James E. McDonald statement, Symposium on UFOs, House Committee on Science and Astronautics

and distances, but that they had the general impression that these disc-like craft were appreciably larger than
ordinary aircraft. Smith emphasized that he had not taken seriously the previous week's news accounts that coined
the since-persistent term, "flying saucer." But, after seeing this total of nine unconventional, high-speed wingless
craft on the evening of 7/4/47, he became much more interested in the matter. Nevertheless, in talking with me, he
stressed that he would not speculate on their real nature or origin. I have spoken with United Air Lines personnel
who have known Smith for years and vouch for his complete reliability. Discussion
The 7/4/47 United Air Lines sighting is of historic interest because it was obviously given much more credence than
any of the other 85 UFO reports published in press accounts on July 4, 1947 (see Ref. 8). By no means the most
impressive UFO sighting by an airliner crew, nevertheless, it is a significant one. It occurred in clear weather,
spanned a total time estimated at 10-12 minutes, was a multiple-witness case including two experienced observers
familiar with airborne devices, and was made over a 1000-ft altitude range (climb-out) that, taken together with the
fact that the nine objects were seen well above the horizon, entirely rules out optical phenomena as a ready
explanation. It is officially listed as an Unidentified.
2. Case 2. Montgomery, Alabama, July 24, 1948:
Another one of the famous airline sightings of earlier years is the Chiles-Whitted Eastern Airlines case (Refs. 3, 5, 6,
10, 23, 24, 25, 26). An Eastern DC-3, en route from Houston to Atlanta, was flying at an altitude of about 5000 ft,
near Montgomery at 2:45 a.m. The pilot, Capt. Clarence S. Chiles, and the co-pilot, John B. Whitted, both of whom
now fly jets for Eastern, were experienced fliers (for example, Chiles then had 8500 hours in the air, and both had
wartime military flying duty behind them). I interviewed both Chiles and Whitted earlier this year to cross-check the
many points of interest in this case. Space precludes a full account of all relevant details.
Chiles pointed out to me that they first saw the object coming out of a distant squall-line area which they were just
then reconnoitering. At first, they thought it was a jet, whose exhaust was somehow accounting for the advancing
glow that had first caught their eyes. Coming almost directly at them at nearly their flight altitude, it passed off their
starboard wing at a distance on which the two men could not closely agree: one felt it was under 1000 ft, the other
put it at several times that. But both agreed, then and in my 1968 interview, that the object was some kind of vehicle.
They saw no wings or empennage, but both were struck by a pair of rows of windows or some apparent openings
from which there came a bright glow "like burning magnesium." The object had a pointed "nose", and from the nose
to the rear along its underside there was a bluish glow. Out of the rear end came an orange-red exhaust or wake that
extended back by about the same distance as the object's length. The two men agreed that its size approximated that
of a B-29, though perhaps twice as thick. Their uncertainty as to true distance, of course, renders this only a rough
impression. There is uncertainty in the record, and in their respective recollections, as to whether their DC-3 was
rocked by something like a wake. Perception of such an effect would have been masked by Chiles' spontaneous
reaction of turning the DC-3 off to the left as the object came in on their right. Both saw it pass aft of them and do an
abrupt pull-up; but only Whitted, on the right side, saw the terminal phase in which the object disappeared after a
short but fast vertical ascent. By "disappeared", Whitted made clear to me that he meant just that; earlier
interrogations evidently construed this to mean "disappeared aloft" or into the broken cloud deck that ray above
them. Whitted said that was not so; the object vanished instantaneously after its sharp pull-up. (This is not an
isolated instance of abrupt disappearance. Obviously I cannot account for such cases.) Discussion
This case has been the subject of much comment over the years, and rightly so. Menzel (Ref. 24) first proposed that
this was a "mirage", but gave no basis for such an unreasonable interpretation. The large azimuth change of the
pilots' line of sight, the lack of any obvious light source to provide a basis for the rather detailed structure of what
was seen, the sharp pull-up, and the high flight altitude involved all argue quite strongly against such a casual
disposition of the case. In his second book, Menzel (Ref. 25) shifts to the explanation that they had obviously seen a
meteor. A horizontally-moving fireball under a cloud deck, at 5000 ft, exhibiting two rows of lights construed by
experienced pilots as ports, and finally executing a most non-ballistic 90-degree sharp pull-up, is a strange fireball
indeed. Menzel's 1963 explanation is even more objectionable, in that he implies, via a page of side-discussion, that
the Eastern pilots had seen a fireball from the Delta Aquarid meteor stream. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Ref.
2), the radiant of that stream was well over 90 degrees away from the origin point of the unknown object. Also,
bright fireballs are, with only rare exceptions, not typical of meteor streams. The official explanation was shifted
recently from "Unidentified" to "Meteor", following publication of Menzel's 1963 discussion (see Ref. 20, p. 88).