Iran 1976
Thanks for the links, Ivan. No doubt the 1976 Iranian UFO incident ranks as one of the most intriguing and suggestive of them all. Once again, we need to be careful about what the evidence shows, as opposed to what speculation we can reasonably or unreasonably draw from that evidence. Even without speculation, the facts alone warrant further investigation.
This is where the debunkers lose all their credibility, including at least one poster on this forum; what do we do with this data at this point? Well, we have choices; we can simply stop thinking about the incident, because it doesn't fit our worldview, or we can examine it and try to draw reasonable conclusions that arise naturally from the data. We could rephrase that to say that we will either engage in intellectual cowardice, or we can behave with epistemological integrity.
What is clear is that no known prosaic explanations exist for the events as described.
As well, we cannot reasonably claim that any human technology was responsible, since no known technology accounts for the incident. I recall that there some attempts to debunk the incident by claiming that the systems malfunctions aboard the F-4s were not unusual for that plane. However, that "explanation" failed to account for the timing of the malfunctions and the observations involved. Even if we concluded that there were normal system malfunctions occuring, we would still be left with a remarkable incident.
We are then left with object(s) exhibiting light that does not correspond to any natural phenomenon, and behavior that does not appear random, but rather appears responsive to the stimuli (the Iranian planes) around it.
This is where it get's tricky, and its best to be conservative in our conclusions. I'm going to cut and paste from CohenUFO a little here since I can't paste from the PDF files:
The UFO and the pursuing F-4 were on a course taking them south of Tehran when suddenly another smaller brilliant object came out of the UFO. F-4 Missile Fails To Fire This second object came directly toward the pursuing F-4 traveling at a very high rate of speed. The pilot started to fire an AIM-9 missile at the rapidly approaching object, but at the moment his weapons control panel went off and simultaneously he lost all communications. With no other defense left, the pilot turned sharply and put the F-4 into a dive in an attempt to evade the projectile from the UFO. The maneuver was not successful since as the F-4 continued its diving turn, the object changed course and trailed the jet briefly at a distance estimated to be 3 to 4 miles. It then increased its speed, went to the inside of the jet's turn, and climbed back to rejoin the "Mother ship."
Is there a basis for us to conclude that this behavior is volitional? It seems that one would have to do rhetorical backwards somersaults to characterize this action as described as anything but an intentional act. If indeed we have intent, then there has to be an existence of some sort behind that attempt. The intent shown also made sense, even to the human brain; keep that plane away. So in our crude attempt to engage in a little behavioral profiling of this. . . this. . .existence, for want of a better word, we discover something: that this existence itself is engaged in relatively subtle behavior modication. For all we know, it could have simply destroyed the plane; it did not, for reasons we can't know.
We also learned that the existence regarded the approach of the plane as some sort of threat, although we should shy from being too congratulatory about our military prowess. The plane may have presented a physical threat, the plane could have identified the object, or taken pictures of it. . . or the object may have represented a threat to the plane; perhaps the existence aboard the object had knowledge that close physical proximity of the plane represented a threat to the plane; hence what appeared to be an act of intimidation may have actually have been an altruistic act.
Remember that above I remarked about how this gets "tricky" and how we should be conservative in our interpretation of the data. . . All we can reasonably surmise from the behavior is that the existence desired that the plane remain at a distance. It would seem reasonable to assume that the existence had some knowledge that the pilot would react to the approaching object in a predictable way and turn away, which he did.
From all this we can pull some facts and reasonable inferences based on those facts; that an object appeared in Iranian airspace in 1976; that this object responded to external stimuli in a way that strongly suggests intelligence and a desire to affect the behavior of the external stimuli.
I sometimes wonder at this point about the reasonableness of the ETH. Under the attacks of the debunkers, UFO researchers can be pretty defensive about the ETH, since there is no direct evidence that an object such as this is an extraterrestrial spacecraft. On the other hand, we ourselves have traveled to our own moon, and sent robot ships to other planets. We are currently engaged in research of exotic propulsion systems in the hope of interstellar travel.
Knowing all this, we look at an incident like this one; it appears to be intelligent and non-human, from all reasonable appearances. It appears, and stress that word, appears to behave in a way that suggests thought processes not completely different from our own. Q actually made one good point on a different thread, as I recall, and to give credit where credit is due; we make an assumption when we assume we are the only intelligence from Earth. But we have no data suggest that there is any other intelligence on Earth capable of producing the phenomenon observed in 1976, so an unknown terrestrial intelligence is just one of several possibilities.
From what we know in the public arena, we are now able to travel through local space, and have plans for more long range travel. It does not appear we have made any strides at all in any theoretical travel to other realms, such as other dimensions. So perhaps interstellar travel is easier than interdimensional travel. So does that mean that it is more reasonable to conclude that the occupants, if any, of this object were extraterrestrials than extradimensionals? In other words, what are the known choices for the sources of a non-human manifestation of intelligence such as the one that appeared in the skies of Iran in 1976?
