Next morning, in the broad light of day, the idea of space visitors
somehow had lost its menace. If the disks were space ships, at least
they had shown no sign of hostility, so far as I knew. Of course, there
was Mantell; but if he had been downed by some weapon on the disk, it
could have been self-defense. In most cases, the saucers retreated at
the first sign of pursuit.
My mind was still reluctant to accept the space-travel answer, in spite
of the old reports. But I kept thinking of the famous aircraft designer
who thought the disks were space craft; the airline pilots Purdy had
mentioned; Blake’s copilot, Chuck. . . .
Now that I recalled it, Blake had been more embarrassed than seemed
called for when he told about Chuck. Perhaps he had been the one who
believed the saucers were space ships, instead of his absent copilot.
After breakfast, I went over the list of sightings since June 1947.
There were several saucers that actually had been described as
projectile-like ships. The most famous of all was the Eastern Airlines
case.
It was 8:30 P.M., July 23, 1948, when an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off
from Houston, Texas, on a flight to Atlanta and Boston. The airliner
captain was Clarence S. Chiles. During the war, he had been in the Air
Transport Command, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had 8,500
flying hours. His first officer was John B. Whitted, a wartime pilot on
B-29’s. Both men were known in Eastern as careful, conservative pilots.
It was a bright, moonlit night, with scattered clouds overhead. The
DC-3 was twenty miles west of Montgomery, at 2:45 A.M., when a
brilliant projectile-like craft came hurtling along the airway.
Chiles saw it first and took it to be a jet plane. But the next instant
both pilots saw that this was no jet fighter.
“It was heading southwest,” Chiles said later, “exactly opposite to our
course. Whatever it was, it flashed down toward us at terrific speed.
We veered to the left. It veered sharply, too, and passed us about
seven hundred feet to the right. I saw then that it had no wings.”
The mystery ship passed on Whitted’s side, and he had a fairly close
look.
“The thing was about one hundred feet long, cigar-shaped, and
wingless,” he described it. “It was about twice the diameter of a
B-twenty-nine, with no protruding fins.”
Captain Chiles said the cabin appeared like a pilot compartment, except
for its eerie brilliance. Both he and Whitted agreed it was as bright
as a magnesium flare. They saw no occupants, but at their speed this
was not. surprising.
“An intense dark-blue glow came from the side of the ship,” Chiles
reported. (It was later suggested by engineers that the strange glare
could have come from a power plant of unusual type.) “It ran the entire
length of the fuselage—like a blue fluorescent light. The exhaust was a
red-orange flame, with a lighter color predominant around the outer
edges.”
Both pilots said the flame extended thirty to fifty feet behind the
ship. As it passed, Chiles noted a snout like a radar pole. Both he and
Whitted glimpsed two rows of windows.
“Just as it went by,” said Chiles, “the pilot pulled up as if he had
seen the DC-three and wanted to avoid its. There was a tremendous burst
of flame from the rear. It zoomed into the clouds, its jet wash rocking
our DC-three.”
Chiles’s estimate of the mystery ship’s speed was between five hundred
and seven hundred miles an hour.
As the object vanished, Chiles went back into the cabin to check with
the passengers. Most had been asleep or were drowsing. But one man
confirmed that they were in their right senses. This passenger,
Clarence McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, told them (and a Project “Saucer”
team later) that he had seen a brilliant streak of light flash past his
window. It had gone too swiftly for him to catch any details.
The A.P. interviewed Mr. McKelvie soon after he landed, and ran the
following story:
“Kennett Square, Pa., July 24 (AP) . Clarence L. McKelvie, assistant
managing editor of the American Education Press, said he was the only
passenger on the EAL Houston-Boston plane who was not asleep when the
phantom craft was sighted.
“‘I saw no shape or form,’ Mr. McKelvie said. ‘I was on the right side
of the plane, and suddenly I saw this strange eerie streak out of my
window. It was very intense, not like lightning or anything I had ever
seen.’
“The Columbus man said he was too startled and the object moved too
quickly for him to adjust his eyes to it.”
In Washington, Air Force officials insisted they could shed no light on
the mystery. Out in Santa Monica, General George C. Kenney, then chief
of the Strategic Air Command, declared the Air Force had nothing
remotely like the ship described.
“I wish we did,” General Kenney told reporters. “I’d sure like to see
that.”
The publicized story of this “space ship” set off another scare—also
the usual cracks about screwball pilots. But Chiles and Whitted were
not screwballs; they were highly respected pilots. The passenger’s
confirmation added weight. But even if all three had been considered
deluded, the Air Force investigators could not get around the reports
from Robbins Air Force Base.
