Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter

Case dossier

The strongest event coordinates are descriptive rather than surveyed. Chiles placed Trip 576 about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery; Whitted wrote 25 miles southwest, with the DC-3 on a compass heading of 50 degrees and the object moving oppositely. Whitted also wrote that the trip had left Houston at 20:40 and later bypassed fog-covered Columbus before continuing to Atlanta. The same line calls the departure “Friday night, July 22,” although 22 July 1948 was a Thursday and the encounter file is dated 24 July. The archive therefore preserves that date conflict and the clock label “EST” without inventing a UTC conversion or a precise plotted point.

Chiles's signed statement says a jet-like object approached from the right and slightly above in clear moonlight. During roughly ten seconds he saw no wings, described two rows of windows or openings lit from within, a blue glow beneath the body and a power-exhaust-like flame extending about 50 feet. He said it passed on the right, pulled sharply into light broken cloud and vanished, with no prop wash or rough air. A later investigative summary adds his impression of a cockpit and radar-like “snout”; those features are attributed to Chiles in that later summary, not treated as shared observations or instrument detection.

Whitted's signed account estimates a cigar-like body about 100 feet long, roughly three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage, with two rows of very large square windows and white light he interpreted as combustion. He estimated about half a mile separation, roughly 700 mph and five to ten seconds of viewing, but none was instrumentally measured. His drawing shows six rectangular openings and a dark nose; Chiles's drawing uses a longer sequence of openings and a circular end view. Whitted did not report Chiles's cockpit or snout. Both agreed on no wings, a red-orange rear flame, straight and level passage, no sound heard and no turbulence.

The passenger evidence is narrower. Major P. A. Llewellyn's 31 July interview memorandum summarizes McKelvie's written statement: from a right-side seat he saw a sudden light streak crossing the airway toward the southeast, briefly lost it while shifting position, then saw it again. He described a bright, probably light-cherry-red flame with yellow edges moving in a straight line. He saw no physical shape and heard no sound, while noting that aircraft vibration would have made outside sound difficult to hear. This independently supports a brief luminous passage, not the pilots' cigar body, windows, distance, speed or upward turn.

Project Sign personnel interviewed the pilots on 25 July, obtained signed statements and drawings, and interviewed McKelvie on 31 July. Investigators requested air-movement data across Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina. A later report says 225 commercial and government schedules were checked; a C-47 candidate failed the time, speed, direction, maneuver and color tests. Calls to Columbus and Lawson Field also produced no matching jet. This eliminates the specific traffic checked, not every possible aircraft, meteor or perception effect.

The 20 December 1948 Air Intelligence Information Report combined this event with other reports from 24 and 26 July and judged the Chiles-Whitted incident significant, not identified as a meteor and still unidentified. Its “flying fuselage,” propulsion and RAND discussions are intelligence speculation, not observations made from the DC-3. Other bundled reports include apparent fireballs and cannot be counted as sightings of the same object. An undated archival classification sheet later calls incident 144 a true “Unknown.” That administrative label records the file outcome; it does not certify the object's shape, performance or origin.