United States.Chiles-Whitted · two airline pilots and a windowed object

At 2:45 a.m. on July 24, 1948, an Eastern Air Lines Douglas DC-3 on the Houston-to-Atlanta route was flying at about 5,000 feet, some 30 km southwest of Montgomery, Alabama. The night was clear, with a bright moon and scattered clouds (4/10) at 6,000 feet. According to the summary written by Air Force technical intelligence after it interviewed the pilots in Atlanta on July 25, Captain Clarence S. Chiles first saw a dull red glow like an engine exhaust some 700 feet ahead, a little above and to the right. He told his copilot, John B. Whitted: "Look, here comes a new Army jet job." The object approached in a slight dive, veered a little to the left, passed the plane on the right, almost level and parallel to its path, at about half a mile, then pulled up sharply and disappeared into a cloud.

The two descriptions agreed on the essentials: a body with no wings or protruding surfaces, cigar-shaped, about 100 feet (30 meters) long and twice the diameter of a B-29 bomber. Chiles thought he saw a "snout" like a radar pole and a cabin with windows above, and compared the interior glow to a magnesium flare. An intense blue glow ran beneath the fuselage, reminding him of a fluorescent factory light, and behind it came a red-orange flame 30 to 50 feet long that lengthened and reddened as the object climbed. Whitted, alerted by his captain's remark, saw no cockpit or snout but did see windows or openings on the side, and described the flame as a wide stream coming from the entire rear. According to the official summary, both estimated the object was in sight for 10 to 15 seconds; in their written statements, Whitted gives a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 10 seconds, and Chiles about ten.

The official summary states that no air wave or disturbance was felt as the object passed and that no sound was heard; the idea of a "near miss" that rocked the DC-3 comes from the pilots' statements to the press, not from that summary. The only passenger awake, Clarence McKelvie, saw only the trail of fire, according to Chiles's written statement.

General Charles Cabell, the Air Force's director of intelligence, ordered it investigated. The report of Project Sign, the program through which the Air Force investigated such sightings, was signed by Captain Robert R. Sneider. It linked the case to a sighting by an employee at Robins Air Force Base in Macon, Georgia, who an hour earlier had seen a cylinder with a long trail of fire heading southwest. After checking 225 civil and military flight schedules, the report concluded that the object "remains unidentified as to origin, construction and power source," that "it is obvious that this object was not a meteor," and that no evidence supported any finding of unreliability on the part of the witnesses. It was among the 1948 incidents that fed the so-called "Estimate of the Situation" (↗), the internal Project Sign document that leaned toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis and that Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg rejected.

The explanation that ended up attached to the case came from J. Allen Hynek, an Ohio State University astronomer and Project Sign consultant. In his 1949 evaluation, Hynek wrote that "there is no astronomical explanation if we accept the report at face value." He added that phrases from the pilots themselves ("tremendous bursts of flame," "cigar-shaped," "disappeared into a cloud," "orange-red flame," "time in sight five to ten seconds") could be satisfied by a brilliant, slow-moving meteor, and that the passenger who was awake gave a description that agreed with a meteor rather than a ship. He left it to psychologists to say whether the trail of such a meteor could produce the impression of a ship with lighted windows.

His conclusion was conditional: if the Robins time, an hour earlier, was correct, the object was some kind of aircraft; if the difference was a timekeeping error, it must have been an extraordinary meteor. In his case index he classed it as astronomical with "fair or low" probability. The file's record card, a temporary 1952 form of the ATIC (the Air Force's technical intelligence center), also carries the handwritten note "Prob Meteor." And the report of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) on the Georgia sightings concluded that what seven Augusta residents interviewed between August 24 and 27 had seen was "not aircraft, but probably of meteoric nature."

The file also records other sightings of lights with trails that are compatible with a fireball (a very bright meteor). Around 2:30 a.m., two crews flying near Blackstone, Virginia, saw an "unusual meteor," brighter than any they had seen, traveling horizontally toward the south and southwest for three seconds. In Georgia, personnel at the Atlanta Naval Air Station, hunters near Covington and residents of Augusta described bright lights with trails that night or the following ones. The times, however, do not match, and Hynek treated the Virginia sightings as a separate incident.

The Southern Delta Aquariids, a meteor shower sometimes cited, do not fit. At that hour their point of origin stood in the south at about 41 degrees of altitude (according to this record's own ephemeris calculation), and their meteors would have moved away from it toward the north, whereas the object came head-on from the northeast. If it was a fireball, it was a sporadic one, unrelated to any shower.

Two airline pilots, at close range and on a clear night, gave concordant, though not identical, descriptions of a structured body, and the Air Force investigation ruled out any known aircraft after checking 225 flight schedules. Project Sign's technical report declared the case unidentified and ruled out a meteor in writing. The case fed the "Estimate of the Situation," the moment a USAF body leaned toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis before the hierarchy reversed it.

The same file holds the opposite reading. Hynek found no astronomical explanation if the account was taken at face value, but did find a brilliant, slow-moving meteor compatible with the flame, the cloud and the duration, and left it to psychologists to say whether its trail could give the impression of a ship with lighted windows. The only passenger awake saw only the trail of fire, and other people saw lights with trails that night and the following ones, although at times that do not match.

No radar, photo or instrument fixed the object: everything rests on testimony.