The Chiles-Whitted Encounter

1948. The Air Force's Project Sign was collecting flying saucer reports. The year brought the Mantell incident in January and the Gorman dogfight in October. In between came a case that, Edward Ruppelt wrote, "shook them worse than the Mantell Incident."

Eastern Air Lines trip 576 was a DC-3 flying from Houston to Atlanta. At about 2:45 a.m. it was at roughly 5,000 feet, 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama. The moon was bright. Captain Clarence S. Chiles saw a light dead ahead. It was closing rapidly and leaving a glowing streak. "Look, here comes a new Army jet job," he said to First Officer John B. Whitted.

The object came on in a slight dive. Chiles banked the airliner to the left. The thing veered left too, as if to avoid them. Then it streaked past on the right.

Whitted wrote that it "was cigar shaped and seemed to be about a hundred feet in length." It had "two rows of windows, an upper and a lower." Chiles saw no wings. From inside the windows "a very bright light was glowing." Underneath was a blue glow. Flame shot from the rear some 50 feet. "We heard no noise nor did we feel any turbulence from the object," their statements read.

Then it pulled up "with a tremendous burst of flame out of the rear." It climbed into light broken clouds and was lost from view. Of the 20 passengers, only Clarence L. McKelvie was awake. He saw "a strange, eerie streak of light, very intense."

About an hour earlier, at Robins AFB near Macon, Georgia, ground crew chief Walter Massey had reported a cylindrical, wingless object with a long stream of fire from its tail and "a phosphorescent glow" on its body. At about 2:30 a.m., an Eastern crew near Blackstone, Virginia, saw a brilliant, slow, meteor-like light on a dead-horizontal path.

Chiles and Whitted signed statements and drew sketches at the Henry Grady Hotel in Atlanta. Sign's interviewers recorded that both men said the object "was definitely a mechanical device of some type." Ruppelt called it the first time "two reliable sources had been really close enough to a UFO to get a good look." The case helped trigger Sign's top secret Estimate of the Situation, which concluded UFOs were interplanetary. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg rejected it in October 1948. "The estimate died a quick death," Ruppelt wrote. No copy has ever surfaced.

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, consulting for Sign, leaned toward "a very bright meteor," noting that "The orange-red flare is particularly suggestive." Donald Menzel pointed to Aquarid meteor activity that night. In 1959 Project Blue Book formally listed a fireball-type meteor. The Condon Report compared the case with the Zond IV re-entry of 1968, when some witnesses described a cigar-shaped craft with windows. Researcher Kevin Randle accepts a bolide as "the most likely answer."

The pilots never did. In 1968 James E. McDonald interviewed both men, by then jet captains. They still described "some kind of vehicle." Jacques Vallée also argued against a meteor, because the object climbed.

Ruppelt counted it among three 1948 classics that convinced Sign staff "that UFOs were real." Later retellings added a jolt of turbulence that the signed statements never mention. In 2019, History's Project Blue Book series loosely dramatized the case. Two experienced airline pilots. A few seconds. A question that has never fully settled.