In their official report both pilots agreed on the general appearance of the UFO: it looked like a wingless aircraft with no fins or protruding surfaces, was cigar-shaped, about 100 feet long, and about twice the diameter of a B-29 superfortress. It seemed to have two rows of windows through which glowed a very bright light, brilliant as a magnesium flare. An intense dark-blue glow like a blue fluorescent factory light shone at the bottom along the entire length, and red-orange flames shot out from the rear to a distance of some fifty feet. Neither man heard any sound and neither saw any occupants. In their original report to ATIC both men agreed that “no disturbance was felt from the air waves, nor was there any prop wash or mechanical disturbance when the object passed.” The third witness, the passenger, did not report any turbulence or rocking of the plane. Some of the later versions of the incident gloss over these facts, however, and thus exaggerate the startling nature of the sighting. One account subtly implies the presence of a pilot in the UFO and several state that, as the object passed, the plane hit turbulent air[[V-7], p. 61] or was “rocked” by the UFO[[V-20], p. 21].
Like most eyewitness descriptions of a startling event, the testimony of the three men differed. Chiles stated that at the front of the UFO was a lighted pilot compartment or cockpit with a “snout” similar to a radar pole, and that a kind of nozzle projected from the rear from which the flames fanned out to a width of twenty or thirty feet. Whitted did not see a cockpit, a snout, or a rear nozzle; he thought the flames flared out from the entire rear and were never any wider than the width of the UFO itself. The third witness, the passenger, saw no shape or form, only an intensely brilliant streak of light that appeared and vanished before he was able to focus his eyes. As responsible officers, both pilots had obviously tried to separate the observed phenomena from their interpretation. They differed widely on the estimated distance of the UFO (the passenger did not offer an estimate). Chiles thought it passed them with a margin of only about 700 feet, but Whitted believed the distance to be more than ten times greater, about a mile and a half. However, when we remember that these men had the UFO in sight for only a small fraction of a minute and that their study of the side view (“windows,” “cockpit,” etc.) must have been limited to the instant of passing, these disagreements are not remarkable.
When Captain Chiles and Lieutenant Whitted reported their frightening experience, the Air Force made a prompt investigation. Since Captain Chiles explicitly stated his belief that the UFO was under intelligent control, the case required careful consideration. A check of the air traffic showed that no other planes had been in the area at the time, so the object could not have been a normal aircraft. Furthermore, other equally reliable witnesses reported seeing unusually bright meteors in the Southeast that night. Since the bare physical description of the UFO, apart from the inferences made, was identical with that of a fireball, Dr. Hynek concluded that it was an unusually bright meteor.
But the climate at ATIC that summer was not friendly to a prosaic explanation. Remembering the tragic death of Captain Mantell some six months earlier while he was chasing a UFO, then unidentified ([p. 33]), some officials were more than half ready to believe in invading space fleets as the answer to every puzzling phenomenon in the sky. They rejected the fireball explanation. Instead of accepting the Chiles-Whitted UFO as a meteor, they identified the other two meteors seen that night as UFOs!
And yet the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO was a fireball.
The major meteor showers that occur on schedule every year have accounted for hundreds of alleged UFOs over the last fifteen years. Several of these showers begin in mid-July; thus July 24 falls in a period of greatly increased meteor activity, when the earth is moving through the Aquarid streams and is encountering the forerunners of the Perseids. All during the year, and particularly during these weeks of shower meteors, amateur astronomers throughout the country spend many evenings watching the sky, counting meteors, mapping their paths, and reporting the data to various observatories. On an average night outside the shower periods, if there are few clouds and no moon, an experienced watcher may count about half a dozen meteors in an hour’s time, but during a shower he usually sees many more. For the week of July 23 to 30, 1948, the records of the American Meteor Society, the Harvard College Observatory, and the Flower and Cook Observatory show that, in spite of the interference of a bright moon, large numbers of meteors were counted and the paths of many of them were mapped and plotted.
The reports from the Southeast for that week have particular interest for the Chiles-Whitted case. A regular observer in Alabama counted fifteen meteors in one hour’s watching on the evening of July 24, and twenty-one in two hours the following night[V-22]. On the evening of July 26 he apparently took a holiday, but many other persons saw a huge fireball that flashed over North Carolina and Tennessee at 9:36 P.M. E.S.T.; its radiant (AMS 2322), plotted from many reports, showed it to be a member of the Delta Aquarid stream, then approaching its maximum. Early on the morning of July 27 another fireball soared over Tennessee and apparently exploded[[V-23]]. On the night of July 28 the Alabama watcher recorded fifteen meteors, from which he obtained the radiants AMS 3269, 3270, and 3271[[V-9], p. 521].
These facts alone—the occurrence of scheduled showers and the number of well-plotted meteors observed during the period—point strongly to the probability that the Chiles-Whitted UFO was a meteor. The probability becomes virtual certainty when we examine the available records for the night of July 23 and morning of July 24, the period when this particular UFO appeared. The watcher in Alabama was not on duty, but another observer in Iowa counted fourteen meteors in one hour[[V-22]], more than double the rate for an average night. About an hour before the UFO appeared in Alabama, ground observers at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia, reported an unusually bright meteor going from north to south. A few minutes before the Alabama sighting, two Air Force officers flying between Blackstone, Virginia, and Gainsborough, North Carolina, reported an unusually bright meteor traveling in a southerly direction.
When Chiles and Whitted observed their UFO, its appearance and manner of motion were identical with those of many other bright meteors but the pilots, startled by the sudden apparition, misinterpreted what they saw. They probably overestimated the length of time the meteor was in view and they almost certainly underestimated the distance. Meteors notoriously mislead even the experienced observer, who often sees them disappearing “just behind the next hill,” when they may actually be fifty or a hundred miles away. Although the night was moonlit and clear except for broken clouds, the witnesses had no fixed reference point by which to determine either distance or size.
There can be no doubt that Chiles and Whitted misinterpreted the appearance of an unusually brilliant meteor, its body glowing to white (the momentarily persisting luminous train of a meteor often has a veined or fibrous structure that could easily have suggested the “lighted window” and “cockpit”) and blue incandescence (the glowing “undercarriage”) as it rushed through the atmosphere some fifty miles or more away, shooting off flaming gases (the “exhaust”) and vaporizing from the friction of the atmosphere. Flashing beyond their range of vision (“pulling up into the clouds”), it probably burned and disintegrated before it reached the earth.