Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency information report, numbered OO-2-321/15354-66, relays an airline pilot's account of a sighting on 17 June 1966 near the Rudeshur beacon, about 25 miles WSW of Mehrabad Airport, Tehran. Flying at about 18,000 feet, the pilot and the crew of another airliner watched a brilliant white sphere grow in size and fade over four to five minutes. The sphere appeared to lie deep within the Soviet Union. The pilot could not explain it and suggested gases from a man-made explosion lit by the sun.
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unless one were alerted to look for it. The reason for its being obscured from the ground is attributed to the elucpt rise of the very high mountain range north of the city in the direction of the phenomenon. 3. I don't know what caused this strange occurrence which we observed. I had never seen anything resembling it in over 20 years of flying experience. One theory advanced to me was that the sphere was a "false moon" and that such a phenomenon was seen near Rome, Italy. My feeling is that the sphere was formed by gases emanating perhaps from a non-made explosion. These gases forming the sphere may have been illuminated by the sun from the back side. If this were the case, it would account for the diminishing intensity as the density of the gases decreased with the expansion of the sphere.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.