1948 chronology - UFO Updates on Chiles-Whitted case 

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/subscribers/2004/sep/m20-012.shtml

 Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting - Sparks

From: Brad Sparks 

Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 22:36:02 EDT

Fwd Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:54:01 -0400

Subject: Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting - Sparks

>From: Larry Hatch <larryhatch.nul>

>To: ufoupdates.nul

>Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:24:48 -0700

>Subject: Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting

>>From: Jerome Clark <jkclark.nul>

>>To: <ufoupdates.nul>

>>Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 13:36:02 -0500

>>Subject: Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting

>>>From: John Harney <magonia.nul>

>>>To: <ufoupdates.nul>

>>>Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:57:17 +0100

>>>Subject: Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting

>>>>From: Jerome Clark <jkclark.nul>

>>>>To: <ufoupdates.nul>

>>>>Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:44:02 -0500

>>>>Subject: Re: Chiles-Whitted Sighting

<snip>

>>>>This illustrates a common problem in trying to evaluate UFO

>>>>reports. Witnesses make the reports, usually giving the time,

>>>>(as defined by an officially recognised time zone, sometimes

>>>>advanced one hour for "summer time"), or GMT (Greenwich Mean

>>>>Time, also referred to as Universal Time or Zulu Time).

>>>Ideally the times of UFO reports would all be recorded in GMT

>>>together with date, latitude and longitude. It would then be

>>>easy - assuming the reports were stored in a computer data base

>>>- to calculate the local apparent time, from which relevant

>>>astronomical information could be calculated.

>>I am happy to agree entirely with John on this important point.

>Please let me second (third?) that.

>I am sick to death of UFOs that appear "right after dinner" and

>which fly away "over Kelly's barn" as if clock, calender and the

>North Pole were vague abstractions, designed by eggheads to

>distract honest kids from the fish in the creek.

Still another agreement here. This raises the issue of

evaluation of UFO report quality. Very poor judgment is

continually displayed in the promotion of poor cases. As I said

before the Chiles-Whitted case is a lousy case, and not one upon

which the existence or non- existence of the UFO phenomenon

should hinge. The reason, as I said before, is that it was very

short in duration (5-10 seconds) and while certain expert

observers such as a Lincoln LaPaz could have made an enormously

detailed and accurate report of such a short observation or

could have extracted such from his sophisticated investigation

and reenactments with witnesses, there is no evidence of such

accurate and precise visual observation by Chiles or Whitted in

their reporting. So far as I can tell Chiles and Whitted never

give any angles whatsoever (except their own course heading).

The object was essentially in rectilinear motion at high speed,

not hovering where one could observe more carefully.

There is little to distinguish it from a high speed brilliant

meteor fireball and it does appear to have been sighted over

several Southern states from the Virginia-North Carolina border

(pilot Feldvary) to Georgia (Massey at Warner-Robins AFB) to

Alabama (Chiles-Whitted) on a SW course. But the Chiles-Whitted

passenger who awoke to see the flash said it was headed SE. Let

me review the Strangeness factors that would putatively exclude

a meteor and see how well they hold up (see below).

The Chiles-Whitted time of 2:45 AM seems casual, like most

people who round off times to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes or

even to the nearest hour. Was it really 2:44 or 2:46 or even

2:30 or 2:55 or whatever? Was it EST or EDT? Whitted specified

EST but Chiles did not specify a time zone or standard in his

report to the AF. It is my impression that airlines and railoads

in that era used Daylight Saving Time. It's possible Whitted

converted to EST in his reporting. The AF maintenance man in

Georgia was apparently a bit confused in his time and date.

Ruppelt seems to have assumed his 1:40-1:50 AM time was EST and

Chiles-Whitted was 2:45 AM EDT and thus the same time, as Hynek

seems to have suggested in his 1949 analysis.

This might be resolvable if one could check the newspapers for

the July 1948 flight schedule of Eastern Airlines Flight 576.

Major papers often printed airline schedules in that era.

The Strangeness factors that might exclude a meteor fireball

are:

Rocket Ship Shape with Rectangular "Windows"

"Pull Up" Maneuver

Course Change

Speed

Altitude Possibly Below Clouds

As we will see the evidence for each is very weak, equivocal, or

contradicted by the best data.

