CHILES–WHITTED.
“In the early morning of July 24, 1948, Eastern Air Lines DC-3 flight 576, on a route from Houston to Atlanta, was cruising at 5,000 feet over Alabama when Captain Clarence S.”
Captain Chiles banked the DC-3 sharply to avoid a collision. After the object passed, the pilots observed it climb and accelerate away to the northeast. A single passenger, Clarence McKelvie, also observed the object briefly out of his window. Multiple witnesses on the ground at Robins Air Force Base in Macon, Georgia, and at Blackstone, Virginia, reported observing a similar fast-moving object on roughly the same trajectory.
The case was investigated by Project Sign — the US Air Force's first formal UFO study — and was a key component of the now-famous "Estimate of the Situation," a classified report drafted by Project Sign personnel in late 1948 that reportedly concluded UFOs were likely interplanetary craft. The Estimate was rejected by USAF Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg for insufficient proof and ordered destroyed; copies are believed to have circulated unofficially among USAF personnel for years afterward.
The eventual official Project Sign conclusion was that the Chiles–Whitted object was likely a bolide meteor. Both pilots strongly rejected this explanation, arguing that the close passage, the structured appearance, and the rows of windows were inconsistent with a meteor. The case is historically significant for its role in shaping early Air Force UFO policy and for the fact that one of the original "estimates" within the US government concluded — against later official policy — that some UFOs were likely extraterrestrial.