Post by uforn on Nov 27, 2010 3:25:27 GMT 1
WARNER ROBINS UFOS, PART 1- THE ROCKET IN 1948
Pilots Chiles and Whitted drew this sketch of the rocket propelled aircraft seen seconds later in Georgia.
Warner Robins is a relatively new community, founded during World War II. As a result it has little claim to ghost stories like those from historic Savannah. However, with a massive Air Force base and many qualified observers of the skies, the city has accumulated a significant number of substantial reports of UFOs.
The UFO age began on June 24, 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold, flying above the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest, saw a group of unidentified flying objects shaped like disks, or saucers. Georgia officially entered the “saucer” age a year later, on July 24, 1948.
At their 5,000-foot altitude, visibility was excellent and the moon bright as Captain Clarence S. Chiles and his co-pilot John B. Whitted flew their normal airliner route. They had taken off from Houston, Texas, at 8:30 p.m., July 23, bound for Atlanta via New Orleans. It was 2:45 a.m. when an extraordinary event occurred between Montgomery and Atlanta.
According to Chiles, the pilots saw “what appeared to be a tremendous jet of flame,” a dull red glow which “approached with incredible swiftness.”
“It flashed down and we veered to the left and it veered to its left, and passed us about 700 feet to our right and about 700 feet above us,” Chiles told reporters. It was “as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us. It pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds. Its prop-wash or jet-wash rocked our DC-9.”
The pilots had sufficient time for a detailed look at the craft, which was described as enormous in size, 100 feet long and thirty feet in diameter, with no wings. It had a double deck-Whitted saw two rows of square windows, six windows to a row. “You could see right through the windows and out the other side,” he said. An intensely bright light, described as being “brilliant as a magnesium flare,” shone out of those windows.
The giant aircraft was propelled by an orange red jet flame which measured thirty to forty feet in length at a speed estimated at 500 to 700 miles an hour. The DC-9 had been flying northeast while the craft whizzed past to the southwest, apparently continuing directly toward Robins Air Force Base, 200 miles from the initial sighting.
Walter G. Massey was 23 years old in 1948, a high school graduate who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II in Europe as an Aircraft Engine Mechanic. He left the service in March 1947 and started working at Robins in September 1947. He was single and lived at 141 High Street in Macon.
On the night of July 24 Massey had not been drinking and was a transient Maintenance Alert crew member from 2400 to 800, midnight until eight a.m., standing fire guard on the number two engine of a C-47 that was soon to take off. Visibility was 10,000 feet, the wind blowing to the north at two mph.
At 1:50 Massey was facing north, the direction from which the UFO approached, but he did not notice it until the rocket was directly overhead. It was in view for 20 seconds and departed to the southwest.
“The first thing I saw was a stream of fire and I was undecided as to what it could be,” Massey stated in the official investigation report of the incident, “but as it got overhead, it was a fairly clear outline and appeared to be a cylindrical object with a long stream of fire coming out of the tail end. I am sure it could not be a jet since I have witnessed” jets in night flight, he stated. It “looked like rocket propulsion rather than jet propulsion,” but its speed “was much greater” as if “energized by rocket propulsion.” During his World War II service in 1944 he had witnessed the night launch of a German V-rocket.
The object Massey observed was at approximately 3,000 feet and the flame was longer than the UFO. There was also “a faint glow on the belly of the object-a phosphorescent glow.” That light illuminated the whole object. He did not detect a sound or odor from the craft.
Massey believed the object “was about the size of a B-29. It might have been a little longer, in circumference. It was too large for a jet. It seemed to be a dark color and constructed of an unknown metallic type material.”
He estimated its speed at 700 mph and believed it was “one of the fastest objects I have ever seen,” faster than a V1 rocket and much larger.
Asked if he was familiar with shooting stars, or meteorites, Massey replied that he was, but noted that those objects fell while this phenomenon flew “straight and level” and faded from view due to distance rather than dropping out of sight. It was Massey’s experience that meteorites were round and bell shaped while his UFO was definitely “long and cylindrical” and “trailing a blue flame”
Of the UFO seen by the pilots over Alabama, Massey said, “the description seemed to fit my impressions.”
Weather records backed up Massey’s description of conditions, and the control tower confirmed that no aircraft had been aloft at that time. The C-47 he was attached to took off at 2:50 a.m.
Massey talked to Flight Control about his sighting and the case was given to Air Defense Command the following morning. He was interviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Eugene L. Cropper, who considered him a “competent and qualified observer.”
This file was declassified on December 4, 1975, and can be viewed at Project Blue Book Archives. brownsguides.com/weirdgeorgia/wp-admin/.%20%20
bluebookarchive.org/download.aspx MAXW-PBB4-119-124 are the relevant pages.