UFOs - Leslie Kean [43]
Military pilots and their air-traffic controllers are trained to obey orders and not ask too many questions, and the system is well practiced in the arts of both reporting sensitive information and maintaining its confidentiality. Within the armed services, pilots are more likely to file reports as a matter of duty, free of the risks that commercial pilots face, because they know that such information will likely be restricted. When Air Force pilots are faced with a UFO, there are often other witnesses from a second aircraft or a base below, and information can be quickly relayed up the chain of command. These officers know that other aircraft can readily be scrambled as support in response to any unusual engagement. And they can defend themselves instantly if necessary.
Knowing this, one naturally wonders: Have military pilots ever shot at UFOs? The shocking answer is yes.
In November 2007, I was fortunate to meet and spend a few days with two pilots who have both engaged in lengthy “dogfights” with targeted UFOs. Retired Iranian general Parviz Jafari was a major in the Iranian Air Force in 1976 when he was ordered by the Air Force Command to man his Phantom F-4 II jet and approach a luminous UFO observed over Tehran. Several times during a wild cat-and-mouse chase, he and his backseat navigator attempted to launch a Sidewinder missile at additional smaller objects heading their way, but at the moment of fire their equipment shut down, returning to normal only when their jet moved away. The main object had been pursued by a second Air Force jet, was recorded on cockpit radar, and was observed from the ground by a general and experienced air navigation crews.
A second, similar event occurred four years later, in 1980, over an air base in Peru, when then Lieutenant Oscar Santa María Huertas was ordered to intercept what was at first believed to be an aerial spying device. He fired at the balloonlike object and barraged it with machine-gun shells, but they had no effect. He quickly realized this was something unknown, a UFO. Three different times he locked on to the object to fire when it was stationary, but each time, at the last instant, it shot straight upward. This UFO was witnessed in broad daylight by over a thousand soldiers and staff at the La Joya military base.
General Jafari and Comandante Santa María1 met for the first time at our 2007 press conference in Washington, D.C., also attended by General De Brouwer, Captain Ray Bowyer, and a number of other contributors to this book. This was an opportunity to present statements publicly, but it was also a unique opportunity for these men to converse over the course of a few days, forming the basis of an international network.
As the co-organizer and media contact for the event, and host for our panelists, I was privy to many private discussions over morning coffee and some that lasted late into the night. I will never forget the evening two days before the press conference when General Jafari and Comandante Santa María shook hands and sat down together for the first time. They had just arrived at the Washington Hotel after long journeys from very distant parts of the globe. These two unassuming gentlemen joined a small group of us at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, weary but relieved to be among friends and excited about the momentous press event that lay ahead. General Jafari, sitting to my right, was affable and animated, and soon was responding to a host of questions from those at our table about the 1976 incident. Neither Jafari nor Santa María knew much about the other’s experience, and the conversation that followed was unplanned and spontaneous, with no tape recorders or cameras present to curtail its intimacy.
Comandante Santa María did not speak English, but shortly after Jafari began his account, a Spanish-speaking couple at the next table confessed that they couldn’t help eavesdropping,