Ruppelt continued, “The estimate died a
quick death. Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to
the incinerator.”
One reason for Vandenberg’s skepticism was that another faction within the Air Force had a competing
theory: UFOs weren’t interplanetary at all, but the handiwork of
America’s Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. In another top-secret
report dated December 1948, the Air Force suggested a variety of reasons the
Soviets might be behind such a scheme, including photographic reconnaissance,
testing U.S. air defenses, and undermining the U.S. and European ally confidence in
the atom bomb as the ultimate weapon. The Soviets wouldn’t have their own
atom bomb until late August 1949.
Adding to the
mystery: The sighting occurred outside Montgomery, downstate from the Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville where a collection of rocket
scientists—many former Nazis
quietly spirited to the U.S. to help win the Cold War space race—were
working on top-secret rocketry experiments under the guidance of brilliant and
visionary rocket designer Wernher von Braun. Could the sighting have somehow
been related to their experiments?
The
suppression of the “Estimate of the Situation” and the rejection of any
extraterrestrial explanation was the start of “a long period of unfortunate,
amateurish public relations” on the part of the Air Force, astronomer J. Allen Hynek claimed in his 1972 book, The
UFO Experience. Hynek, who had worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory tracking space satellites and later became a professor at
Northwestern University, was the official astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book and the man who developed the
UFO-sighting classification system that originated the phrase “Close Encounters
of Third Kind.”
“The insistence on official
secrecy and frequent ‘classification’ of documents was hardly needed since the
Pentagon had declared that the problem really didn’t exist,” Hynek wrote.
Ruppelt maintained that bureaucratic
bungling rather than deliberate deception was the Air Force’s main problem.
“But had the Air Force tried to throw up a screen of confusion, they couldn’t
have done a better job,” he added.
Because of this lack of
transparency, the Chiles-Whitted incident remains one of the most controversial
UFO sightings—and a favorite of conspiracy theorists even now.
So, what did Chiles and Whitted actually
see? Some suggested a weather balloon, others a mirage. Hynek believed it was a
fireball, or very bright meteor, an opinion that eventually became the official
Air Force verdict. As to the lighted windows both pilots claim to have seen,
some experts suggest that might have been a phenomenon called the “airship
effect,” where observers who see a group of unrelated lights in the sky are
fooled into thinking they’re part of the same object.
But Chiles and Whitted stuck to their
story. James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona physicist and UFO expert,
said he interviewed them in 1968, some 20 years after the event. The two were
now jet pilots for Eastern Air Lines, and they continued to believe that what
they had seen was some sort of airborne vehicle, McDonald reported.
What’s more, Whitted added a new and
puzzling detail to the story. Although reports at the time said the object had
disappeared into the clouds or simply out of their view, he supposedly told
McDonald that wasn’t what really happened. Instead, the object had vanished
instantaneously, right before their eyes.
No wonder the Chiles-Whitted case continues to baffle and intrigue, even 70 years later.
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