My mind was still reluctant to accept the s.p.a.ce-travel answer, in spite of the old reports. But I kept thinking of the famous aircraft designer who thought the disks were s.p.a.ce craft; the airline pilots Purdy had mentioned; Blake"s copilot, Chuck. . . .
Now that I recalled it, Blake had been more embarra.s.sed than seemed called for when he told about Chuck. Perhaps he had been the one who believed the saucers were s.p.a.ce 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
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sharply, too, and pa.s.sed us about seven hundred feet to the right. I saw then that it had no wings."
The mystery ship pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sengers. Most had been asleep or were drowsing. But one man confirmed that they were in their right senses. This pa.s.senger, 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:
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"Kennett Square, Pa., July 24 (AP) . Clarence L. McKelvie, a.s.sistant managing editor of the American Education Press, said he was the only pa.s.senger 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 "s.p.a.ce ship" set off another scare--also the usual cracks about screwball pilots. But Chiles and Whitted were not screwb.a.l.l.s; they were highly respected pilots. The pa.s.senger"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 "s.p.a.ce ship," based on what the two pilots told them."
Whether or not this was true, I found that the Air
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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 s.p.a.ce-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 pa.s.sed 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. {p. 71} And if it had gone astray from White Sands, the station"s remote control would no longer be guiding it.
The Eastern Airlines "s.p.a.ce 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 "s.p.a.ce 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 "s.p.a.ce 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
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other planes nearby that could have been mistaken for this strange craft.