Like most eyewitness descriptions of a startling event, the testimony of the three men differed. Chiles stated that at the front of the UFO was a lighted pilot compartment or cockpit with a “snout” similar to a radar pole, and that a kind of nozzle projected from the rear from which the flames fanned out to a width of twenty or thirty feet. Whitted did not see a cockpit, a snout, or a rear nozzle; he thought the flames flared out from the entire rear and were never any wider than the width of the UFO itself. The third witness, the passenger, saw no shape or form, only an intensely brilliant streak of light that appeared and vanished before he was able to focus his eyes. As responsible officers, both pilots had obviously tried to separate the observed phenomena from their interpretation. They differed widely on the estimated distance of the UFO (the passenger did not offer an estimate). Chiles thought it passed them with a margin of only about 700 feet, but Whitted believed the distance to be more than ten times greater, about a mile and a half. However, when we remember that these men had the UFO in sight for only a small fraction of a minute and that their study of the side view (“windows,” “cockpit,” etc.) must have been limited to the instant of passing, these disagreements are not remarkable. When Captain Chiles and Lieutenant Whitted reported their frightening experience, the Air Force made a prompt investigation. Since Captain Chiles explicitly stated his belief that the UFO was under intelligent control, the case required careful consideration. A check of the air traffic showed that no other planes had been in the area at the time, so the object could not have been a normal aircraft. Furthermore, other equally reliable witnesses reported seeing unusually bright meteors in the Southeast that night. Since the bare physical description of the UFO, apart from the inferences made, was identical with that of a fireball, Dr. Hynek concluded that it was an unusually bright meteor. But the climate at ATIC that summer was not friendly to a prosaic explanation. Remembering the tragic death of Captain Mantell some six months earlier while he was chasing a UFO, then unidentified (p. 33), some officials were more than half ready to believe in invading space fleets as the answer to every puzzling phenomenon in the sky. They rejected the fireball explanation. Instead of accepting the Chiles-Whitted UFO as a meteor, they identified the other two meteors seen that night as UFOs! And yet the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO _was_ a fireball.