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According to Project SIGN's case file, the early morning of July 24 was also full of strange flying objects over the US. At 2:30 AM, the crew of Eastern Airlines flight 571/23, a Douglas DC-3 flying near Blackstone, Virginia (not far from Richmond), noticed a brilliant, slow meteor-like light traveling on a dead-horizontal path. It lasted for three seconds, and seemed to be moving on a southwesterly heading. Its unusual horizontal trajectory riveted their attention. Eastern Flight 573, not far away, noticed it too.
The attached drawings made by these two observers very closely resemble a flying object reported to have been seen on 20 July 1948, by A. D. Otter, chief investigator of Court of Damage Inquiry, and his daughter at Arnham, Netherlands. This object appeared to be a wingless aircraft having two decks. The craft, sighted four times through scattered clouds and unlimited visibility, was traveling at high speed at a high altitude. A sound similar to that made by a V-2 was reported.
The first thing Project SIGN wanted to do was to impress airline pilots with the idea that they should not reveal such incidents to the press before they reported them to the Air Force. On July 30, Alfred Loedding, Project SIGN's civilian engineering analyst, arrived at Eastern's office in New York and and personally asked the airline's vice president of operations to forward any future flying object sightings directly to Col McCoy at Wright Field. Eastern's President, Eddie Rickenbacker, was suspicious about Loedding and wrote directly to McCoy to confirm the instructions. When Rickenbacker was satisfied that Loedding was who he said he was, he issued orders to his pilots to do as Project SIGN asked.
It's not difficult to understand the dilemma that the Chiles-Whitted sighting presented to Project SIGN. If the description of the object was accurate, a huge rocket resembling current US concepts for a satellite launcher (which had not been revealed to the public, but obviously were familiar to Air Force Intelligence personnel, since Cabell had requested RAND assessment of UFO propulsion technology just days before) had been hurtling over the southeast US. It was almost impossible to believe that a secret US vehicle of this type actually existed, and even harder to believe that it was foreign. What other alternatives were there?
Had the pilots mistaken some more conventional aircraft for a giant missile? This seemed to be ruled out by the prominent flame the object was emitting. Few jets had afterburners in 1948, and even those that did would not be likely to be mistaken for something as large and weird as the object the pilots reported. A meteor seemed to be another possibility, but the fact that the pilots were sure it had maneuvered and climbed ruled this out in the minds of the investigators.
The double row of windows described by Chiles caught the attention of some of the SIGN investigators when they were studying the newspapers immediately after receiving the report, because by coincidence, stories about the cross-country flight of a new US Navy/Lockheed transport plane, the RV6 Constitution, shared the headlines with stories about the pilot sighting. The huge RV6 was unusual in that it had two decks and two rows of portholes on the sides of its cigar-shaped fuselage. Was it possible that Chiles and Whitted had had a near-miss with the enormous Navy plane? Could fatigue and surprise have led them to perceive it as a bizarre, flame-spewing rocket? Project SIGN was determined to leave no stone unturned in attempting to solve this case, so on August 2 Col McCoy of Project SIGN dutifully sent a teletype to the Navy's flight operations office at Patuxent River Naval Air Station to enquire about the exact position of the RV6 at the time of the sighting.
The Air Force was besieged with questions. Major General Charles P. Cabell, Director of Air Force Intelligence, personally ordered a Project SIGN investigation of the Chiles-Whitted report. Air Force insiders must have shocked by the sketches the two pilots produced - they looked exactly like the RAND "World-Circling Spaceship" and the Navy HATV studies. General George Kenney, the chief of Strategic Air Command, said wistfully in Santa Monica, Project RAND's headquarters, that the Air Force didn't have anything like the object, but he "wish[ed] it did." The Chiles-Whitted sighting was long considered one of the most significant early UFO reports by both Air Force and civilian researchers, but the existence of the secret space launcher designs, with their strong resemblance to the object, provides an important clue to the urgency and magnitude of the Air Force reaction to the report.
MEMORANDUM TO THE PRESS
NO. M 26 - 49
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APRIL 27, 1949
Excerpt pertaining to Chiles-Whitted case:
SPACE SHIP
Perhaps the fantastic saucer sighting in Technical Intelligence records was the widely-publicized "space ship" which two Eastern Air Lines pilot reported encountering in the skies around Montgomery, Alabama, last July. Presumably the same object was seen by ground observers at Robbins Air Force Base, Macon, Georgia, about an hour before. All reports agreed it was going in a southerly direction, trailing vari-colored flames and that it behaved like a normal aircraft insofar as disappearing from the line of sight was concerned.
