According to the files, Chiles and Whitted were flying a DC-3 at about 5000 feet, on a bright, cloudless and star-filled night. Twenty miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, they spotted, slightly above them and to the right, what they thought was a jet aircraft of some type. Within seconds it was close enough that they could see a torpedo-shaped object that had a double row of square windows.
Chiles called the attention of his co-pilot to the object saying, "Look here comes a new Army jet job." The object approached in a slight dive, deflected a little to the left and passed the plane on the right, almost level to the flight path. After passing, it pulled up sharply and disappeared into a cloud.
Questioned within hours of the event by investigators, both men said that they believed the object was about a hundred feet long. Whitted said, "The fuselage appeared to be about three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage. The windows were very large and seemed square. They were white with light which seemed to be caused by some type of combustion. I estimate we watched the object for at least five seconds and not more than ten seconds. We heard no noise nor did we feel any turbulence from the object. It seemed to be at about 5500 feet."
Chiles, in a statement dated August 3, 1948, wrote, "It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power shooting flame from the rear some fifty feet… Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light."
Apparently all the passengers were asleep with the exception of Clarence L. McKelvie. Chiles wrote, "After talking to the only passenger awake at the time, he saw only the trail of fire as it passed and pulled into the clouds."
Within hours of the sighting, Chiles and Whitted were on radio station WCON in Atlanta, Georgia. They were also interviewed by William Key, a newspaper reporter. At some point during the interviews, someone suggested they had been startled by a meteor, but both men rejected the idea. They had seen many meteors during their night flights and were aware of what they looked like and how they performed.
There are some other points to be made. In a newspaper article written by Albert Riley, he quotes the pilots as saying, "Its prop-wash or jet-wash rocked out DC-3."
In another article that is part of the Blue Book files, Chiles is again quoted as having said there was a prop wash."…[B]oth reported they could feel the 'UFOs backwash rock their DC-3."
This was, of course, one of the first cases that Project Sign could review. The study had been in existence for only about seven months, but it was on the scene of the report quickly. A review of the files, shows that they did search for an answer and went to extraordinary lengths to find evidence. They gathered information from every airline which could possibly have had aircraft in a position to see the object. They also queried all branches of the military, searching for any other pilots who might have glimpsed the object but who had failed to report it.
What they found in the search were that other pilots had "strange" encounters that night. About fifteen minutes before Chiles and Whitted had their sighting, there was another report from the Blackstone, Virginia area. According to the Blue Book files, "Object #2 was observed by Feldary, Mansfield and Kingsley at 0230 hours 24 July 1948, while airborne, between Blackstone, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina. This sighting is considered separately [from the Chiles-Whitted sighting] since the descriptions of speed as 'meteoric' or 'terrific' the manner of travel described as an arc or horizontal, and the fact that it 'faded like a meteor' seem to indicate that the object seen was not the one observed in Incident 1 [that is, the Chiles-Whitted report]."
Other sightings in the Chiles-Whitted folder are from events that took place two nights later. They are included because the descriptions of the objects seem to match some of that made by Chiles and Whitted. Again, those sightings seem to be of a meteor.
The search for additional information turned up a report from Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. Walter Massey, a 23-year-old ground maintenance crewman, said that he saw a cigar-shaped object fly over. Massey was interviewed on August 10, 1948 by Lieutenant Colonel Cropper, the Acting District Commander, 6th District Office of Special Investigations [that is, AFOSI].
He learned that Massey was "standing fire guard on a C-47 [the military version of a DC-3], directly across from Operations, and I had to take down the take-off time which was between 0140 and 0150." Because of that, we have a good idea of the exact time of his sighting.
He told Cropper, "It was coming out of the north. I was facing the north and actually didn't see it until it was overhead, but it came out of the north and was in my view for about twenty seconds. The last I saw of it the object was taking a southwest course."
He continued, saying, "The first thing I saw was a stream of fire and I was undecided as to what it could be, but as it got overhead, it was a fairly clear outline and appeared to be a cylindrical shaped object with a long stream of fire coming out of the tail end. I am sure it would not be a jet since I have observed P-84s in flight at night on two occasions."
Massey thought the object was about three thousand feet high, but said that at night he couldn't be sure. He also said that he thought, at first, it was a "shooting star or meteor, but a shooting star falls perpendicular. This object was on a straight and level plane."
Of course, we know that meteors can seem to fly at all sorts of angles, and given the location of the observer and the meteor, it can seem that the flight is, more or less, straight and level. Massey was asked how the object differed from a meteor and pointed out that what he saw was long and cylindrical in shape. In other words, he was describing an object that trailed a glow.
Interestingly, Cropper asked, "Did it give you the impression that there were windows or holes and did the decks appear to be divided into sections?"
Massey answered, "I am not sure. It would be hard to tell if there were windows and a divided deck could not be recognized from the ground."
That was a good answer on Massey's part. Clearly he wasn't taking his cues from Cropper who then asked, "Did you read the newspaper account of the two civilian pilots who saw this strange object about the same time and did the paper's description seem to refer to the object you saw?"
Massey responded, "I read the write up about the rate of speed. I don't see how they could tell if it had square windows or round windows but the description seemed to fit my impression."
When asked specific questions about the object, Massey said, "It looked like it was about the size of a B-29… It was too large for a jet. It seemed to be a dark color and constructed of an unknown metallic type."
Under the questioning about seeing anything like this at any other time, Massey said, "During the Battle of the Bulge, a sergeant and myself were on guard duty and saw something that resembled this object in question. We later found that we had witnessed the launching of a German V-2 rocket. It carried a stream of fire that more or less resembled this object. This object looked like rocket propulsion rather than jet propulsion, but the speed and size was much greater."
Because of the similarities in the description of the craft, the locations and the timing, Air Force investigators linked the two cases. They wondered, rightly, if the various witnesses could have seen the same object. They also wondered why it had taken the craft an hour to fly the two hundred miles between the two locations. If it was moving at the 700 miles an hour estimated by Chiles, then it should have gotten to the Montgomery area faster than it did.
J. Allen Hynek was asked for his assessment of the case. He could find no "astronomical explanation" if the case was accepted at face value. In other words, Hynek was saying that if the testimony of Chiles and Whitted was accurate, then it couldn't be explained. He also wrote, "[The] sheer improbability of the facts as stated… makes it necessary to see whether any other explanation, even though far-fetched, can be considered." He was saying there that there could be no flying saucers and we should therefore accept any other answer no matter how ridiculous it might seem because it was preferable to a flying saucer.