Rocket Ship Shape with Rectangular "Windows"

The famous double-decker row of rectangular or square windows on

a Buck Rogers-type pointy rocket ship is what has made this case

sensational. But there is an "airship effect" in which fast

moving flaming objects such as meteors and reentering satellites

can appear to have "windows" even sharply delineated "windows."

Hynek may have been the first to notice this effect and

suggested it specifically with reference to Chiles-Whitted.

Typically the "windows" are bright blobs of flaming material

that seem to be contrasted against a surrounding "darker body"

typically thought to be cigar-shaped or rocket-shaped. Cases

include the March 3, 1968, meteor-fireball or space debris

reentry, the June 1969 Iowa Fireball that Klass likes to point

out where a pilot over 100 miles away thought he needed to avoid

collision with the objects, and the 1913 Chant Meteor Procession

(meteors that apparently braked into earth orbit briefly).

The "double decker" parallel rows may be due to the meteor

fireball breaking up into two major portions burning up along

parallel paths shortly before final disintegration. Indeed the

Chiles-Whitted portion of the long 500+ mile trajectory that

began as far up as the southern Virginia border is the final end

of the sighting series so far as we can tell. And Whitted made

it clear to McDonald that the object did NOT disappear by going

into clouds but by disappearing in mid-air. That is what meteors

do, they burn up and disappear in mid-air.

Again, this is a problem with a short-duration high-speed moving

object case where there was not a phase of hovering to give

witnesses a chance to make better observations. The witnesses

were not experts at short-duration observations of meteors as

LaPaz was, they gave no angles and their timing data is

relatively weak.

"Pull Up" Maneuver

The famous "pull up" maneuver reported by Chiles and Whitted was

described by Whitted who had the best view because he was not

distracted by flying the plane and veering to avoid a possible

collision as Chiles was doing. Whitted told AF interviewers on a

followup that it was a "gentle climb" prior to "disappearance."

Whitted told McDonald in Jan 1968 that he was widely

misunderstood, by both the AF and his own pilot Chiles according

to McDonald, to mean that the object vanished by going into the

clouds in a sharp pullup when in fact "it climbed only perhaps a

matter of a few hundreds of feet" and it was "suddenly just

gone!" It had not gone into the cloud cover.

Again, Chiles and Whitted had a chance to prove some special

expertise at visual observation by providing precise sensible

angles and timing. But they didn't. They did not need to be

astronomers or mathematicians (as LaPaz was) or Cal Tech

aerodynamicists (as one of the Lockheed crew was). All they

needed to do was understand the concepts of angular measurements

and timing and do the best they could. But they did not

understand the importance of angles and time and the AF

investigators apparently did not either since they seem not to

have extracted that info from Chiles or Whitted.

We are left to reconstruct angles and time from fragmentary data

and logical deduction. Chiles said that at closest approach the

object passed about 700 feet to their right about 500 to 800

feet higher than their altitude. Even though distance is

difficult to impossible to determine, the relative _ratio_ of

height and distance can be fairly accurate, and that gives the

tangent of the elevation angle, which is 36 to 49 degrees at

closest approach.

Whitted estimated the speed at 700 mph (1,000 ft/sec) at 500

feet higher altitude than their DC-3 airliner. Then, as he told

McDonald, it disappeared a few hundred feet higher than that

(say 700-1,000 ft above airliner altitude). So supposing about

half the sighting duration was spent passing the plane to

disappearance we get about 2,500 to 5,000 feet distance traveled

from close approach to disappearance.

But this makes the disappearance only 8 to 22 degrees above the

aircraft local horizontal (using Chiles' close-approach distance

estimate).. This is a huge _drop_ in elevation angle from the

36-49 degrees. This is not a "pullup" or "gentle climb" but a

_descent_. The angle drops. The "pullup" is apparently an

illusion of distance perspective. Perhaps if the climb had been

very sharp instead of "gentle" we could hypothesize that as the

angle gradually dropped there was a sudden lift up. But Whitted

was quite explicit in telling McDonald it was a "gentle climb"

evidently over a large fraction of the sighting duration, which

is clearly contradicted by the angles calculated.

