Location:
Montgomery, Alabama, USA
Another one of
the famous airline sightings of earlier years is the Chiles-Whitted Eastern
Airlines case (Refs. 3, 5, G , 10, 23, 24, 25, 26). An Eastern DC-3, en route
from Houston to Atlanta, was flying at an altitude of about 5,000 ft.. near Montgomery
at 2:45 a.m. The pilot, Capt. Clarence S. Chiles, and the co-pilot, John B.
Whitted, both of whom now fly jets for Eastern, were experienced fliers (for
example, Chiles then had 8500 hours in the air, and both had wartime military
flying duty behind them.). I interviewed both Chiles and Whitted earlier this
year to crosscheck the many points of interests in this case. Space precludes a
full account of all relevant details.
Chiles pointed
out to me that they first saw the object coming out of a distant squall line
area which they were just reconnoitering. At first, they thought it was a jet,
whose exhaust was somehow accounting for the advancing glow that had first
caught their eyes. Coming almost directly at them at nearly their flight
altitude, it passed off their starboard wing at a distance on which the two men
could not closely agree: one felt it was under 1000 ft., the other put it at
several times that. But both agreed, then and in my 1968 interview, that the
object was some kind of vehicle. They saw no wings or empennage, but both were
struck by a pair of rows of windows or some apparent openings from which there
came a bright glow "like burning magnesium." The object had a pointed
"nose", and from the nose to the rear along its underside there was a
bluish glow. Out of the rear end came an orange-red exhaust or wake that
extended back by about the same distance as the object's length.
The two men
agreed that its size approximated that of a B-29, though perhaps twice as
thick. Their uncertainty as to true distance, of course, renders this only a
rough impression. There is uncertainty in the record, and in their respective
recollections, as to whether their DC-3 was rocked by something like a wake.
Perception of such an effect would have been masked by Chiles' spontaneous
reaction of turning the DC-3 off to the left as the object came in on their
right. Both saw it pass aft of them and do an abrupt pull-up; but only Whitted,
on the right side, saw the terminal phase in which the object disappeared after
a short but fast vertical ascent. By "disappeared", Whitted made
clear to me that he meant just that; earlier interrogations evidently construed
this to mean "disappeared aloft" or into the broken cloud deck that
lay above them. Whitted said that was not so; the object vanished
instantaneously after its sharp pull-up. (This is not an isolated instance of
abrupt disappearance. Obviously I cannot account for such cases.)
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