What happened
In the small hours of 24 July 1948 an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 bound from Houston to Atlanta was cruising near Montgomery when Capt. Clarence Chiles saw a dull red glow ahead, closing fast. He thought at first it was a new Army jet. In seconds it flashed past their right side, and both pilots described a wingless, torpedo-shaped body about the size of a B-29 fuselage, glowing blue underneath, with what looked like two rows of brightly lit windows and a long orange-red flame from the tail. Whitted saw it pull up sharply and vanish into cloud. The whole sighting lasted perhaps ten to fifteen seconds. One passenger saw only a bright streak. Within the hour a crew chief at Robins AFB in Georgia, roughly on the object's projected track, reported a very bright light passing overhead. Ruppelt wrote that the case shook Project Sign's investigators worse than the Mantell crash.
The official explanation
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Project Sign's consultant, concluded the pilots saw an unusually bright meteor: the flaming tail and sudden disappearance fit a bolide, and many bright meteors were reported that night. Donald Menzel noted the date fell in the Aquarid meteor season and that a huge fireball crossed North Carolina and Tennessee two days later. Philip Klass agreed. The 'windows' are read as fragments or glowing segments in the meteor's train, interpreted by startled pilots.
The anomalous case
Two experienced airline pilots, at close range and in moonlight, independently described a structured body with lit openings, and they disagreed on small details in a way that suggests they were not simply echoing each other. Ruppelt wrote that this was the first time two reliable witnesses had been close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look, and that Project Sign's map showed its path would pass near Robins AFB, where a crew chief independently saw a bright light. A Project Sign officer wrote that it was obvious the object was not a meteor. According to Ruppelt, this sighting was a direct trigger for the top secret Estimate of the Situation, which concluded that UFOs were interplanetary. Physicist James McDonald re-interviewed both pilots in the 1960s and concluded a meteor did not fit their descriptions. A bolide that pulls up into cloud is not a typical meteor path.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Project BLUE BOOK records (National Archives, microfilm T-1206) official, archives.gov
Sources
- Chiles–Whitted UFO encounter Wikipedia
- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956) Project Gutenberg
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.