Summary
On September 20, 2026, a witness traveling on Tehran's Azadegan Expressway recorded a curved formation of multicolored lights against the cloudy evening sky. The lights appeared to remain near the clouds, changed between several colors and were reportedly silent. The approximately 23-second video subsequently spread widely online, but the object's size, distance, altitude and speed could not be determined from the footage. Suggested explanations include an illuminated kite, drone or LED-equipped model aircraft, but no identification has been confirmed.
Additional Notes
At approximately 19:30 local time on September 20, 2026, a witness identified as Ali Sedaghati recorded unusual lights while traveling on the Azadegan Expressway in Tehran. His original description placed the phenomenon near the clouds and described it as silent. The approximately 23-second recording shows a curved arrangement of separate colored lights, including blue, white, green, red and purple tones. Road signs visible at the beginning of the footage are consistent with the reported highway location. The video quickly spread through social media and news coverage. Reuters Connect subsequently carried the footage through third-party video suppliers Spectee and StringersHub, while explicitly stating that Reuters had not independently verified or endorsed the supplied material. No public identification by Iranian authorities was reported in the Reuters material. Analysis of the recording indicates that the visible formation consists of multiple individual lights rather than a clearly resolved solid object. Motion blur from the moving vehicle and limited image quality prevent reliable determination of the object's dimensions, distance, altitude or physical structure. Claims that separate circulating clips provide multiple independent views have also not been firmly established. Several conventional explanations have been proposed. An illuminated kite or drone could potentially account for the changing colored lights and apparent silence. More recently, commentators have compared the formation with LED-equipped model aircraft, particularly the E-flite Night Radian, a powered model glider carrying programmable multicolored lights. The resemblance provides a testable hypothesis, but no demonstration has yet established that such an aircraft was responsible for the Tehran sighting. The incident has also been compared online with the famous Tehran UFO encounter of 1976. No evidence currently connects the two events; the comparison is based on their shared location and the coincidence that the new sighting occurred almost fifty years later. The September 2026 lights therefore remain unidentified on the publicly available evidence, without establishing an extraordinary origin.
The Location Today
The 1976 Tehran incident involved reports over parts of the city and military aircraft operating in the surrounding airspace. Tehran remains a densely populated capital, and there is no single established public memorial or preserved ground site for the encounter. Civilian public areas may be visited under normal local rules, while airport and military facilities are restricted.
- Environment
- Urban Area
- Time of Day
- Evening / Night
- Evidence Level
- Witness Report
- Visiting the Location
- Limited
- Ownership of the Location
- Mixed