On the night of 19 September 1976 residents of northern Tehran began ringing Mehrabad airport: a bright object was standing over the city. The Iranian Air Force scrambled an F-4 Phantom; as it closed, its communications and instruments failed and it turned away. A second was sent up, locked the target on radar, and when it tried to fire, the weapons system and radio failed and the pilot broke off. By the crew's report a smaller object separated from the first, went down and landed, flooding the ground with light. The American defence attaché's report on the case was circulated to the State Department, the CIA, the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and has long been declassified. It is among the best-documented military episodes in the subject.

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Kaikōura and the Lights Filmed from the Air

In late December 1978, over the east coast of New Zealand's South Island, the crews of Argosy freight aircraft saw bright lights accompanying them on several consecutive nights. Radar at Wellington confirmed returns. On 31 December an Australian television crew was taken aboard; the cameraman David Crockett filmed the lights on colour stock, and the footage went round the world — one of very few films of the phenomenon shot from an aircraft with simultaneous radar confirmation. The astronomer William Ireland offered an explanation: the lights of squid boats reflected off a temperature inversion, plus Venus. It accounts for some of the episodes and not others.