by Charles Lear
In the first year of the Air Force’s flying saucer investigation, then operating as Project Sign, a sighting was reported that was one of a few that convinced some members of the Air Force that flying saucers were interplanetary craft piloted by extraterrestrials. The witnesses were two commercial pilots flying for Eastern Airlines and one passenger. The pilots, after thinking at first that they were seeing a new Army jet, quickly thought otherwise.
At around 2:45 a.m. on July 24, 1948, Clarence Chiles and his co-pilot John Whitted were flying at approximately 5000 ft over Montgomery, Alabama, when Chiles spotted a red glow up ahead. He alerted Whitted that a new Army jet was approaching and both men watched as the object approached.
According to the men in their report, the object moved past the right side of the plane, and then ascended with a burst of flame from its rear. They observed the object for ten to fifteen seconds and said that it looked like a wingless craft with two rows of windows running down its side. There was light coming out of the windows that they said was as bright as a magnesium flare. They said it was 100 feet long, shaped like a torpedo or a cigar, was 25-30 feet in diameter, and had flame coming out of the rear. A single passenger, C. L. McKelvie, reported seeing a bright light streak by.
Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of Project Blue Book from 1952 to 1953, wrote about the incident in his 1956 book, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.” Ruppelt is credited with introducing the designation, “Unidentified Flying Object” or “UFO” (pronounced “yoofo”) into usage as a replacement for the term “flying saucer,” in an effort to avoid the latter term’s association with aliens.
According to Ruppelt, a crew chief at Robins Air Force Base in Macon Georgia reported seeing a streak of bright light at about the same time as the people in the plane were making their observation. He also tells the reader that another pilot report came into the Air Force office at Air Technical Intelligence Command (Project Sign’s base of operation) a few days later. This pilot reported seeing a “bright shooting star” while he was flying near the Virginia–North Carolina state line.
The Air Force was still reeling from the January 7, 1948 death of 25-year-old Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell. Mantell had crashed his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky, after ascending to over 10,000 feet while trying to close in on a flying saucer. It was officially surmised that he had blacked out due to anoxia, as he had no oxygen supply with him.
According to Ruppelt, the Chiles–Whitted report shook up “the old timers at ATIC . . . worse than the Mantell incident.” Ruppelt explains: “This is the first time two reliable sources had really been close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it.”
The Project Sign investigators had been looking into the mystery of the flying saucers since January and just days after the Chiles–Whitted incident, they felt they had enough information to make an assessment. An “Estimate of the Situation” was prepared and sent up to Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenburg. According to Ruppelt, the assessment was that flying saucers were interplanetary. In Ruppelt’s unedited manuscript of his book as quoted in Thomas Tullien’s “History of the United States Air Force Programs,” the EOTS is described this way:
As documented proof, many unexplained sightings were quoted. [sic] The original UFO sighting by Kenneth Arnold; the series of sightings from the secret Air Force Test Center, Muroc AFB; the F-51 pilot’s observation of a formation of spheres near Lake Meade; the report of an F-80 pilot who saw two round objects diving toward the ground near the Grand Canyon; and a report by the pilot of an Idaho National Guard T- 6 trainer, who saw a violently maneuvering black object.
As further documentation, the report quoted an interview with an Air Force Major from the Rapid City AFB (now Ellsworth AFB) who saw twelve UFO’s flying a tight diamond formation. When he first saw them they were high but soon they went into a fantastically high speed dive, leveled out, made a perfect formation turn, and climbed at a 30 to 40 degree angle, accelerating all the time. The UFO’s were oval-shaped and brilliant yellowish-white.
Also included was one of the reports from the AEC’s Los Alamos Laboratory. The incident occurred at 9:40 AM on September 23, 1948. A group of people were waiting for an airplane at the landing strip in Los Alamos when one of them noticed something glint in the sun. It was a flat, circular object, high in the northern sky. The appearance and relative size was the same as a dime held edgewise and slightly tipped, about 50 feet away.
The document pointed out that the reports hadn’t actually started with the Arnold Incident. Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who observed a “silver disk” through his theodolite telescope; an F-47 pilot, and three pilots in his formation, who saw a “silver flying wing”; and the English “ghost airplanes” that had been picked up on radar early in 1947, proved this point. Although not received until after the Arnold sighting, they all had taken place earlier. [Unedited MS of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects in Ruppelt files].
According to Ruppelt in the published version of his book, Gen. Vandenburg didn’t accept the interplanetary conclusion and the estimate was “completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator.” According to Jan Aldrich in the section “1948 UFO Documents” on the Project 1947 website:
Ruppelt’s book contains some rather curious references, one of strangest being Ruppelt’s contention that the EOTS was declassified and burned. The proper procedure for the destruction of TOP SECRET classified information is to prepare a destruction certificate and destroy the document in an approved manner, one of which is by burning. This is usually done by a destruction official and a witness. Ruppelt should have been aware of this procedure, although he may never have been called upon to perform it. Why he makes the mistake of saying that the document was declassified and then burned — which is constantly repeated by other UFO authors — is a mystery.
Ruppelt tells the reader that copies of the estimate “were kept as mementos” and Aldrich says: “Former Major Dewey Fournet confirmed the EOTS as described by Ruppelt did exist, and a copy survived in the USAF Intelligence files.” Aldrich and others have searched for a copy, but none has ever been found.
In spite of the fact that Chiles’ and Whitting’s reports helped to convince those at Project Sign that the flying saucers were interplanetary, scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek concluded that the pilots had seen a meteor. The case was re-examined in the age of Project Blue Book in 1959 and the meteor conclusion became official. Atmospheric physicist turned UFO investigator James McDonald interviewed the pilots in the 1960s and he disagreed with the Air Force conclusion. This case remains open in the minds of many researchers and enthusiasts to this day.