given all this information to our MAAG. I think they send it to the
organization in the United States."
MAAG
refers to the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group that was then posted
in Tehran. It was then under the command of General Robert Secord, who later
became one of the prominent figures in the Iran-Contra investigation.
General
Azarbarzin said that whenever the jets got within fifteen miles or so of the
UFO it was somehow able to temporarily knock out most of the electronic systems
aboard the planes.
“The
first time it happened, the pilot said, 'I have everything locked on but when
I reached firing range the whole system went out,’” said the general. "That
means the fire control, radio, navaids, even the intercom between the two
crew members."
He
explained that "fire control" meant the missile and weapon control
system but stoutly denied that either pilot was ever ordered to shoot at the
UFO.
‘NO
DOUBT’ JET CREWS SAW A UFO
"Why
should we?" he asked. "Would you do that in the United States? It
was harmless. No reason to shoot them. We wanted to get as close as we could."
General
Azarbarzin admitted the incident was "extremely strange and unexplainable.
I can say it is because what we found out – this technology they were using
for jamming was something we haven't had before and we don't have it. It doesn't
exist, because it was a very wide band and this jammer could jam different
bands, different frequencies, at the same time. It was very unusual."
The
UFO could hover and then move at extremely high speeds, he said.
"We
were estimated at Mach Three," he said, meaning three times the speed
of sound. "Very fast acceleration, especially when going from zero speed
to maybe Mach Three. Pretty fast. And this is something you don't find in
any other flying object."
He
said there was no doubt the Phantom crews saw a UFO. "We didn't know
if it was a UFO in the beginning, but then later on we just wanted to get
as close as we could to get more information. We had no intention of destroying
it."
On
the same night, the crew of a 707 jetliner reported a near collision with
a large, bluish object over Lisbon, Portugal, and in Morocco an object described
sometimes as a disc and sometimes as a cylinder was seen flying slowly over
eight cities. The Moroccans were so worried that they requested assistance
from the United States in determining what the objects were.
Stories
on the Portugal case were published almost immediately, but the Moroccan sightings
did not become known generally in the United States until the State Department
released documents under the Freedom of Information Act in June 1978. The
documents were several messages between the U.S. Embassy in Rabat and the
State Department in Washington.
PROBABLY A METEOR, KISSINGER SAYS
The
final message was a two-page reply from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
stating that the U.S. Government was no longer involved in studying UFOs and
suggested that what the Moroccans had seen was probably a meteor or part of
a decaying satellite.
When
the Pentagon finally declassified and released the Iran UFO message from Colonel
McKenzie, it made interesting reading even though most of the details of
the encounter were already known.
For
the first time, we learned that McKenzie had sent the message to the Defense
Intelligence Agency, which had re-transmitted it to the Central Intelligence
Agency, the National Security Agency, the Secretary of State, the White House,
the chiefs of the Air Force, the Navy and the Army as well as to the commander
in chief of our European forces and the commanders of several European bases.
I
tried to find out from the Pentagon if it was routine to send UFO messages
to the CIA, NSA, White House and all the others, but the only answer I got
was that it is routine to send intelligence messages to these points, with
the stress on the word "intelligence."
With
the name of the man who sent the message now known, I phoned Colonel McKenzie
in Tehran and reached him at his home. I wanted to find out from him why the
UFO message was sent and whether it was a common thing to send UFO messages
to the Pentagon.
"No,
it's not necessarily common, I guess," he replied in an easy-going, disarming
way. "Part of our job over here is reporting on unusual things and a
UFO report is unusual regardless of whether you believe in them or not. This
thing had such big play in the papers over here that it was almost unreal."
REPORTS
TO PENTAGON REQUIRED
For
many years, American and Canadian military forces operated under JANAP 146
(E), or the Joint Army, Navy and Air Force Procedures for reporting "vital
intelligence sightings." One portion of it requires reports to the Pentagon
on any UFO incidents involving military installations, equipment or personnel
and includes two and a half pages of specific details to check for on unidentified
objects.
I
asked McKenzie if he was familiar with JANAP 146 (E) and was this why he sent
the UFO message to the Pentagon.
No,
he said, he wasn’t familiar with it and added: "I sent it
in because it was an unusual incident and not necessarily in relation to or
in response to any requirement."
I
asked how he obtained the information for his report and he replied:
"Well, we read the newspapers, we talked to various people around town,
other attachés. It was really quite a topic of conversation for three or
four days.”
The
partial report published by NICAP indicated he had talked to one of the Iranian
pilots, but McKenzie said:
"I
didn't talk to the Iranian pilots. As a matter of fact, I didn't talk to anybody
who did talk to him, per se. I got my information from, oh, various sources.
I got a lot of it from the newspapers, in fact."
I
said he had an awful lot of details that weren't in the newspapers.
"Yeah,
I can agree with that," he said. "In fact, if you set all the newspapers
down most of it is in there but some of the detail probably isn't. If I had
a real source that was giving me all this information I'd be hard pressed
to tell you who it is but I don't have a one-source type of guy."
