The Tehran UFO incident of 1976

Early on 19 September 1976, people in Tehran reported a bright light overhead, and Iranian Air Force F-4 jets were sent up to intercept it.

Wikipedia says the air traffic controller Hossein Pirouzi, in the Mehrabad Airport tower, took calls from at least four civilians about a shining object over Tehran's Shemirān district. Pirouzi said he saw it too, and described a rectangle with a large light at each end and a little red light moving around its middle.

Skeptoid's Brian Dunning tells it with General Yousefi at the centre. Mehrabad's radar was out for repair, so Yousefi called Shahrokhi Air Force Base, 275 kilometres away at Hamadan, whose radar showed nothing. He went outside, saw the light himself, and sent up an F-4 Phantom flown by Lt. Yaddi Nazeri with a weapons officer in the back seat.

Major Parviz Jafari, who commanded a squadron, flew another F-4 against the object. In his contribution to a book by Kean, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus reported in The New Yorker in 2021, Jafari wrote that its coloured lights were so bright he could make out no body, and that his weapons and radio were jammed as he closed in. US intelligence sources inside Iran sent Washington an account of the event in a classified memo of four pages.

WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg gives the same date and says a pair of Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II fighters went up after something people on the ground compared to a star, only far brighter.