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

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

## The Chiles-Whitted Sighting

The Chiles-Whitted UFO, sighted on July 24, 1948; is one of the most publicized of the classics. Although the object appeared, passed, and vanished in an interval of roughly ten seconds, and the descriptions given by the three witnesses differed on several vital points, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer consultant to ATIC, in his report of April 30, 1949, identified it as an undoubted meteor. Nevertheless, as late as 1960, apparently not all Air Force officials had accepted this solution [20]. The literature of saucerdom still cites the incident as indisputable proof of alien spaceships [19, pp. 78, 88].

On the evening of July 23 an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off from Houston, Texas, en route for Boston, with an experienced pilot and copilot in the cockpit. By 2:40 a.m. C.D.S.T. July 24 the plane was a few miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, flying at an altitude of 5000 feet. The night was clear, and a bright moon just four days past full shone through a layer of broken clouds about 1000 feet above the plane. At 2:45 a.m. the pilot, Captain C. S. Chiles, noticed a dull red glow some distance ahead, approaching from a little above and to the right of the plane. He remarked to his co-pilot, Lieutenant J. B. Whitted. "Look, here comes a new Army jet job." [18] In the next few seconds, however, he changed his mind about the identity of the object. As both men watched, the brilliantly glowing unknown continued to approach with incredible swiftness, apparently on a collision course; it seemed to veer slightly, passed the plane on the right almost level with and parallel to the flight path, then seemed to pull up sharply and disappear into the clouds. Captain Chiles estimated that the object was in sight for about ten seconds. The one passenger who was awake, sitting at the right of the cabin, saw the light for only an instant as it flashed by.

The brief impressions of these three witnesses were the sole foundation for newspaper stories that the plane had narrowly escaped collision with a spaceship.

In their official report both pilots agreed on the general appearance of the UFO: it looked like a wingless aircraft with no fins or protruding surfaces, was cigar-shaped, about 100 feet long, and about twice the diameter of a B-29 superfortress. It seemed to have no traces of windows through which glowed a very bright light, brilliant as a magnesium flare. An intense dark-blue glow like a blue fluorescent factory light shone at the bottom along the entire length, and red-orange flames shot out from the rear to a distance of some fifty feet. Neither man heard any sound and neither saw any occupants. In their original report to ATIC both men agreed that "no disturbance was felt from the air waves" nor was there any pre