John Greenewald - 1976 Tehran UFO Documents.

a reply to: Direne
a reply to: chunder

Col Mooy did report finding what appeared to be a transponder from a C-141, but according to Dunning they had been having problems with those transponders being ejected just from turbulence.

The Tehran 1976 UFO

Sixth was the beeping transponder located by Jafari and the helicopter crew the next day, apparent physical evidence of intelligent technology. And so it probably was. Col. Mooy noted that the beeping transponder appeared to be from an American C-141. These large transport aircraft carried such transponders designed to be released in the event of a crash, but they'd been having problems with the beepers being ejected simply by turbulence over the mountains just north of Tehran.

No witnesses reported anything like a crash, in fact the bright light seen descending near where the transponder was found was said to have landed very gently, which makes me wonder, what characteristics did the ejected C-141 transponders have? Did they have lights and deploy parachutes so they would land gently? If so, could that be what eyewitnesses saw for the smaller UFO that came out of the larger UFO?

If Mooy is correct that the transponder he found was from a C-141, I think it's reasonable to assume that the US Military and or intelligence knows more about the incident than has been disclosed. I read that going forward, the US policy is to declassify events after 40 years unless there is an ongoing need for secrecy. It's been 45 years so we would hope US intelligence could finally tell us what they know, but they could perhaps claim that not embarrassing the US and causing tension in international relations might be an ongoing reason to not declassify what they really know.

About the claim that pilots could just say whatever they were told to say after the incident, I suppose that can't be ruled out but they had decades to revise their story to admit they only said what they were told to say. If you listen to the Sightings episode linked in the OP, they play some of the actual recorded communication between the pilots and the control tower, which are probably not faked. However, they are not the full recordings and they don't include the part where the pilot allegedly saw a smaller UFO coming out of the larger UFO, there should be a recording of that too if it really happened.

Whatever the UFO was, despite all the people saying no country had technology like that, it doesn't sound very "outer-spacey" because it apparently didn't fly into outer space, they tracked it flying west and sightings mentions two other reports of the UFO further west, flying through the atmosphere and not going to space like a spacecraft might do.

If the C-141 transponder is really related, that too doesn't sound very "outer-spacey".

a reply to: karl 12

Ya Karl...interesting to note that Iran continued to operate with it's so-called "Atoms For Peace" program in 1973, and ramped it up in 1976; which may have stoked other-worldly curiosity and suspicions about Iran's intention to partially go nuclear.

www.nti.org...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm certainly no aviation expert but I don't think transponders "fall" out of planes. They are built into cockpit avionics systems and if your transponder "fell" out then likely the plane is in a bad way as part of the cockpit has disintegrated.

Likewise a transponder on the ground is unlikely to be seen by radar and if it fell out of a plane is not powered so I'm not sure what is being said when it is called a beeping transponder. Seems like a cross between the functions of a transponder and the black boxes.

Maybe the US used some kind of location beacons on these aircraft, maybe there is something like that on all military planes ?

Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge can chip in.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

The document clearly states that what the pilot found the day after, when he went to inspect the area, was a beeper, that Mooy interpreted as an emergency beacon. Why he ventured to state it was a beacon from a C-141 is unknown to me, as far as, to my knowledge, all military beacons were the same. These beacons were first used in the 1950s by the U.S. military and were mandated for use on many types of commercial and general aviation aircraft beginning in the early 1970s.

When ELTs were mandated in 1973, most GA aircraft were equipped with an ELT that transmits on the 121.5 MHz frequency, the designated international distress frequency. The frequencies are 121.5 MHz for civilian, also known as International Air Distress (IAD) or VHF Guard, and 243.0 MHz for military use, also known as Military Air Distress (MAD) or UHF Guard. The pilot stated that he received the beacon signal during his encounter with the... errr... UFO. This means he didn't scan for any signals: he simply received the signal in the mandatory emergency channel. This means the beacon is clearly terrestrial.

ELTs are mounted aft in the airplane, and designed to be triggered upon impact or may be manually activated using the remote switch and control panel indicator in the cockpit. For the C-141, the beacon is well protected inside the airframe. Bear in mind that the guy found the beacon the day after, something really impossible because the beacon, back in 1976, with no GPS existing, was designed to give you an approximate location within 10 Km. That's enough for you to fly over the area and find the wreckage and debris of the crash site. No wreckage, no way to find the beacon itself.

Yet, the pilot was extremely lucky to find the beacon itself with no signs of debris at all. And he did it close to a house with a garden (sic). And he did it without he being a member of a rescue and recovery team. And he did it in his spare time (remember his base was some 200 Km away from the area, and remember that Mehbarad was closer to the site). There is no way a pilot involves himself in a search party: it is not his job.

So again, I feel the entire story was fabricated to hide a fatal accident.

originally posted by: chunder
a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm certainly no aviation expert but I don't think transponders "fall" out of planes. They are built into cockpit avionics systems and if your transponder "fell" out then likely the plane is in a bad way as part of the cockpit has disintegrated.