Just about one hour before the DC-3 incident, a strange flaming object
came racing southward through the night skies over Robbins Field, at
Macon, Georgia. Observers at the air base were astounded to see what
appeared to be a huge, wingless craft streak overhead, trailing a
varicolored exhaust. (The witnesses’ description tallied with those of
Chiles and Whitted.) The mystery ship vanished swiftly; all observers
agreed that it disappeared from the line of sight just like a normal
aircraft.
While I was working on this case, a contact in Washington gave me an
interesting tip.
“Within forty-eight hours after that Eastern sighting, Air Force
engineers rushed out blueprint plans and elevations of the ‘space
ship,’ based on what the two pilots told them.”
Whether or not this was true, I found that the Air Force engineers did
compute the probable speed and lift of the mystery craft. The ship was
found to be within the bounds of aerodynamic laws for operations in our
atmosphere. Here is the Air Force statement:
“Application of the Prandtl theory of lift indicated that a fuselage of
the dimensions reported by Chiles and Whitted could support a load
comparable to the weight of an aircraft of this size, at flying speeds
in the sub-sonic range.” (This supports Chiles’s estimate of 500-700
m.p.h.)
Four days after the space-ship story was published, a Navy spokesman
was quoted as hinting it might have been a high-atmosphere rocket gone
astray from the proving grounds in New Mexico. The brief report
appeared on the editorial page of the Washington _Star_ on July 28,
1947. It ran as follows:
“The Navy says that naval technicians have been testing a
3,000-mile-per-hour rocket in New Mexico. If one went astray, it could
travel across our continent in a short time.”
At first glance I thought this might be the real answer to the
Chiles-Whitted case. But after a few minutes I saw it was almost
impossible.
First, rockets at White Sands are launched and controlled with utmost
care. There have been no reported cases of such a long-distance
runaway.
Second, if such a rocket had gone astray, it would certainly have
caused wild confusion at White Sands until they found where it landed.
Hundreds of people would have known about it; the story would be
certain to leak out.
Third, such a rocket would have had to travel from White Sands to
Macon, Georgia, then circle around south of this city for over forty
minutes. (If it had kept on at the speed observed at Robbins Field, it
would have passed Montgomery long before the DC-3 reached the area.) In
addition, the rocket would have had to veer sharply away from the
airliner, as both pilots testified, and then zoom into the clouds. No
high-atmosphere test rocket has automatic controls such as this would
require. And if it had gone astray from White Sands, the station’s
remote control would no longer be guiding it.
The Eastern Airlines “space ship,” then, was not just a fugitive
rocket. But it could be a new type of aircraft, something
revolutionary, developed in absolute secrecy.
Other airline pilots had reported flying disks racing along the
airways, though none that I knew of had described projectile-like
objects. Chiles and Whitted insisted the mystery ship was not a disk,
and the report from Robbins Field agreed on this point. Man-made
devices or not, it seemed fairly certain there was more than one type
of saucer.
The more I studied the evidence, the harder it was to believe that this
was an earth-made ship. Such a wingless rocket ship would require
tremendous jet power to keep it in the air. Even our latest jet bombers
could not begin to approach its performance.
Going back over the Project “Saucer” preliminary report, I found strong
evidence that the Air Force was worried. In their investigation,
Project teams had screened 225 military and civilian flight schedules.
After nine months, they reported that the mysterious object was no
conventional aircraft.
On April 27, 1949, the Air Force admitted that Project “Saucer” had
failed to find the answer. The “space ship” was officially listed as
unidentified.
“But Wright Field is still working on it,” an Air Force officer told
me. “Both Chiles and Whitted are responsible pilots, and McKelvie has a
reputation for making careful statements. Even without the Robbins
Field confirmation, no one could doubt that they saw something.”
The Chiles-Whitted “space ship” was not the first of this type to be
reported. Another wingless aircraft was sighted in August 1947, by two
pilots for an Alabama flying service. It was at Bethel, Alabama, just
after sunset, when a huge black wingless craft swept across their
course. Silhouetted against the evening sky, it loomed larger than a
C-54. The pilots saw no wings, motors, or jet exhausts.
Swinging in behind the mystery ship, they attempted to follow. But at
their speed of 170 m.p.h. they were quickly outdistanced. Careful
checking showed there were no other planes nearby that could have been
mistaken for this strange craft.
On New Year’s Day, 1948, a similar rocket-shaped object was sighted at
Jackson, Mississippi. It was first seen by a former Air Force pilot and
his passenger, and later by witnesses on the ground. Before the pilot
could begin to close in, the odd wingless ship pulled away. Speeding up
from 200 to 500 m.p.h., it swiftly disappeared.
