Sunday's postcard, and UFOs Part III

July 30, 2023

“A Blue Note,” cobbles on the riverbed in west Spokane

UFOs, Part III: Tehran, September 1976

For most of my friends and acquaintances in Spokane, my dear friend Sharokh Nikfar requires no introduction. An Iranian emigre who arrived in Spokane via Texas, he’s become a fixture in our community over the past quarter century as a human rights activist, radio host, restaurateur and assistant director of the Spokane Fair Housing Alliance. He’s a paragon of human kindness, a role model for civic engagement and, for me, a reliable source of humor, wisdom and élan.

What I didn’t know about Sharokh until two years ago is that, as a young teenager, he’d witnessed a UFO silently hovering above his family’s home in north central Tehran. I only learned about it because I’d asked him and another friend to hear me out as I rehearsed a presentation I was about to give to my men’s discussion group on UFOs. A couple minutes into my rehearsal, he politely interrupted to share his UFO experience.

Sharokh Nikfar

As he described it, I couldn’t help but connect it to what is one of the more detailed UFO encounters ever documented. This was a September 1976 episode involving two Iranian Air Force jets (both U.S.-made F-4 Phantom fighter planes) that gave chase to a large UFO—roughly the size of a passenger airliner—in the night sky above Tehran. This was three years before the Iranian revolution of 1979, during a time when the U.S. and Iranian military were collaborative partners.

The incident is famous and makes for one of the chapters in Leslie Kean’s 2010 best-selling book UFOs—Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record. The chapter, entitled “Dogfight over Tehran,” was written by a retired Iranian Air Force General, Parviz Jafari, one of the F-4 pilots who gave chase to the UFO that night —Sept. 18th, into the morning of Sept. 19th, 1976.

I’ll pick up the thread on the remarkable air chase, but part of my purpose with this series is to explore our binary experience with the UFO phenomenon, in which we uneasily straddle the world between science fiction and real life. For some, eye witness accounts will never be persuasive because they’re intangible and, in many instances (as criminal justice studies reveal), unreliable. At the same time, a major confounding element of the UFO phenomenon is the chilling effect of disparagement and ridicule so often heaped on those who claim to have witnessed and/or encountered UFOs, or give credence to purported evidence of UFOs. It is a strange paradox, especially in the U.S., where there’s a well-documented history of efforts to suppress discussion of UFO encounters while at the same time cloaking so much of the topic in secrecy, ostensibly for national security purposes.

I’ve never seen a UFO, but of course I’ve known Sharokh for years and my trust in him is unshakeable. It’s not possible (to me) that he imagined his experience, even though (as you’ll see) there are parts of his account that are as funny as they are wondrous. So let me share that with you first. This is from an interview at a local coffee shop, earlier this month. I’m the Q, and Sharokh is the A.

To continue reading, subscribe to The Daily Rhubarb at the button below…