But,
I said, certainly you investigated to some extent before you sent the message
to the Pentagon to make sure your information was as accurate as possible?
"Well,
I guess I would do that with anything," he replied.
A
REVEALING ‘MEMO OF RECORD’
Colonel
McKenzie had said he had no "one-man source" for his information
and had no ties with MAAG. However, the Air Force eventually released another
document on the Iran affair.
It
was a "Memorandum of Record," written by Lieutenant Colonel Olin
R. Mooy,
the U.S. Air Force executive officer for MAAG. He was one of two U.S. Air
Force colonels who sat in on the debriefing of First Lieutenant Jalal Damirian
and Second Lieutenant Hossein Shokry, the crew of the second F-4 Phantom jet
(similar to the one shown here) that went up that night.
It
is interesting that Colonel McKenzie's classified message to the Pentagon
on the UFO incident says exactly the same thing, word for word, as Colonel
Mooy's report written after the debriefing.
In
December 1977, the Iran case took another strange twist. A scientist that
I will call “X” claimed to have heard some startling new information. “X”
was flying to Chicago on an airliner and fell into a conversation with the
man in the next seat, who turned out to be a very high-ranking Iranian air
force officer in civilian clothes. He was based temporarily at a U.S. Air
Force base in Texas.
After
discussing a number of other things, “X” asked about UFO sightings in Iran
that had been mentioned recently in the newspapers. “X” said the officer began
talking about the September 18, 1976, case and claimed that the UFO had hovered
over the military air base next to Mehrabad for forty-eight hours and seemed
to be communicating with the field on the air traffic control radio band.
He
said no one could understand the language, which was described as conversational,
and the Shah of Iran became personally involved. He had a team of linguists
flown in from another country to try to decipher the language. They were unsuccessful.
SHAH
OF IRAN ALLEGEDLY INVOLVED
The
officer told “X” that all aircraft were kept away from the object because
of intense heat it was giving out. He said he himself had gone up in a helicopter
and had come within a mile of it when the helicopter's engine began malfunctioning
and they returned to the ground. He said he and others aboard the helicopter
suffered minor sunburn type burns.
“X”
took down the man's name and Texas address, but later attempts to locate him
were unfruitful. The man had supposedly returned to Iran for a brief visit
but never returned to Texas.
The
Iranian newspapers had carried UFO stories for several days in a row, reporting
on other incidents as well as the one the night of September 18. But none
of the stories mentioned a UFO being in the sky for forty-eight hours. One
story, however, did say that a scientific group from Germany had quickly arrived
on the scene, but the team was never identified nor was it learned what they
were doing.
In
trying to confirm this report, we eventually managed to obtain a copy of the
tape recordings made in the air traffic control tower that night. But there
was nothing in them of the nature described by “X”.
Then,
with my editor's approval, I wrote to General Azarbarzin, requesting permission
to visit Tehran and interview the officers who were in the Phantom jets that
night as well as any others involved in the case. I explained that even though
we had published a story already, it was such a dramatic event that we wanted
to do a follow up with the officers personally involved. To my knowledge,
their story had never been published and such a story would be highly interesting
I
was being truthful, to a point. I really did want to talk to the crewmembers.
But we were much more interested in trying to confirm the report about the
UFO's alleged attempt to communicate and the Shah's becoming personally involved.
TRIP
TO TEHRAN POSTPONED TOO LONG
In
April 1978, General Azarbarzin replied by letter, saying I could talk with
the men and asked me to advise him when I would be in Tehran. By that time,
I was working for another editor, Bill Dick, who was away in London on a special
assignment. He asked me to wait until he got back before going to Tehran.
Unfortunately,
he was there for more than two months and by the time he got back and I had
time to go to Iran, the country was embroiled in the political unrest that
led to the Shah's going into exile. We decided to abandon the idea.
Whether
the Shah was ever involved, we probably will never know. OMNI magazine
reported that when American astronauts visited Tehran he discussed the UFO
incident with them. After he went into exile and while he was living in Cuernavaca,
Mexico, I wrote to him asking permission to talk to him about the incident.
I never received a reply.
Late
in 1978, a new, revealing document about the case came to light. Todd Zechel,
then a UFO researcher and one of the founders of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy
(CAUS), uncovered it. He obtained a copy of a military intelligence analyst's
evaluation report of the Iran incident as reported by Colonel McKenzie.
Zechel
informed me that the analyst was Air Force Major Roland B. Evans, who was
then stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. I phoned Major
Evans in January 1979.
“This
was a classic case because everything that was bizarre about it was confirmed
with real sources," he told me. "We don't have this capability to
jam all these systems simultaneously.”
Major
Evans, then forty, had served as a military capabilities analyst for the Defense
Intelligence Agency in Washington for four years. He was then re-assigned
to Offut AFB in July 1978, where he was serving as an electronic warfare officer
flying in an RC-l35 reconnaissance aircraft with the 343rd Reconnaissance
Squadron.
‘AN
OUTSTANDING REPORT!’