Remember the source calling it a "transponder" was an Iranian, Col Mooy, perhaps a mistranslation, and he meant transmitter, specifically the ELT as suggested by Direne is probably what was found:

rdw.rowan.edu...

Automatic deployable ELTs are designed to automatically eject from the aircraft when a crash has occurred.

It seems plausible that an overly sensitive ejection system could eject the ELT due to turbulence as the other article suggested had happened over the Iranian mountains on other occasions. Prior to 1985, the false positive rate for ELTs was about 97%, and new procedures were implemented in 1985 but false positive rates are still pretty high.

www.aopa.org...

The original ELTs were manufactured to the specifications of an FAA technical standard order (TSO-C91). Historically, these ELT’s have experienced an activation rate of less than 25 percent in actual crashes and a 97 percent false-alarm rate. In 1985, a new TSO-C91A ELT was developed, which substantially reduces or eliminates many problems with the earlier model.

originally posted by: Direne
Yet, the pilot was extremely lucky to find the beacon itself with no signs of debris at all. And he did it close to a house with a garden (sic). And he did it without he being a member of a rescue and recovery team. And he did it in his spare time (remember his base was some 200 Km away from the area, and remember that Mehbarad was closer to the site). There is no way a pilot involves himself in a search party: it is not his job.

If you're searching for an object that went down (landed or crashed) why wouldn't you want to take the pilot who saw WHERE it went down with you? The pilot made some effort paying attention to the location where it went down visually according to this, so it would make sense to bring him along so he could assist in pointing out where he saw the object go down.

www.nsa.gov...

So according to that the pilot was paying attention to where the object went down. I think you would want to bring him with you when you go searching for it. Seems like they sort of "stumbled" across the beeper signal while in transit from the area where he saw the object go down.

So again, I feel the entire story was fabricated to hide a fatal accident.

It's very likely part of the story is being omitted and we are not being told everything the US government knows. I suppose I wouldn't rule out a crash after reading this account that witnesses near where the ELT was found heard a loud noise and bright flash, which sounds like a possible description of a crash in the distance they couldn't directly see, though, it's far from any conclusive evidence of a crash:


"The people talked about a loud noise and a very bright light like lightning". Could that be a description of a crash? Possibly, but it's ambiguous, how do we know it wasn't actually lightning and the associated thunderclap?

a reply to: Arbitrageur


Yes, you are absolutely right, the pilot should be part of the recovery team as he is a direct witness of the events. I figured out for no reason that he was acting on his own.

As for the possibility of the civilian witnesses describing a lightning strike I, however, have doubts. The original report states that all started when four telephone calls were received from citizens living in the Shemiran area of Tehran Province reporting that they had seen strange objects in the sky. Some reported a kind of bird like object (a C-141?) while others reported a helicopter with a light on. The sky was clear, as the Mehbarad officer reported to have seen stars, and we know Jupiter was also visible, so I think it would be safe to assume there was no storms or lightings. However, it may be there was a storm building up on the mountains to the North, as Shemiran lies in the slopes of Alborz Mountain, but the report states the lights were visible from Mehbarad area. I'll try to recover weather data for that particular night from Mehbarad Weather Station 4075409999.

Now, as for the ELT, I've downloaded some manuals for the C-141 from:

c141heaven.info...

However, note those manuals refer to C-141B, which didn't exist in 1976. The documents are dated December, 1984. Section III, Avionics, Chapter 5, Emergency Location/Recording Devices, states the following:

"The Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) AN/ARC-31 system is installed on all C-141 aircraft. This system aids search, rescue and recovery operations by automatically signalling the geographical location of the downed aircraft. In the event of a crash landing, it radio beacon begins immediate transmission on the 121.5 and 243.0 megahertz distress frequencies"

"To quickly locate the aircraft upon an accident or crash landing, two systems are installed on the C-141 to aid in finding the aircraft and/or its recording devices. One is an underwater acoustic beacon (UAB); the other is an emergency locator transmitter (ELT). Once the aircraft has been located, two other devices will aid in the accident investigation board's findings of the causes of the accident. One such device is a cockpit voice recorder (CVR); the other is a digital flight data recorder (DFDR). All four of these systems are designed to be fire and crash resistant."

There is also a nice diagram showing the ELT system on page 4E-101. The AN/ARC-31 was a VHF Radio Set manufactured by Magnavox.

I still ignore how can an ELT be traced back to a particular aircraft. Maybe they have attached stickers or plates with part numbers which allows you to unambiguously assign an ELT to a particular aircraft, and this allowed Mooy to state the beacon belonged to a C-141. In any case, it is clear that if the recovery team went to a dry lake bed where a hypothetical UFO crashed, and what they find is an ELT beacon, the case for a UFO crash scenario weakens dramatically.

