The Flying Saucers are RealKeyhoe, Donald E. (Donald Edward)
History
The Flying Saucers are Real
Keyhoe, Donald E. (Donald Edward)
Unidentified flying objects
“Kennett Square, Pa., July 24 (AP) . Clarence L. McKelvie, assistant
managing editor of the American Education Press, said he was the only
passenger 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 “space ship” set off another scare—also
the usual cracks about screwball pilots. But Chiles and Whitted were
not screwballs; they were highly respected pilots. The passenger’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 ‘space
ship,’ based on what the two pilots told them.”
Whether or not this was true, I found that the Air 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 space-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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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