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One man, who had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO's were interplanetary spaceships. He had questioned the people in the control tower at Godman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near Montgomery, Alabama, by a "cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame."
This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it. A quick check on a map showed that the UFO that nearly collided with the airliner would have passed almost over Macon, Georgia, after passing the DC-3. It had been turning toward Macon when last seen.
About midmorning, the Hughes test engineer told me, the jet traffic had begun to drop off, and they were about ready to close down their operation when one of the crew picked up a slow-moving target coming across the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. He tracked the target for a few minutes and, from the speed and altitude, decided that it was a DC-3.
Just before he swerved the DC-3, the fireball was as big, or bigger, than a full moon. The intelligence officers asked a few more questions and went back to their office. More reports, which had been phoned in from all over northern New Mexico, were waiting for them. By morning a full-fledged investigation was under way.
As it rolled down the runway getting up speed, both the pilot and the copilot were busy, so they didn't see the light approaching. But the tower operators did, and as soon as the DC-3 was airborne, they called and told the pilot to be careful. The copilot said that he saw the light and was watching it.
As they watched, the object seemed to approach their airplane head on, changing color from orange red to green. As it became bigger and bigger, the captain said, he thought sure it was going to collide with them so he racked the DC-3 up in a tight turn. As the green ball of fire got abreast of them it began to fall toward the ground, getting dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared.
The tower operators, thinking that it was another airplane, called the pilot of the DC-3 and told him to be careful since there was another airplane approaching the field. As the DC-3 lined up to take off, both the pilots of the airliner and the tower operators saw the light moving in, but since it was still some distance away the DC- 3 was given permission to take off.
Chiles said he reached over, gave Whitted, the other pilot, a quick tap on the arm, and pointed. The UFO was now almost on top of them. Chiles racked the DC-3 into a tight left turn. Just as the UFO flashed by about 700 feet to the right, the DC-3 hit turbulent air. Whitted looked back just as the UFO pulled up in a steep climb.
Just then the tower got a call from another airplane that was requesting landing instructions and the operators looked away from the light. In the DC-3 the pilot and copilot had also looked away from the light for a few seconds. When they looked back, the bluish-white light had apparently closed in because it was much brighter and it was dead ahead.
If it had been another airplane, they could have read the number, seen the passengers, and darn near reached out and slugged the pilot for getting so close to them. About a month later, over northern Indiana, TWA treated all the passengers of one of their DC-3 nights to a view of a UFO that looked like a "big glob of molten metal."
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