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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.
“Headquarters”21 pages
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or mechanical disturbance when the object passed that witness, the passenger, did not repeat any no balance or rocking of the plane. Some of the later versions of the incident gloss over these facts. however, and thus exaggerate the startling nature of the sighting. One account subtly implies the presence of a pilot in the UFO [22] and several state that, as the object passed, the plane hit turbulent air [7, p. 61] or was "rocked" by the UFO [20, p. 21].
Like most eye-witness descriptions of a startling event, the testimony of the three men differed. Chiles stated that at the front of the UFO was a lighted pilot compartment or cockpit with a "snout" similar to a radar pole, and that a kind of nozzle projected from the rear from which the flames fanned out to a width of some twenty to thirty feet. Whitted did not see a cockpit, a snout, or a rear nozzle; he thought the flames flared out from the entire rear and were never any wider than the width of the UFO itself. The third witness, the passenger, saw no shape or form, only an intensely brilliant streak of light that appeared and vanished before he was able to focus his eyes. As responsible officers, both pilots had obviously tried to separate the observed phenomena from their interpretation. They differed widely on the estimated distance of the UFO (the passenger did not offer an estimate). Chiles thought it passed them with a margin of only about 700 feet, but Whitted believed the distance to be more than ten times greater, about a mile and a half. However, when we remember that these men had the UFO in sight for only a small fraction of a minute and that their study of the side view ("windows," "cockpit," etc.) must have been limited to the instant of passing, these disagreements are not remarkable.
When Captain Chiles and Lieutenant Whitted reported their frightening experience, the Air Force made a prompt investigation. Since Captain Chiles explicitly stated his belief that the UFO was under intelligent control, the case required careful consideration. A 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.