The EAL pilots, Capt. C.S. Chiles and John B. Whitte(d) described the phenomena as a "wingless aircraft," 100 feet long cigar shaped and about twice the diameter of a B-29 with no protruding surfaces."
"We saw it at the same time and asked each other,"What in the world is this?" Chiles told investigators. "Whatever it was, it flashed down toward us and veered to the left. It veered to its left and passed us about 700 feet to our right and above us. Then, as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us, it pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame from the rear and zoomed into the clouds, its prop wash or jet wash rocking our DC-3."
The flame-shooting mystery craft, as described by the EAL pilots had no fins, but appeared to have a snout similar to a radar pole in front, and gave the impression of a cabin with windows above.
Captain Chiles declared the cabin "appeared like a pilot compartment, except brighter. "He said the illumination inside the body itself approximated the brilliance of a magnesium flare.
"We saw no occupants," he told investigators. "From the side of the craft, came an intense, fairly dark blue glow that ran the entire length of the fuselage...like a blue fluorescent factory light. The exhaust was a red-orange flame, with a lighter color predominant around the outer edges."
The pilots said the flame extended 30 to 50 feet behind the object and became deeper intensity as the craft pulled up into a cloud. Its speed was said to be about 1/3 faster than common jets.
In their investigation of the incident, Project "Saucer" personnel screened 225 civilian and military flight schedules and found that the only other aircraft in the vicinity at the time was an Air Force C-47. Application of the Prandtl theory of lift to the incident indicated that a fuselage of the dimensions reported by Chiles and Whitted could support a load comparable to the weight of an aircraft of this size at flying speeds in the sub-sonic range.
The object is still considered "Unidentified."
The Pentagon first suggested that the men had seen a weather balloon, but this explanation was quickly withdrawn. Within days, an Air Force spokesman admitted the sighting was credible, further stating: "this country has no plane resembling a double-decked, jet-propelled, wingless transport shooting a 40-foot flame out of its back end." (Clark, 182)
Astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a consultant to Sign, argued that it if the pilots had reported accurately what they'd seen, that "no astronomical explanation" was even remotely plausible. However, he did offer an admittedly "far fetched" explanation, suggesting that the pilots had seen an "extraordinary meteor." (Clark, 183)
The men of Project Sign, however, had their own ideas. Ruppelt wrote
According to the old timers at ATIC, this report shook them worse than the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it [Weeks earlier, Mantell had died in pursuit of a UFO].
Sign's personnel were very intrigued by the Chiles-Whitted report. They knew that rockets could fly, but there was no known technology that could account for a rocket being as maneuverable as the pilots had asserted. They pored through obscure technical journals (including the work of German engineer Ludwig Prandtl) and eventually concluded that a "flying fuselage" was feasible if the object had a power source that used nuclear energy.
Based on this, and other UFO cases, Sign's personnel began to favor the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Though there was no direct physical evidence, they thought that there was simply no Earthly technology that could account for some UFO sightings.
They allegedly wrote the legendary Estimate of the Situation to argue their case. The document was gradually forwarded to the highest authorities in the Air Force, who rejected it, primarily because of a lack of physical proof. The Estimate was ordered destroyed, and no copies are known to survive.
However, Sign's personnel refused to abandon the interplanetary hypothesis, even when explicitly ordered to do so. Due to conflicts with "anti-saucer" elements in the U.S. military, Sign was dismantled and replaced with Project Grudge, which conducted little to no research, and which tended towards debunking of any UFO reports.
Hynek's meteor explanation became the official Air Force explanation for the Chiles-Whitted incident, though his qualification was not mentioned in later discussion of the sighting.
But SIGN went much further than that. It began the herculean task of attempting to determine the positions of all aircraft in the southeastern United States on the night of 23-4 July 1948 in order to rule out a near-miss with any other plane. The case file is crammed with scores of teletype messages to airports, military air bases and airline operations offices, requesting departure and arrival times of all flights at their location, as well as identity and type of aircraft involved. Within hours, bewildered air traffic controllers and dispatchers began replying with the requested information, and when all 255 flight reports had been received, SIGN compiled the data into a huge table that served mainly as evidence of the intense pressure the Wright Field technical intelligence personnel were feeling from their superiors.
The Constitution lead turned out to be dry. Only one of the air movement reports even remotely matched with the sighting time and place (it was a C-47 heading northwest miles from the Eastern plane, and was ruled out). Most SIGN members doubted the meteor explanation. The existence of secret US or foreign rockets with performance and appearance matching the Alabama object was highly improbable. The Air Force saucer investigators were unwilling to dismiss the report and needed to give Cabell an answer. There was one other alternative, as some of SIGN's personnel saw it, and the time had come for action. On or about August 5, the faction within the project that leaned toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis issued an intelligence "estimate," classified top secret, that argued that the Chiles-Whitted object was an interplanetary spaceship.
