From the Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 25, 1948

VET PILOTS REPORT SEEING
MYSTERY SHIP IN ALABAMA

ATLANTA, Ga., July 24 (UP) - Two Eastern Airlines pilots reported
today that their plane last night passed a tremendous wingless
aircraft that shot a 40 foot flame out it's back end and traveled
between 500 and 700 miles an hour.

Captain Clarence Chiles and his co-pilot, John B. Whitted, told
of seeing the fantastic airship and said it looked like a B-29
fuselage "blown up about 4 times."

The aircraft was brilliantly lighted and had two decks of big,
square windows, they claimed. It passed within several hundred
feet of the pilot's DC-3 and then shot up in the clouds, they
said.

"We were crusing about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama"
said Captain Chiles who was an ATC ferry pilot for 4 years during
the war.

"We looked out of the right side of the cockpit and saw a
tremendous light. The first thing that came to my attention was
the long stream of flame coming out of the rear end of the plane,
or whatever it was."

"Then I noticed the two rows of square windows-it was a man-made
thing, alright. We couldn't see any people aboard. It was
traveling too fast for that."

"The aircraft seemed to be about 4 times the circunference of a
B-29 fuselage, but it was only a little longer," Chiles said.
"There were no wings whatsoever."

"The plane passed us on our right, then, as if the pilot had seen
us and wanted to avoid us, it zoomed up into the same cloud it
had come out of. A 40 foot flame shot out it's rear end. A
luminous glow, like a giant flourescent light, ran along the
belly of the thing."

Whitted, who said he had seen the air forces's best jet planes
not on the secret list, estimated it's speed as much faster than
he had seen before.

"I'd say that when it shot up into the clouds it was going
between 500 and 700 miles an hour," Whitted said. "I've seen
real shooting stars and meteors-they look pretty close when you
are a pilot-but I've never seen anything like this."

Whitted added that as a B-29 pilot over Japan he had looked
kamikaze suicide planes in the face and been attacked by "balls
of fire"-Japanese jet planes.

As the aircraft passed them, they said, their comparatively small
DC-3 fluttered in the "propwash or "rocket-wash". The pilots said.
"It sent out tremendous shock waves."

The brilliant light of the airship and the flame of it's
propellant brought "lightning blindness" to their cockpit, the
pilots said, they had to turn up their instrument lights to read
them.


KENNETT SQUARE, Pa., July 24 (UP) - C.L. McKelvie, Columbus, Ohio
a passenger in an Eastern Airlines plane whose pilot reported
seeing a phantom ship in the skies near Montgomery. Alabama, said
today he saw a definite light "but no space ship" at the time.


WASHINGTON, July 24 (UP) - Air Force officials said today they
could not throw any light on the mystery of a tremendous wingless
aircraft reported seen over the vicinity of Montgomery, Alabama.

An air firce spokesman said that "obviously" this country has no
plane resembling what two Eastern Air Lines pilots described as
a double decked, jet propelled, wingless transport shooting a 40
foot flame out the back end.

They suggested the possibility that it might have been a civilian
version of the Boeing C-97 transport. A plane of this type is
believed to be undergoing tests now somewhere in the south.


SEATTLE, July 24 (UP) - William M. Allen, president of the Boeing
Airplane Company, said today he was "pretty sure" the giant
aircraft reported seen by the two Eastern Air Lines pilots last
night was "not one of our planes."



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