The Swedish Defense Staff supposedly conducted a comprehensive study of the incidents and concluded that they were all explainable in terms of astronomical phenomena.  Since this was UFO history, I made several attempts to get some detailed and official information on this report and the sightings, but I was never successful.

The ghost rockets left in March, as mysteriously as they had arrived.

All during the spring of 1948 good reports continued to come in.  Some were just run-of-the-mill but a large percentage of them were good, coming from people whose reliability couldn’t be questioned.  For example, three scientists reported that for thirty seconds they had watched a round object streak across the sky in a highly erratic flight path near the Army’s secret White Sands Proving Ground.  And on May 28 the crew of an Air Force C-47 had three UFO’s barrel in from “twelve o’clock high” to buzz their transport.

On July 21 a curious report was received from the Netherlands.  The day before several persons reported seeing a UFO through high broken clouds over The Hague.  The object was rocket-shaped, with two rows of windows along the side.  It was a poor report, very sketchy and incomplete, and it probably would have been forgotten except that four nights later a similar UFO almost collided with an Eastern Airlines DC-3.  This near collision is Volume II of “The Classics.”

On the evening of July 24, 1948, an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off from Houston, Texas.  It was on a scheduled trip to Atlanta, with intermediate stops in between.  The pilots were Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted.  At about 2:45 A.M., when the flight was 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, the captain, Chiles, saw a light dead ahead and closing fast.  His first reaction, he later reported to an ATIC investigation team, was that it was a jet, but in an instant he realized that even a jet couldn’t close as fast as this light was closing.  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.

Both the pilots had gotten a good look at the UFO and were able to give a good description to the Air Force intelligence people.  It was a B-29 fuselage.  The underside had a “deep blue glow.”  There were “two rows of windows from which bright lights glowed,” and a “50-foot trail of orange-red flame” shot out the back.

Only one passenger was looking out of the window at the time.  The ATIC investigators talked to him.  He said he saw a “strange, eerie streak of light, very intense,” but that was all, no details.  He said that it all happened before he could adjust his eyes to the darkness.

Minutes later a crew chief at Robins Air Force Base in Macon, Georgia, reported seeing an extremely bright light pass overhead, traveling at a high speed.  A few days later another report from the night of July 24 came in.  A pilot, flying near the Virginia-North Carolina state line, reported that he had seen a “bright shooting star” in the direction of Montgomery, Alabama, at about the exact time the Eastern Airlines DC-3 was “buzzed.”