Look Back Now On The Then New 1940's UFO Craze

According to USAF Project Blue Book supervisor Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the Chiles-Whitted Eastern Airlines UFO sighting of 24 July 1948 was one of three recent UFO events that led the personnel of the earlier Project Sign to conclude "that UFOs were real". However that conclusion was later walked-back and in 1959 Project Blue Book formally stated that a meteor was the cause of the incident. On the 24th of July 1948 six months after the Captain Thomas Mantel UFO encounter January 7, 1948 a cylindrical shaped object sighting was reported. The object was giving off a phosphorescent glow in the night sky over Maxwell Air Force Base Montgomery Alabama at 2:45 am. Captain Sia's Child and first officer J.B Whitten were piloting a routine Eastern Airlines flight number 576 from Houston to Atlanta. The pilots sighted an object coming toward them. This strange object had a stream of red fire coming from its tail. The captain could see it was much larger than anything ...