Unless one wishes to hypothesize a war incident between UFOs and F-4s which resulted in a C-141 downed. A hypothesis Occam's would certainly reject.

a reply to: Direne

The ELT is mounted in the tail of the plane. It is designed to be removable so that crash survivors can take it with them to aid recovery.

Finding one at that location with no other wreckage is not an indication of a crash, it indicates it was dropped there - possibly from a C-141 if it became detached with the tail lift down or from some other source.

A clean up operation may explain lack of wreckage but if that was the case why was the ELT left.

Things don't add up, and I know that's partially your point but that doesn't mean any randomly selected theory does either.

a reply to: chunder

Yes, finding an ELT at the site where the pilot said the 'UFO' landed is certainly weird, but it is just weird for those defending the idea of a UFO encounter. Actually, it is embarrassing for the UFO theory. Adding up the witnesses description of the object (a bird-like object... some sort of helicopter... etc.), the ELT, the fact that the area was a hot spot of military traffic, and so on, the Tehran UFO seems too humanly, so earthly, that I feel counting it in the UFO cases demerits the already demerited case for alien visitation.

In the end, if any randomly selected theory could explain the events it means those events are not relevant as UFO events.

originally posted by: Direne
a reply to: chunder

In the end, if any randomly selected theory could explain the events it means those events are not relevant as UFO events.

Can you clarify what you are saying -

is it more towards if there is a prosaic logical theory that could fit it likely is that, or more

if I can make something up then as long as it doesn't break any physical laws no matter how illogical it is that is the explanation ?

If the latter then the term UFO should not even exist for you as everything is identifiable.

a reply to: chunder
I can't tell you Direne's intent, but in general part of the issue is how UFO is supposed to mean "Unidentified Flying Object", but in the popular context it often implies alien space ships. This is the opening of the Wikipedia article:

An unidentified flying object (UFO) is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot immediately be identified or explained. Most UFOs are identified or investigated as conventional objects or phenomena. The phrase was coined as an acronym by Project Blue Book project head Edward J. Ruppelt, but today UFO is widely used as a stand-in for extraterrestrial spacecraft-aircraft claimed to be observed by various people.

So "finding an ELT at the site where the pilot said the 'UFO' landed" is not exactly supportive of an extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis in this case. However if one uses the term "UFO" is a less biased context which just means "unknown" instead of "ET", then obviously it was a UFO according to the witnesses who saw it. I suspect it's partly because of this corruption or dual meaning of the term "UFO" that we've seen efforts by the Navy to change terminology to "UAP" but I don't know how well they are avoiding bias in that term when their famous witness Fravor says he thinks the UAP he saw was ET.

a reply to: chunder

I was referring to the fact that when facing a 'high strangeness' situation, if one resorts to esoteric explanations (like antigravity, interdimensional beings, metamagical technology, etc.) then, any explanation could be valid. And when for a given problem any solution is valid, then the solution is not a solution, and the problem is not a problem.

A good example could be a mathematical problem: if any random selection of numbers is a solution for that problem, then obviously there is no problem at all to solve. Another example would be programming: if given an algorithm to code you find it doesn't matter how you code it as it gives you always the same result, then obviously something is bad with the algorithm itself.

We shouldn't confuse 'approaches' with 'solutions'. A problem can be tackled using different approaches, but all of them must converge to one and the same solution. What I feel is that people believing in UFOs resort to all kind of theories that of necessity produce different solutions, and they then pack all those solutions into just one, thus abusing logic and breaking down rationality.

In the Tehran incident, I'm just establishing what the context was from the point of view of politics, geostrategy, and the societal changes Iran was going through at the time. Intel operations were at its high, the incident happened at close range from at least two heavy-traffic military bases, high-tech was deployed as the then USSR border was close enough, ICBMs silos were close enough to deserve monitorization, and so on. Finally, nothing in the description of the event seems 'otherworldly', plus the fact that an ELT was found in the area where the alleged UFO landed.

Finally, yes, for me everything is identifiable, though not everything is identified. Hope this answers your question, chunder.

a reply to: Direne

Kudos and star for answering.

The thing is, and it doesn't necessarily apply to this case, when someone has witnessed a UFO under high strangeness circumstances when there are no reasonable prosaic explanations they have no option other than to entertain the esoteric.

You are then perhaps also more likely to take other sighting descriptions at face value than to try and rationalise them to something explainable.

Regarding the Tehran incident how does finding an ELT in the alleged landing area alter anything - are you suggesting it is indicative of a crash ? Any explanation must also explain the evidence.

a reply to: Direne

Absolute bollocks

a reply to: karl 12

The typical solid argument of UFO believers, I guess.

a reply to: Direne

Finally, yes, for me everything is identifiable, though not everything is identified

The typical solid argument of UFO Non-believers, I guess.






UFO Hunters: US Military Pursues UFOs (S3, E11)

a reply to: easynow

Not at all. The typical non-believers' argument is this: show me an UFO. Or an unicorn. Or a fairy. Or shut up.