What happened
On July 24, 1948, at around 2:45 a.m., Captain Clarence Chiles and copilot John Whitted were flying an Eastern Air Lines plane from Houston to Atlanta. Over Alabama they saw a wingless, cigar-shaped object heading straight at them, with two rows of brightly lit windows and a fiery tail. The object passed them at close range and shot up sharply into the clouds, and – according to the pilots – their plane rocked in its wake. The only passenger who was awake noticed a streak of light. The case made a tremendous impression on the investigators of Project Sign, who, according to Edward Ruppelt, prepared a secret “Estimate of the Situation” suggesting that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. The top brass rejected the document.
Witnesses
Captain Clarence Chiles and First Officer John Whitted, a passenger on the plane; an hour earlier a ground crewman in Georgia had reported a similar light.
Explanations and hypotheses
Astronomers Donald Menzel and J. Allen Hynek concluded that the pilots had seen a bright fireball – a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere, whose fragments could have looked like lit windows. The date falls within the activity period of the Delta Aquariids meteor shower. The explanation is widely accepted, although some ufologists point out that the pilots estimated the sighting lasted several seconds and described a very specific shape.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
More: Wikipedia (en)