July 24, 1948 — Montgomery, AL
2:45 a.m. Capt. Clarence S. Chiles and copilot John B. Whitted are flying an Eastern Airlines DC-3 at 5,000 feet, 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, when they see an object about 100 feet long moving rapidly toward them on their right. Torpedo-shaped and wingless, the object has flames jetting 50 feet from its rear. There are two rows of square windows through which a bright light is glowing. They only see it for 5–10 seconds. It is half a mile away and moving at about 700 mph. After it passes the plane it appears to swoop into a cloud bank at 6,000 feet. One passenger, Clarence L. McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, also sees it. Many ufologists now consider the object to be a fireball meteor. Martin Shough writes: “There is nothing in this case that convincingly rules out a fragmenting fireball, and the ‘airship effect’ which causes the eye to see a line of glowing fragments as lighted windows in an elongated machine has been a widely known feature of such sightings at least since Hartmann made a pretty good study of it in the Condon Report. Other observers in neighboring states saw on their far western horizon an ‘unusually bright meteor’ that could have been the same fireball on a near-horizontal trajectory heading SW over the Alabama-Georgia border area. Chiles-Whitted saw it only for a few seconds going by above and to their right heading SW on a near reciprocal heading to them but miles higher and much faster then they thought. As it approached them, the angular rate of the object would rise geometrically in a hockey-stick curve which, interpreted in terms of an illusory near-miss with another ‘aircraft,’ could suggest the appearance of a climb and an avoiding veer.” [Eberhart] NOT A REAL UNKNOWN. This was without a doubt a fireball that was misidentified. So it’s not a real UFO case, despite being one of the most famous UFO cases.
Record Card:
Incident Checklist:
Statement [Chiles]:
Statement [Whitted]:
Sources:
Weird Science-Fantasy (EC, 1954 series) #26 (December 1954): 2-3;
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Wikipedia, “Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter”;
NICAP, “Chiles-Whitted Case”;
James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 42–43;
Joel Carpenter, “Watershed: The Chiles-Whitted ‘Rocketship’ Sighting,” 2002;
Martin Shough, “Analysis of the Chiles-Whitted Sightings, July 24, 1948,” February 2011;
Kevin D. Randle, “Chiles/Whitted and Skepticism,” A Different Perspective, January 21, 2016;
UFO Casebook, “The Chiles/Whitted Sighting”;
UFO’s (It Has Begun) Past, Present, and Future Documentary. Cued up to the Chiles-Whitted section with Clarence McKelvie’s testimony:
John Greenewald, “Project Blue Book: The Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter, July 24, 1948, Montgomery, Alabama,” The Black Vault, May 15, 2023;