It's not all that uncommon for airline pilots to spot UFOs. After all, some guy who flies with Southwestern isn't immune to mistaking a meteor for an alien craft if he's never seen a meteor before. But then you have a case like the Chiles-Witted encounter.
Named after commercial airline pilots and World War II veterans Clarence Chiles and Charles Whitted, this sighting occurred in the wee hours of July 24, 1948, when both Chiles and co-pilot Whitted reported having to evade, what could only be described as a giant, flying ... dildo.
The Unsettling Evidence:
First off all, the below facts are not from the pages of Holy Shit UFOs Are Real Weekly or any other group of alien enthusiasts. This is from the Air Force's own investigation into the sighting.
So right off the bat we have the fact that there were two experienced pilots both reporting the same thing: that a weird-ass craft was flying alongside them, very closely. It wasn't some vague flashing light that zipped past. Both men claimed they got a good, long (10 to 15 seconds) look at it. If you think it's because both men had been dropping the same acid minutes earlier, know that one of the passengers in the plane (one of the few who were awake at the time) also saw it. Everyone involved described it as a rocket like ship, conical in shape with two decks lined with windows, which produced an almost blinding light from beneath the ship.
The pilots got on the radio and, trying not to sound crazy, asked if there were any experimental craft in the area (there weren't, or at least none that flight control knew about).
OK, so maybe everybody on the plane got together and came up with a hoax so they'd get their name in the paper later. Well, when Air Force investigators started poking around, they found yet another witness on the ground (a guy named Walter Massey, who worked as a member of the ground crew at a nearby Air Force base) who claimed to have seen the same object, reporting it an hour before Chiles and Whitted.
Then, strangest of all, they found out that the same object (right down to the two rows of windows) was spotted in the Netherlands. Well, they probably just heard about the Chiles-Whitted sighting and wanted to jump on the bandwagon, right? Only if they had a time machine: it was reported a month earlier. What the hell?
The Official Explanation:
First the military dismissed the Chiles-Whitted encounter as a weather balloon, but then they retracted that explanation and floated the idea that it was a meteor. The pilots flatly rejected this theory, both having seen meteors before and knowing that they tended to not have windows.
After investigating it, the Air Force famously concluded that it was in fact an alien space craft. After investigators handed in that report, superiors handed it right back with a proverbial "BULLSHIT" stamped on it in red. They pointed out that just because we don't know what the object was, doesn't mean it's little green men.
That seems reasonable. But still ... what the hell was it? To this day, we have no idea.
