Although the Americans retired their F-14s in 2006, around 40 of Iran’s Tomcats remain active, tasked with defending Iran’s nuclear sites, and while doing so the interceptors came into close contact with some very mysterious aircraft, according to a story in the magazine Combat Aircraft by Babak Taghvaee that has resurfaced in a National Interest report.
The Iranians reportedly believed the objects were actually US Central Intelligence Agency spy drones, specially sending objects to the ground to potentially sniff out Tehran’s suspected atomic weapons programme, as the facilities at Bushehr, Arak, and an enrichment plant at Natanz became public knowledge.
However, these alleged unmanned aerial vehicles were suspected by the Iranians of having “astonishing” flight characteristics and capabilities that far exceeded any known drone.
The intercepted UAVs could allegedly jam radars and disrupt F-14 navigation programmes. Separately, they are understood to have flown from “outside the atmosphere” at speeds that were tentatively estimated to equal Mach 10 - something unheard-of to date. The UAVs could reportedly hover, and when darkness fell, they would typically emit a mysterious blue light that earned them their nickname - “luminous objects".
“In several cases … F-14s faced them but were unable to operate their armament systems properly", Taghvaee wrote, further recounting that one Tomcat taking off to intercept a luminous object on 26 January 2012 mysteriously exploded, killing both crewmen.
Taghvaee implies the alleged UAV was somehow behind the incident, as the exploded F-14 was “one of the fittest” of the 40 or so Tomcats in service at the time.
The inexplicable observations have since sparked multiple rumours that the Air Force and CIA might operate a stealthy new drone that so far remains undisclosed to the general public. If this really is the case, it’s unlikely that the new UAV is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic speeds, as the Pentagon has formally stated multiple times it is now working to reach Mach five levels.
So if the Iranian F-14s and F-4E fighters - the bulk of the country’s intercepting fleet - truly are chasing around something super-fast and lethal, could it be… UFOs?