Besides these two cases, already on record, I had the tips Purdy had
given me. One wingless ship was supposed to have been seen three or
four days before the Chiles-Whitted sighting; like the thing they
reported, the unidentified craft was a double-decked “space ship” but
moving at even higher speed. At first I ran into a stone wall trying to
check this story. Then I found a lead conforming that this was a
foreign report. It finally proved to be from The Hague.
The tip had been right. This double-decked, wingless ship had been
sighted on July 20, 1948—four days before the Eastern case. Witnesses
had reported it at a high altitude, moving at fantastic speed.
While working on this report, I verified another tip. We had heard a
rumor of a space-ship sighting at Clark Field, in the Philippine
Islands. Although I didn’t learn the date, I found that there was such
a record.
(In the final Project “Saucer” report, the attempt to explain away this
sighting was painfully evident. Analyzing this case, Number 206, the
Air Force said: “If the facts are correct, there is no astronomical
explanation. A few points favor the daytime meteor
hypothesis—snow-white color, speed faster than a jet, the roar,
similarity to sky-writing and the time of day. But the tactics, if
really performed, oppose it strenuously: the maneuvers in and out of
cloud banks, turns of 180 degrees or more, Possibly these were
illusions, caused by seeing the object intermittently through clouds.
The impression of a fuselage with windows could even more easily have
been a sign of imagination.”
(With this conjecture, Project “Saucer” listed the sighting as
officially answered. The Hague space-ship case was unexplained.)
In following up the Jackson and Bethel reports, I talked with two
officials in the Civil Aeronautics Administration. One of these was
Charley Planck, who handled public relations. I found that the pilots
concerned had good records; C.A.A. men who knew them discounted the
hoax theory.
“Charley, there’s a rumor that airline pilots have been ordered not to
talk,” I told Planck. “You know anything about it?”
“You mean ordered by the Air Force or the companies?” he said.
“The Air Force _and_ the C.A.A.”
“If the C.A.A.’s in on it, it’s a top-level deal,” said Charley. “I
think it’s more likely the companies—with or without a nudge from the
Air Force.”
While we were talking, an official from another agency came in. Because
the lead he gave me was off the record, I’ll call him Steve Barrett. I
knew Steve fairly well. We were both pilots with service training; our
paths had crossed during the war, and I saw him now and then at
airports around Washington.
When the saucer scare first broke, Steve had been disgusted. “Damn
fools trying to get publicity,” he snorted. “The way Americans fall for
a gag! Even the Air Force has got the jitters.”
So I was a little surprised to find he now thought the disks were real.
“What sold you?” I asked.
“The radar reports,” said Steve. “I know of half a dozen cases where
they’ve tracked the things. One was in Japan. The thing was climbing so
fast no one believed the radarmen at first. Then they got some more
reports. One was up in Canada. There was a case in New Mexico, and I
think a Navy destroyer tracked a saucer up in the North Atlantic.”
“What did they find out?” said Charley Planck.
Steve shrugged. “I don’t know all the answers. Whatever they are, the
things can go like hell.”
I had a hunch he was holding back. I waited until he had finished with
Charley, and then went, down the hall with him. “You think the saucers
are guided missiles?” I said.
“If I thought so, I wouldn’t be talking,” he said flatly, “That’s not a
dig at you. But I was cleared last year for some secret electronics
work, and it might be used in some way with guided missiles.”
“I didn’t know that, Steve.”
“It’s O.K.,” he said. “I don’t mind talking, because can’t believe the
saucers are guided missiles. Maybe few of the things sighted out in the
Southwest have beer our test rockets, but that doesn’t explain the
radar reports in Canada and Japan.”
“I’d already heard about a radar case in Labrador,” I told Steve. He
looked at me quickly.
“Where’d you pick that up;”
“_True_ passed it on to me,” I said.
“They’ve had some trouble tracking the things, they maneuver so fast,”
said Steve. “It sounds crazy, but I’ve been told they hit more than ten
thousand miles an hour.”
“You believe it.?”
“Well, it’s not impossible. Those saucers were tracked about fifty
miles up, where there’s not much resistance.”
The elevator door opened. Steve waited until we were outside of the
Commerce Building.
“There’s one other thing that gets me,” he said. “Unless the radar boys
are way off, some of those saucers are enormous. I just can’t see a
guided missile five hundred feet in diameter.” He stopped for a moment.
“I suppose this will sound screwy to you—”
“You think they’re interplanetary,” I said.
Steve was quickly on the defensive. “I haven’t bought it yet, but it’s
not as crazy as it sounds.”
Without mentioning names, I told him about the aircraft designer and
the airline pilots.
“They’re in good company,” said Steve. “You know the Air Institute?”
“Sure—the Air Force school down at Montgomery.”
“Six months ago, I was talking with an officer who’d been instructing
there.” Steve looked at me, deadly serious. “He told me they are now
teaching that the saucers are probably space ships.”