"I
was an intelligence analyst," said Major Evans. "This (Iran incident)
came through as a routine intelligence analysis. I was given the report because
my field is electronic warfare. The DIA intelligence community is broken up
by region. Within each region we have some specialties. I was in the Middle
East region and I was an air defense expert. I was given this particular case
because of my electronic warfare and air defense field.”
I
asked him if he knew UFOs were also reported in Portugal and Morocco the same
night as the Tehran case. He didn't, he said, and added: "Morocco is
in North Africa, another branch, and of course Lisbon would be in the western
European branch. My chances of talking with those analysts were reasonably
slim."
In
his evaluation of the Tehran case, filed October 12, 1976, and approved by
a civilian superior, Clifford J. Souther, Major Evans stated:
"An outstanding report! This case is a classic which
meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon:
"(a) The object was seen by
multiple witnesses from different locations (i.e. Shemiran, Mehrabad, and
the dry lake bed) and viewpoints (both) airborne and from the ground.
"(b) The credibility of many of the witnesses was high
(an air force general, qualified aircrews and experienced tower operators)
"(c) Visual sightings were confirmed by radar.
"(d) Similar electromagnetic
effects (EME) were reported by three separate aircraft.
"(e) There were physiological
effects in some crew members (i.e., loss of night vision due to the brightness
of the object).
"(f) An inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed
by the UFOs.”
The
UFO's ability to jam several systems simultaneously greatly impressed Major
Evans, who said this was the only UFO case he had evaluated in his four years
with the DIA.
"We
had several other messages that someone would attribute to UFOs," said
Major Evans. "I didn't pay much attention to them, but I felt this particular
case was very interesting. Here we had a case where we had a visual sighting
from three different locations, three different angles, by highly qualified
people and they were confirmed by radar from three different points.
"The
electromagnetic effects were very interesting to me as an electronic warfare
officer, and the fact that this thing was so highly maneuverable impressed
me quite a bit. As an electronic warfare officer, I would love to go into
combat with the capability of turning off my opponent's weapon system panel
at will, and to be able to figure out when he's going to turn it on, and to
cut off his communications.
AIR
FORCE CRITERIA USED IN EVALUATION
"I
was impressed that he (the UFO) did even more than jam the jets' systems.
He actually turned them off. He made them completely useless. He didn't just
foul them up. Jamming is sort of like a lot of static on your radio. It's
where we override their electronic emissions, but in this case he didn't override
the emissions. He turned them off, made them completely inoperable.
"It's
rather frightening, as a matter of fact.”
I
asked what criteria he used to evaluate the case.
"The
criteria I used were the criteria the Air Force used, or at least my impression
of what the Air Force and the government used, to discount most UFO information,"
Major Evans replied. "That is, their criteria had always been that visual
sightings were no good unless you confirm them by radar and vice versa. Radar
phenomena happen all the time and if you can't confirm them visually, they
are not really valid.
"Then,
too, the maneuverability sort of eliminates planets and fishing trawlers and
such, and other aircraft just flying over and satellites. And the electromagnetic
effects, the fact that this happened to three different aircraft – the two
F-4s at two different times under the same circumstances and the fact that
a commercial airliner just happened to be passing by that was also affected
in the area where the F-4s were – indicated that this was not just peculiar
to the two aircraft. The airliner was an innocent bystander that also received
some of the same effects.
"To
me, there were too many circumstances that fit in, indicating this thing was
no an aberration, it was not swamp gas or anything else. There's just no other
way to explain it. It was real. It was there.
"That's
why I call it a classic."
‘TECHNOLOGY
WOULD BE USEFUL’
Concerning
some of the incredible capabilities demonstrated by the UFO, Major Evans said:
"Yes,
it does seem to be beyond the capabilities of any of the military systems
that I'm aware of. As far as its being extraterrestrial, I don't know. That's
getting a little out of my field. This electronic capability was very interesting
to me, and it was far more than any country I know of is capable of."
In
his evaluation, Major Evans indicated that the value of the information contained
in the report was "high" and "potentially useful" and
was in the highest category of reliability.
"The
technology would be useful," he explained. “My main thought at the time
was that if this was a Soviet system, we've got a lot of homework to do. My
first thought was not of anything extraterrestrial, just the fact that there
is something out there with capability far beyond ours. That is definitely
of high interest, even though at the time it did not appear to be hostile.
There didn't appear to be any immediate threat, but the prospects were rather
frightening, especially if it was a Soviet system. We should definitely start
playing catch up.”
Major
Evans said he did not understand why the government didn’t continue its investigation
of UFOs after the Air Force ended Project Bluebook in 1969.
"I
always thought it was puzzling that the whole investigation was dropped,"
he said. "It has been a mystery to me as to why they weren’t
investigating the whole time.
"I'm
assuming there were other reports similar to the one I analyzed. I've read
of other cases of Air Force aircraft having similar problems and I'm sure
that this was not an isolated report. I don't think this was an isolated classic
report, although I can't verify that. I just have that feeling.
"UFOs
notwithstanding, it seems like these electromagnetic effects should be investigated.
It's a mystery to me that we're not looking for these effects, because this
affects lives."
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