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 he had seen. And then he notices that the object had no wings supporting it as it passed on the right side of our plane. The UFOs speed was about 700 miles per hour and both men got a very good look at this unusual object.

The UFO was about 100 feet long and shaped like a cigar as it passed they clearly saw two rows of windows. There were upper and lower levels and were large and Square. During that evening there was a third witness the one passenger who was awake on that Eastern Airlines flight. Clarence Mcelvey & I were startled & frightened a male Steward came to me and said I notice you've been looking out the window will you talk to the pilot? 

And I said well of course the pilot came down with his clipboard he was visibly shaken he told me that he had been a flyer in the war and had covered a million miles of flight and I'd never seen anything like this before. What was it that I saw? I saw this object cigar-shaped it had a row of Windows behind them it was lit out of the rear was a cherry red flame. 

This hair-raising experience was witnessed by three aircraft a passenger and ground observers added more corroboration. The conclusion of an Air Intelligence report was that the object remained unidentified as to origin construction and power source and goes into the Record classified as unknown. This is the Pentagon Washington DC and this man is Colonel Bill Coleman. 

He was chief of public information for the United States Air Force from 1969 to 1974. It was here at the Pentagon that the Defense Department first became interested in the UFO phenomenon. This occurred in the late 1940s with reports of objects and lights seen in the Sky by military personnel and others. Furthermore, the Air Force decided to investigate the matter anyway. 

As there were UFOs that could well be foreign weapons used for test purposes and might affect our national security. The investigative Branch was called Project Sign. This project had only been underway for about two weeks when The Mantel crash had made headlines Across the Nation. In addition, the staff's investigation was far from complete but public pressure was enormous. 

They were forced to come up with an answer to really quiet growing speculation that Mantel had been killed by hostile aliens and a Flying Saucer. This is when it was decided that Mantel had chased the planet Venus. But however, this was an initial finding of the Chills and Wooded UFO encounter 1948 the case had an impact on the Air Force project. 

What's more, it presented the first close-up account by highly reliable Witnesses the object described led some of the staff to postulate an extraterrestrial Theory. They wrote up an estimate of the situation which at the time was classified as top secret suggesting that the saucers were from outer space. Air Force investigators couldn't explain the sighting. 

The UFO could not possibly fly unless it had an engine in it that was beyond anything anybody on Earth could produce. The Air Force investigators trusted the testimony of these experienced pilots and were forced to consider the incredible. And the investigators said the Earth was being visited by alien spaceships. They took it so seriously that they risked their own careers by writing an estimate of the situation that they sent to higher headquarters. 

What's more, they stated for the record that UFOs could be Extra-Terrestrial which of course was not received well by the Pentagon. White Vandenberg looked at this case and he said I cannot accept the eyewitness accounts from experienced Pilots. Their accounts were not enough for the General of the Air Force. He wanted the Flying Saucer phenomena to just go away but the popular fascination with mysterious flying objects was growing. 

This theory was rejected by the Air Force Chief of Staff General Hyde Vandenberg and even other project science staff members said they did not have enough proof of Alien visitation. And so the Extraterrestrial visitation idea was dropped for the time being. 

As the recent Congressional public hearings on the subject of UFOs and U.A.P.  has proven there is a lack of openness to divulge any information to the general public. After 93 years of military investigations on this phenomenon, you would think that we the people would know much more than we do. There will never be UFO Disclosure to the general public.