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residents if they had seen anything. People said they had heard a sound the previous night after midnight, but that was it. The emergency squawk continued for days, and it was heard by the commercial airlines in the area, too. That really bothered me. oe A group of scientists questioned us over a period of time, but it was all on paper, in letters sent to headquarters, and not in person. They called me in repeatedly from the base and I would go to headquarters and read the papers and answer more questions, again and again. Iranian officials examined and tested the two F-4S for radioactivity, and found none. Later, a once-classified memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), written by Lieutenant Colonel Mooy, whom I had tried to find after the briefing, was released in America through the Freedom of Information Act. It documented the event in great detail, for over three pages, and it was sent to the NSA, the White House, and the CIA. Another document, dated October 12,1976, by Major Colonel Roland Evans, provided an assessment of the case for the DIA. It said that "This case is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon." To make that point, Evans listed some important facts in his DIA document: There were multiple highly credible witnesses to the objects from different locations; the objects were confirmed on radar; the loss of all instruments happened on three separate aircraft— a commercial jet as well as our two F-4S; and "an inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs." The evaluation form said that the reliability of the information was "confirmed by other sources" and the value of the information was "high." It said the information would be potentially useful. This shows the U.S. government took this information very seriously, and it was clear to me at the time that this information was being kept secret there. But within a relatively short time these documents were released. ean) sae a4 aasee ra Lom 1 There is likely additional material sitting in U.S. government files, but no one has told me anything more. ands ot . 4 on *¥ . saa In my country, even the Shah of Iran took an interest. I met with the shah when he visited my squadron at Shahrokhi air base in Hamadan and asked about the UFO. He called a meeting attended by a number of generals along with the pilots involved in the encounter. When the base commander told the shah that I was the pilot who had chased the UFO, the shah asked me, "What do you think about it?" I answered, "In my opinion they can not be from our planet, because if anyone on this planet had such power, he would bring the whole planet under his own command." He simply said, "Yes," and told us this was not the first report he had received. aircraft; it was not a flying object that human beings on Earth can make. It moved way too fast. Imagine: I was looking at it about seventy miles out and it jumped all of a sudden 10 degrees to my right. This 10 degrees represented about 6.7 miles per moment, and I don't say per second because it was much less than a second. Now’ you can try to calculate the To this day I don't know what I saw. But for sure it was not an