After this candid admission of his intentions, the Project consultant earnestly attempts to fit the two pilots' space ship description to a slow-moving meteor.
"It will have to be left to the psychologists," he goes on, "to tell us whether the immediate trail of a bright meteor could produce the subjective impression of a ship with lighted windows. Considering only the Chiles-Whitted sighting, the hypothesis seems very improbable."
As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, observers at Robbins Air Force Base, Macon, Georgia, saw the same mysterious object streak overhead, trailing varicolored
[p. 160]
flames. This was about one hour before Chiles and Whitted saw the onrushing space ship.
To bolster up the meteor theory, the Project consultant suggests a one-hour error in time. The explanation: The airliner would be on daylight-saving time.
"If there is no time difference," he proceeds, "the. object must have been an extraordinary meteor. . . . in which case it would have covered the distance from Macon to Montgomery in a minute or two."
Having checked the time angle before, I knew this was incorrect. Both reports were given in eastern standard time. And in a later part of the Project report, the consultant admits this fact. But he has an alternate answer: "If the difference in time is real, the object was some form of known aircraft, regardless of its bizarre nature."
The "bizarre nature" is not specified. Nor does the Project "Saucer" report try to fit the Robbins Field description to any earth-made aircraft. The air-base observers were struck by the object's huge size, its projectile-like shape, and the weird flames trailing behind. Except for the double-deck windows, the air-base men's description tallied with the pilots'. With the ship at five thousand feet or higher, its windows would not have been visible from the ground. All the observers agreed on the object's very high speed.
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt:
"At about 2:45 A.M., when the flight was 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, the captain, Chiles, saw a light dead ahead and closing fast. His first reaction, he later reported to an ATIC investigation team, was that it was a jet, but in an instant he realized that even a jet couldn't close as fast as this light was closing. Chiles said he reached over, gave Whitted, the other pilot, a quick tap on the arm, and pointed. The UFO was now almost on top of them. Chiles racked the DC-3 into a tight left turn. Just as the UFO flashed by about 700 feet to the right, the DC-3 hit turbulent air. Whitted looked back just as the UFO pulled up in a steep climb. Both the pilots had gotten a good look at the UFO and were able to give a good description to the Air Force intelligence people. It was a B-29 fuselage. The underside had a "deep blue glow." There were "two rows of windows from which bright lights glowed," and a "bright trail of orange red flame" shot out the back."
"In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an "Estimate of the Situation." A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!"
No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge.
There has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.
Originally posted by internos
An on top of that, it's interesting to compare Sign's conclusions with Blue Book's ones:
No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge.
There has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.
If they just would have read some reports ...
Develop an armed capability to repel any threat to the status quo, (including the uncertain ontological, social, and economic impacts of any revelation of the reality of UFO and extraterrestrial presence) through the development of a Star Wars/BMDO ground and space-based surveillance and SDI weapons network.
National Reconnaissance Office(NRO).
Controls and collects information from global spy satellites, monitors UFO traffic entering and leaving Earth's atmosphere, coordinates firing of energy beam weapons from orbiting Star Wars satellites at selected human ground and airborne targets and selectively at extra-terrestrial craft. Loc: Pentagon basement and Dulles Airport area, VA.
National Security Agency
Orchestration of information-control and cover-up activities related to UFO secrecy and surveillance of extra-terrestrial operations.
Loc: Fort Meade, MD.
Central Intelligence Agency
Cooperates with NSA's UFO cover-up operations.
Loc: Langley, VA, and worldwide branches.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Counter Intelligence Division
Cooperates with the National Reconnaissance Organization in the surveillance of those involved in close encounters with UFOs and extra-terrestrials.
U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence
Has a compartmented unit involved in UFO and USO [Unidentified Submerged Objects] information gathering.
U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations
(AFOSI) has a compartmented unit involved in investigating UFO sightings, extra-terrestrial contact reports, as well as IAC [Identified Alien Craft] surveillance.
Loc: Bolling Air Force Base, MD.
NASA Intelligence
Intelligence on astronaut and reconnaissance satellite encounters with UFOs and ETs, and coordinates the transfer of alien technology to U.S. and allies' aerospace operations.
Keep up the good work! You now need to write a reference book covering the many other incidents you have brought out here with such great detail.
Originally posted by jkrog08
regardless of what you think the cause, something IS going on in our skies and has been for many decades or more.