A meteor could have been at about, say, 45 miles up at the close

approach traveling at say 20 miles per second (72,000 mph),

dropping to 40 miles altitude at disappearance. These numbers

can be adjusted and are merely to illustrate how plausible a

meteor scenario can be. At a ground distance of say 60 miles at

close approach this would be an elevation angle of 37 degrees,

consistent with the data from Chiles-Whitted. At disappearance

perhaps 100 miles away the elevation angle would be 22 degrees,

again consistent with the Chiles-Whitted data I previously

calculated. Farther back up the trajectory in North Carolina,

the meteor might have become visible at about 90 miles altitude

(including earth dropoff of thirty miles or so). All these

numbers are quite consistent with meteor fireballs.

Course Change

As Chiles veered the airliner to the left the object reportedly

veered the opposite direction to their right. Or was the

impression of the object turning simply an illusion caused by

the airliner's own turn? Why should the reality of the UFO

phenomenon have to hinge on a few seconds of a sudden and

unexpected event like this with not even a quantitative estimate

of how many degrees of the "turn"? This simply degenerates into

an argument over pilot qualifications, etc., that do not prove

anything one way or another. These pilots did not provide angles

and their timing is very loose, so there is no reason from the

weakness of their reporting to want to rely on them for the

impression of a momentary course change by the object, an

alleged course change whose size is completely unknown. Was it a

trivial slight 1-degree turn, or 10 degrees or 45 degrees?? Who

knows?

Without a numerical estimate the alleged turn remains rather

subjective. This is how one can gauge whether to put much weight

on a witness observation -- numerical estimates are to be

preferred over non-quantitative subjective impressions. This is

basic science.

A meteor in general cannot change course, though if it broke up

or a portion broke off the different parts could veer off in

differing directions. A portion could break off out of view

depending on the angle of view, clouds that may hide that

portion, and other visibility factors. Whether this rare

possibility needs to be invoked is a good question. Chiles did

not have a good view of the object disappearing because he was

busy piloting the plane to avoid what he thought could have been

a collision. The illusion of a pilot thinking he was about to

collide with a distant meteor, thinking it was an aircraft much

closer, is known from the Iowa Fireball case of 1969, as Philip

Klass has pointed out many times without recognition by the UFO

community.

AF flight mechanic Massey in Georgia about 200 miles from Chiles

and Whitted and presumably observing slightly earlier in the

meteor flight claimed the object "took a changing southwest

course while in sight" after first being seen in the N. Massey

did not give an angle for the turn. McDonald interpreted this as

a 45-degree turn from a S heading to a SW heading but Massey is

perhaps too fuzzy to rely upon for such an inference, as he

seems a bit confused on his observational details, such as which

day the sighting occurred (Friday the 23rd or Saturday the

24th), there are two different times attributed without

explanation (1:40-1:50 or 2:05 AM), etc. And again Massey did

not give any figure at all, nothing about a 45- degree turn or

any particular number of degrees. Without a numerical estimate

the alleged course change remains rather subjective. A meteor of

course can be seen in the N and still be on a SW heading,

without changing course.

Speed

Whitted reported the object seemed to be traveling at 700 mph.

AF man in Georgia also said 700 mph, but also compared the

object to a V-2 he had seen in France during the war, and V-2

speed was up to about 4,000 mph.

Because distance could not be reliably determined, Whitted's 1/2

mile distance estimate (he was not clear as to whether that

applied at first sight or close approach or disappearance or

just when) could be scaled up by a factor of a hundred to meteor

distances. Then the speed scales up to 70,000 mph, which is in

accord with the 72,000 mph meteor speed scenario I outlined

above.

Altitude Possibly Below Clouds

No one ever explicitly said they saw the rocket ship silhouetted

against clouds. If it had been seen against the clouds Chiles

and Whitted could have said they had a reliable means to

estimate the distance using the clouds. But they never said

such a thing, never said they could use the scattered clouds for

a distance reference, or upper limit. Whitted even had to

complain to McDonald that his statement about the object

disappearing was not meant to imply the object went into clouds

(which would give us a distance marker) but that it had vanished

in mid-air apparently against clear sky -- as a meteor would.

In summary, there is not enough reliable quantitative data in

the Chiles-Whitted case from its short duration of 5-10 seconds

to exclude a bright meteor fireball, and it should not be used

as a strong case or best evidence for UFO reality.

Brad Sparks