Project Blue Book case file, Chiles-Whitted (PDF)

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## Galley 45-THE WORLD OF FLYING SAUCERS

check of the air traffic showed that no other planes had been in the area at the time, so the object could not have been a normal aircraft. Furthermore, other equally reliable witnesses reported seeing unusually bright meteors in the Southeast that night. Since the bare physical description of the UFO, apart from the inferences made, was identical with that of a fireball, Dr. Hynek concluded that it was an unusually bright meteor.

But the climate at AT1C that summer was not friendly to a prosaic explanation. Remembering the tragic death of Captain Mantell some six months earlier while he was chasing a UFO, still unidentified (p. 00), some officials were more than half ready to believe in invading space fleets as the answer to every puzzling phenomenon in the sky. They rejected the fireball explanation. Instead of accepting the Chiles-Whitted UFO as a meteor, they identified the other two meteors seen that night as UFOs!

And yet the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO was a fireball.

The major meteor showers that occur on schedule every year have accounted for hundreds of alleged UFOs over the last fifteen years. Several of these showers begin in mid-July and July 2.4 falls in a period of greatly increased meteor activity, when the earth is moving through the Aquarid streams and is encountering the fore-runners of the Perseids. All during the year, and particularly during these weeks of shower meteors, amateur astronomers all over the country spend many evenings watching the sky, counting meteors, mapping their paths, and reporting the data to various observato ries. On an average night outside the shower periods, if there are a few clouds and no moon, an experienced watcher may count about half a dozen meteors in an hour's time, but during a shower he usually sees many more. For the week of July 23 to 30, 1948, the records of the American Meteorities Society, the Harvard College Observatory, and the Flower and Cook Observatory show that, in spite of the interference of a bright moon, large numbers of meteors were counted and the paths of many of them were mapped and plotted.

The reports from the Southeast for that week have particular interest for the Chiles-Whitted case. A regular observer in Alabama counted fifteen meteors in one hour's watching on the evening of July 24, and twenty-one in two hours the following night [2.9]. On the morning of July 26 he apparently took a holiday, but many other persons saw a huge fireball that flashed over North Carolina and Tennessee at 9:36 p.m. E.S.T.; its radiant (AMS 2322), plotted from many reports, showed it to be a member of the Delta Aquarid stream, then approaching its maximum. Early on the morning of July 27 another fireball soared over Tennessee and apparently exploded [2.9]. On the night of July 30 the Alabama weather are caused by other meteors, from which he obtained the radians AMS 3269. 3270. and 3271 [9. p. 521].