1948 Airline Pilot Chiles-Whitted UFO Case

by Brent Raynes

This case was truly one of the early UFO classics. The principal witnesses were Eastern Airlines pilot Captain Charles S. Chiles and his copilot John B. Whitted. The date was July 24, 1948, and the time was 2:45 a.m. The sky was clear and there was a full moon visible, as the Eastern Airlines DC-3 cruising at 5000 feet about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, encountered its UFO. At first the pilots thought that it was a jet aircraft. It appeared just above them and to their right, flying rapidly towards them. Within a few seconds the pilots could see that this was no ordinary aircraft, however. It was torpedo-shaped, wingless and silent, with flames shooting some 50 feet out from behind it, and two rows of illuminated large and square “windows.” It’s fuselage appeared to be some three times larger than the circumference of a B-29 fuselage and looked to be some 100 feet long, and on the underside of the object there appeared to be a blue glow of light.

The light from the large flame at the rear produced a cherry red wake and the “windows” were white and it was all so bright that the pilots were nearly blinded temporarily. The craft moved at an estimated 700 miles per hour and was observed from 5 to 10 seconds. They estimated that it was a half mile distance and flying at about 5500 feet, before it pulled up and was lost to sight in some clouds. Later they were to learn that one of their passengers, a Clarence McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, happened to be awake and looking out his window on the right side of the plane and caught a glimpse of the errie sight. The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) was in charge of investigating this report and was the Air Force’s first UFO program. Entitled Project Sign, they soon learned that a similar report had been made about an hour earlier, by a ground-maintenance crewman named Walter Massey, at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. Massey claimed that he had first seen a “stream of fire” from out of the north and wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Then when it was overhead he got a much clearer view of it and saw that it was of a cylindrical shape and had a long stream of fire coming from its rear section. Like the pilot’s sighting, the object was also wingless, and there was a faint phosphorescent glow around the underbelly.

ATIC investigators were interested to learn that on July 20, in The Hague of the Netherlands, that witnesses had observed a rocket-shaped object with two rows of windows along its side, flying at high speed. In addition, in the official Project Sign report on the Chiles- Whitted case, Capt. Robert R. Sneider took note of how during that same summer there had been other sightings of rocket-shaped objects traveling at high speeds reported in broad daylight in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Reportedly, the ATIC investigators were rather shook up by the implications of this case. They even prepared an “Estimate of the Situation” wherein they expressed that extraterrestrial visitation might be the answer. However, a General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the Air Force’s Chief of Staff, ordered all copies burned, and for years the very existence of this document was denied.

Astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a Sign consultant and was asked to provide his thoughts on the case. He could find no solid astronomical explanation, except to offer the “far- fetched” (his own words) inference that possibly the pilots had mistaken an “extraordinary meteor” for a craft. For a time the Chiles-Whitted case was carried as an “unknown” in the Air Force files, but later they decided to go with Dr. Hynek’s “far-fetched” possibility and turn it around as the now official explanation. In the 1960s, Dr. James E. McDonald looked into the case and interviewed the two pilots and rejected the meteor explanation.

References:

1. Scientific UFOlogy: Roswell and Beyond­How Scientific Methodology Can Prove the Reality of UFOs, by Kevin D. Randle, Ph.D., Captain U.S.A.F.R. HarperTorch, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 10 East. 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022-5299. 1999. ISBN: 0-380- 81383-1.

2. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, Volume 1, 2nd Edition, by Jerome Clark. Omnigraphics, Inc., Penobscot Building, Detroit, MI 48226. 1998. ISBN: 0-7808- 0097-4.