Glowing object over Tehran, exactly on the anniversary of the 1976 UFO case
On the night of September 19 to 20, millions of people saw a video showing a crescent-shaped object flashing with colored lights as it floats across the sky over Tehran. According to fact-checkers at the Belgian broadcaster RTBF, the footage is not the product of artificial intelligence, but no one has identified the object. The timing cannot be a coincidence: exactly fifty years earlier, one of the most famous UFO cases of the Cold War took place over Tehran.
The footage was posted on September 20 by an Iranian X user, Ali Sedaghati. According to him, he recorded it on the Azadi highway. The video shows an object made up of a continuous arc of light, shaped like a crescent or an inverted V. Its blue, green, red and purple points of light flash one after another. Sedaghati's post was viewed more than 7.5 million times, and the footage gathered tens of millions of views in total on X.
Is the video real?
RTBF's fact-checking section, Faky, examined the footage. The Hive Moderation detector gave a 17.1 percent probability that it was made by artificial intelligence, which is a low value. They did not find a Google SynthID watermark in it either. According to the editorial team, the video is not AI-generated, although they add that such tools are not infallible either.
According to the Iranian fact-checking site Factnameh, the poor image quality makes it impossible to reach a clear diagnosis. The object is therefore considered unidentified in the literal sense of the word.
What do Iranian sources say?
In addition to the footage, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) reported on another glowing object, seen south of Tehran near the highway leading toward Azadegan. According to ISNA, there is no independent information about the object's altitude, speed, trajectory or nature, and neither military nor aviation authorities have identified it. According to the agency, the only thing that is certain is the sighting itself.
The Fars news agency, which is close to the Revolutionary Guards, made inquiries with the civil aviation authority. The radar data that was reviewed showed no flight that could be linked to the object, and the authority made no statement about the object's nature. No official denial or report was issued.
Fifty years earlier: the 1976 Tehran case
The anniversary is what gives the story its particular weight. On the night leading into September 19, 1976, both civilians and military personnel reported a bright light over Tehran, which was also detected by radar. The Iranian Air Force sent two F-4 Phantom fighter jets to identify it. According to the pilots, their instrumentation and radio communication failed near the object and only returned once they moved away from it. The weapons system of one of the aircraft also stopped working when the crew was preparing to fire. The American reports on the case are still available today in the declassified archives of U.S. intelligence, and the incident remains to this day one of the most frequently cited military cases in UFO literature.
What could it have been?
RTBF lists several mundane explanations: one or more drones, a surveillance device, or a large kite fitted with LEDs. According to the editorial team, the appearance timed for the anniversary most likely points to a prank by a hobbyist modeler. The article, however, does not prove this either.
One small contradiction also remains: one of RTBF's image captions mentions footage from September 29, while the article text and the published post place the sighting on the night of September 19–20.
The sober take
The footage appears to be real, and no one has officially identified the object. Iranian civil aviation radar also showed no flight that could be linked to it. According to the Belgian fact-checkers, it could have been a drone, a surveillance device or an LED kite, and the fact that the video appeared exactly on the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Tehran UFO case points more to a deliberate prank than to a coincidence. For now, this is an assumption, not a proven fact.