1948Chiles Whitted Makes Sign Brave
Upon landing they reported to the Atlanta administration. Those administrators gave the story to the press. These press stories were how the word of this got to the Pentagon. Everyone seemed to want to interview the pilots, and several interviews happened. Chiles then said that he got a phone call from the Pentagon saying that he was not to say another word about his experience to the public or he'd be called back to active duty. Reflecting on this heavy-handed silencing later, Chiles indicated that he was angered by it, but for the time being complied. The horse was far out of the barn though and the event was national and officials were being asked about it all over. Of course they had no explanation to give anyone. This, being of course an unacceptable military and security situation, prompted the Pentagon [in the person of new chief of Air Force intelligence, Charles Cabell ] to phone Howard McCoy at Project SIGN and order him to get the project down there asap. The bottom two entries in the picture collage here are the thumbnail descriptions that Whitted (left) and Chiles (right) gave at different times I picked them out of the file because of their convenient sizes
of their encounter.
By the afternoon of Cabell's phonecall, the two "aces" of the project [Alfred Loedding {above, right} and Albert Deyarmond {below right}] were flying to Atlanta with their immediate boss, Lt.Colonel Raymond Llewellyn, as backup. Meeting the pilots [on layover at the Henry Grady hotel] Loedding and Deyarmond split up, each interviewing one of the pilots separately. [In the photo, Chiles is on the right, Whitted is on the left Chiles' drawing is middle of the page; Whitted's drawing is below]. You can look at the drawings and decide what you will. Some of you will decide that the drawings are too much unalike to credit. Some of you will decide that, given the short time of the passage and the different viewing positions of the pilot/co-pilot seats, that the commonalities of the drawings [general shape, "rocket thrust', two rows of "windows", Lighted "windows", dark front end,....] are good enough. Loedding and Deyarmond, for their parts, were wowed. We are dealing with two guys [from SIGN] who have been immersed in unidentified flying object reports for months, and are surely oriented towards believing them, especially when they have such impressive witnesses. We are at greater emotional distance. Maybe we agree; maybe we do not.
"The SIGN operatives went back to the project convinced that they had just interviewed two pilots who had seen a ship from outer space. [I've made a synthesis drawing of the two pilots' attempts to give an impression of the kind of thing that Loedding and Deyarmond thought they were dealing with; collage left, upper portion]. This thing wowed them more than it would you or I, because, as aeronautical engineers they were schooled in the ideas of one of the great(though largely unknown) scientific geniuses of the twentieth century, Ludwig Prandtl. Prandtl basically wrote the laws of fluid flows that found much of aeronautical theory. Historians rate him up there with people like Euler and Bernoulli. "The Prandtl Theory of Lift" described, mathematically how such an object could fly, despite one's gut impression that it could not do so. This thing COULD fly. This thing, to them, was real, and "out-of-this-world". It was the "excuse" that they were looking for to put forward the conclusion that had been firming up all along. An example as to how "ripe" they were for this: they had just explored the possibility of asking the think-tank RAND to give them their estimate as to whether a spaceship was a feasible technology. They may not have been aware that RAND had already produced such a study [it's very first as far as we know] that pronounced that this was" feasible. [Prandtl is in the collage, middle left; the remainder are from the RAND study and RAND's chief, Franklin Collbohm]. SIGN had what they wanted and they were ready.
"But was the Pentagon ready for them? SIGN thought that its logic was air-tight. Here was a craft that flew according to very advanced aerodynamic principles, indicative of high technology. But the Prandtl Theory of Lift made the difficulty of this even clearer: you would have to have an extremely powerful power-plant to fly the thing. Nothing that anyone had, nor anything that was even well imagined, was powerful enough to get this thing up and maneuverable. [Speculation about nuclear engines immediately came up]. It can" fly; it "did "fly;" we" can't fly it; therefore "somebody else" is flying it. This logic and the cluster of unexplained encounters that SIGN could list, were the foundation stones for the famous extraterrestrial "Estimate of the Situation". Once SIGN concluded, and Staff chief Captain Robert Sneider began to pen the Estimate, Howard McCoy would have begun to inform the Pentagon as to what was coming. Doubtless vibrations were felt through the entire directorate.
This is the maelstrom that the news would be heading into. It is one version of the AF Intelligence "stack" [which was changing as all this happened] that the Estimate would face. Vandenberg was now Chief. His new Chief of Intelligence, General Charles Cabell (top, right), had replaced George McDonald. Schulgen was gone, replaced in Cabell's office by Colonel John Schweizer. Over the Intelligence analysis group was Brigadier General Ernest (Mickey) Moore, bottom left. In the middle [of the pictures and, doubtless everything,] was the most negative officer towards UFOs in the Pentagon, Colonel Edward Porter. At the position which would become the UFO "analysis desk", was Major Aaron J. (Jere) Boggs--later known as the "saucer killer". Not a friendly environment. Stay tuned.
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