20 Mi. S of Montgomery, Ala., July 1948 - Incident Number: 144July 1948

At about 2:45 a.m. on July 24, 1948, Eastern Air Lines Flight 576 was cruising at five thousand feet about twenty miles south of Montgomery, Alabama, on a routine overnight run from Houston to Boston via Atlanta. Captain Clarence S. Chiles and First Officer John B. Whitted, both veteran World War II military pilots, were at the controls of the airline's Douglas DC-3.

Chiles saw the object first: a bright glow approaching from the east at high speed and at a slightly higher altitude than the airliner. He nudged Whitted, who later said both pilots assumed for a moment that they were looking at a jet, then realized within seconds that the shape and behavior were like nothing in their training. According to their joint report filed with the Air Force after landing, the object was a torpedo-shaped, finless cylinder roughly a hundred feet long, with two rows of square ports along its side that glowed an intense bluish-white. A blue underglow ran the length of the object, and a long orange exhaust trailed from the rear.

The object passed the DC-3 on the right at an estimated distance of seven hundred feet. Both pilots later said it banked sharply away after passing them, leaving turbulence the airliner could feel. The encounter lasted no more than ten seconds. One passenger, Clarence McKelvie, reported looking up from his book to see a bright flash of light through his window at the same moment.

The case became one of the most-studied incidents of the early UFO era. Project Sign, the institutional predecessor to Project Blue Book, opened a thick file on the report and treated it as a serious incident from credentialed witnesses. The Chiles-Whitted case is widely understood to have been a key citation in the contentious 1948 internal Project Sign memorandum known as the "Estimate of the Situation," a draft document that argued the available evidence pointed toward extraterrestrial origin. Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg rejected the Estimate, and Project Sign was reorganized as Project Grudge later that year.

Project Blue Book inherited the case file from its predecessors and ultimately filed the Chiles-Whitted incident as "unknown," with internal notes acknowledging that the airline pilots' descriptions had no clear conventional match. The program's civilian scientific consultant, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, suggested in a later analysis that the object may have been a bright bolide or fireball, an explanation that Chiles and Whitted themselves disputed for the rest of their careers.

The full case file (161 scanned pages of original witness statements, the airline's incident report, Project Sign and Grudge correspondence, internal Air Force memoranda about how to handle the incident publicly, and follow-up interviews with the pilots and other witnesses) is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.