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This Project Blue Book case file, digitized by the Internet Archive, covers Incident 144: two Eastern Airlines pilots reported that a wingless, cigar-shaped object with a flaming exhaust passed their DC-3 about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, on 24 July 1948. The file includes an OSI interview with a Robins Air Force Base employee who saw a similar object, negative aircraft traffic reports from many bases, and later correspondence. A December 1948 intelligence report found fairly consistent descriptions across four related sightings.
“Lockheed”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
These facts alone—the occurrence of scheduled showers and the number of well-plotted meteors observed during the period—point strongly to the probability that the Clyde Whistler UFO was a test. The probability becomes virtual certainly when we examine the available records for the night of July 23 and morning of July 24. the period when this particular UFO appeared. The watcher in Alabama was not on duty; but another observer in Iowa counted fourteen meteors in one hour [23], more than double the rate for an average night. About an hour before the UFO appeared in Alabama, ground observers at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia, reported an unusually bright meteor going from north to south. A few minutes before the Alabama sighting, two Air Force officers flying between Blackstone, Virginia, and Gainsborough, North Carolina, reported an unusually bright meteor traveling in a southerly direction.
When Chiles and Whitted observed their UFO, its appearance and manner of motion were identical with those of many other bright meteors but the pilots, startled by the sudden apparition, misinterpreted what they saw. They probably overestimated the length of time the meteor was in view and they almost certainly underestimated the distance. Meteors notoriously mishead even the experienced observer, who often sees them disappearing "just behind the next hill," although they may actually be fifty or a hundred miles away. Although the night was moonlit and clear except for broken clouds, the witnesses had no fixed reference point by which to determine either distance or size.
There can be no doubt that Chiles and Whitted misinterpreted the appearance of an unusually brilliant meteor, its body glowing to white (the momentarily persisting luminous train of a meteor often has a veined or fibrous structure that could easily have suggested the "lighted window" and "cockpit") and blue incandescence (the glowing "undercarriage") as it rushed through the atmosphere some fifty miles or more away, shooting off flaming gases (the "exhaust") and vaporizing from the friction of the atmosphere. Flashing beyond their range of vision ("pulling up into the clouds"), it probably burned and disintegrated before it reached the earth.
This fresh analysis, based on meteor records for July 1948, has led ATIC finally to remove the Chiles-Whitted UFO from the category of Unknowns and, as Dr. Hynck suggested originally, add it to the file of recorded meteors. Document, cited by the archive. 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. 161 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.