UFOs - Leslie Kean [79]
And, it says, during these pursuits, the attempts to “detain” the objects were also unsuccessful. Detain? This is peculiar; how would the military detain one? Chances are, the only way to detain such a craft would be to physically disable it, or shoot it down. The Post statement suggests that the Air Force may have tried to do just that, but we don’t know, and have not yet been able to find out.
We do know a great deal, however, about what happened in 1976 over Tehran, and about the 1980 incident in Peru, partly because of U.S. government interest in both cases, which led to the filing of American reports with intelligence agencies. One can assume that the cases of Jafari and Santa María must have been of particular interest not only because the pilots took military action against the UFOs, but also because they actually interacted with them. In both instances, there was an interplay of actions and response over an extended period of time, a type of communication, between a vulnerable man in a small plane and an unknown, highly technological flying machine. Neither pilot knew where it was from, or why it was there. But during this lengthy engagement, both were able to observe the objects at very close range.
The national security aspect is obvious—or perhaps global security would be a more apt phrase. In their attempts to shoot down the UFO, neither pilot was successful, but for different reasons. Santa María penetrated the object the first time with a barrage of shells, which had absolutely no effect, but in subsequent attempts the object shot up vertically extremely fast and avoided additional fire. In Jafari’s case, missile firing mechanisms were rendered inert several times at the moment he was about to launch his missiles. Both UFOs demonstrated an uncanny, astonishing trait: They repeatedly evaded attack at the very last moment, just when the pilots locked on to the target and were ready to fire, as if they somehow “knew,” or registered in some way, when the pilots were about to push the button. These last-minute evasions seem too perfectly timed, and were repeated too many times, to be coincidental. Both cases are among the best illustrations on record of some kind of intelligent control by a UFO. Despite the distance between them, the objects appeared to be highly cued in to the actions of the aircraft with which they were engaged. And neither UFO retaliated or harmed the jets, despite their aggressive maneuvers. One would surmise that our government would clearly have been interested in such remarkable events, despite claims to the contrary. And it was. The fascinating FOIA documents tell the real story.
The 1976 Iranian incident was a major news event in Tehran, and even American television was on the scene. As General Jafari described earlier, U.S. Air Force officer Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy had attended the debriefing the day after the incident. It was Mooy who penned a three-page U.S. government memorandum titled “UFO Sighting,” which was classified and distributed as a teletype from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to the secretary of state, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the White House, and the Air Force, Army, and Navy. This highly unusual report13 spells out in detail the information presented at the briefing that Jafari attended, including a description of the primary object and the secondary, smaller objects; the loss of on-board instrumentation in conjunction with attempts to fire; and an apparent landing of one object.