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Case · C-007

Chiles and Whitted: an object with windows next to the Eastern DC-3

Sky near Montgomery, Alabama · United States · Jul 24, 1948

In flight Mixed witness types

Disputed explanation

What happened
Around 2:45 a.m. the Eastern Air Lines pilots Clarence Chiles and John Whitted reported a wingless object with two rows of illuminated windows that passed alongside their DC-3 at about 5,000 feet and climbed away into the clouds with a burst of flame; a passenger saw a luminous streak, and the same night a crew chief at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia reported a very bright light. According to Edward Ruppelt, the case fed an “Estimate of the Situation” by Air Force technical intelligence in favor of the interplanetary hypothesis, rejected by Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg and then destroyed: no copy is known. Blue Book's case file on the incident (161 pages) can be consulted online.
Proposed explanation
Hynek, a consultant to Project Sign, the astronomer Donald Menzel and Philip Klass attributed it to an exceptionally bright fireball, an explanation formally adopted by Project Blue Book in 1959; the physicist James McDonald, who interviewed the pilots in the 1960s, concluded instead that it was not a meteor. The two pilots stood by their account for decades.
Official investigation
U.S. Air Force (Project Sign, then Project Blue Book)

Official documents

  1. Project Blue Book: The Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter, July 24, 1948, Montgomery, Alabama (fascicolo del caso) · U.S. Air Force – Project Sign/Blue Book (The Black Vault copy) · 1948

Sources

  1. Wikipedia – Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter (other)
  2. History.com, Greg Daugherty – the “Estimate of the Situation” and the Chiles-Whitted case (2018) (press)

On this site

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