I have a friend here in NC, a pilot who has had a major ufo sighting who has become a "researcher" and he recently sent me his thoughts about the recent "missile" (?) that just missed that airliner down in Texas. Now you may, or may not see what we think, how we process and how we track down the information. This is a bit wordy, but go for it if you like. He presents other cases identical to this, including a well known case in the same area from 1948:

"Houston Chronicle on the 3rd...........note in the article below here an identical incident a year ago, same area, May 2008, a Continental 737 leaving Houston for Cleveland.

From the articles I have read so far, this object last Friday at 8:09 PM is reported as looking like a "rocket or missile"...............the pilots reported that it flew "straight at his aircraft and passed 100 feet under it".......another report said it passed "140 feet under it". I have not yet found a good description of the angles and flight path relative to the aircraft, and would like to know what the pilots are saying on being "debriefed by the FAA", however, the description sounds like a rather horizontal flight path, "passing 100 feet under it" after coming "straight at" the aircraft. It cannot very well come "straight at", if that means straight up, then "pass 100 feet under" implying horizontal flight....that means a 90 degree turn.......again, we need a better pilot description here.......

A rocket or missile launched from the ground, whether a hobbyist or a terrorist, would be a more vertical flight path upwards. Until we see more description from the pilots, it seems from what is said that it is not a ground launched rocket. The news reports are assuming, maybe incorrectly, this was a man made rocket, either an innocent hobbyist with toy rockets ( at 13,000 feet that was a VERY good hobby rocket, very few if any go that high )..........or, implied here by the police investigation it is maybe a more sinister situation, a "stinger" missile perhaps, shot at the airliner on purpose. This seems unlikely, as the altitude is a bit high. The FIM-92 Stinger, built by Raytheon in the US and by EADS under license in Germany, has a range of 15,700 feet, but an altitude limit of only 12,500 feet. At the upper altitude limit, it is harder to acquire a target than shooting at something lower, and here it would seem to be very close indeed, at only "100 feet". It is heat seeking, looking for infrared light, meaning it would go for the planes' engines, and may be following/chasing the aircraft from behind. The pilots had been cleared by ATC to climb to 16,000 as they just left the Houston class B airspace, so were climbing fast through 13,000 for 16,000 at the time they saw the "rocket". Note that 13,000 is just above the 12,500 limit of what a stinger can do.......certainly higher than hobby rockets go, or are legal to go, unless it was a PHD candidate in aerospace with special permission to launch his thesis project at White Sands or some such. In addition, at the upper altitude limit, it would seem to not be flying level, but reaching an apogee, out of energy, and then falling back down............if the pilots' report ends up saying it was flying "level" at 12,900, just 100 feet below a plane climbing through 13,000, then it is not impossible, but very unlikely, that it was a shoulder launched, stinger type missile. It would be more plausible as a terrorist shoulder launched stinger if the plane was much lower, meaning closer to the departure airport. It is also very unlikely to be a hobby rocket, which are not flown at night normally, what's the point if you can't see it?, and not that high, although this is not impossible either.

In any case, if a stinger type rocket was shot at a plane that high, it would certainly be in a near vertical flight path, so I am hoping to hear more about the angle of approach it made to the aircraft. If it approached in a level flight attitude, especially if it approached "head on" to the aircraft, it is likely a UFO, "Unconventional Flying Object"... sighting, and not a manmade missile or rocket.

The area of Liberty County involved, is very close to Houston on the East/Northeast side, only minutes away from Houston by air in the airliner involved. Since the Daisetta VORTAC navaid is right there in southern Liberty County, I suspect the aircraft was cleared out of Houston eastbound via the Daisetta VORTAC, on a SID, "standard instrument departure". It is an area of swamps, rivers and Bayous. The Trinity River flows southwards there, as well as Pine Island Bayou and the Big Thickety National Preserve, a cyprus swamp, a desolate place in spots, with many uninhabitable swampy areas. It is said of the swamps there north of the Liberty/Beaumont area that even the indians would not live there prior to white man arriving in the 1600's, and even today there are areas very difficult to access, and totally inhospitible to all but bugs, snakes, and gators.

But the most interesting facts I would like to alert you to involves the incident of July 24th, 1948. One of the most famous cases in UFO literature happened that night, a
case made famous by the early UFO investigators, like J. Allen Hynek, Dr. James McDonald and others. This case is the Chiles-Whitted case, and was featured in the Blue Book files, the Condon Committee proceedings, and the 1968 UFO Congressional Hearings. It has several excellent illustrations of the "rocket" type object seen that night by the crew and one passenger of an Eastern Airlines DC-3 en route from, yes, Houston........ to Atlanta, the same route as Friday's plane. They were late at night over Alabama between Mobile and Montgomery at 5,000 feet, when a "rocket" came "directly at them", head on, at their altitude.

The UFO literature is FULL of pilot reports exactly like this, "saw the object come head on at the windshield" and "had to turn to avoid" etc. Little pranksters, those UFO pilots.

Captain Clarence Chiles, a high time pilot who had left the Army Air Force just 3 years earlier after flying a plane in combat in WW2 Pacific, banked hard left to avoid collision with the object, and both crew saw the rocket object veer off and "up" to avoid them also. It shot off "upwards" at an angle and was out of sight quickly. At the same moment, a plane with two pilots was southbound from Virginia to Winston Salem, NC, and they landed that night reporting seeing an "odd meteor", which shot "UPWARDS" FROM EARTH." It was a clear night throughout the south, the Alabama Eastern DC-3 was VFR, and the pilots who were above VA, facing southwards enroute to Winston Salem saw it leave the atmosphere........although not realizing at the time what it was.......

Later, the investigators put on a map their sighting, and it was in the position of Montgomery, Alabama, at the .....exact time...... of, corrected 1 hour for CST/EST,
the Chiles-Whitted sighting. The object was also seen throughout that night earlier in the evening, by several observers on the ground, including military people at the airbase in Macon, Georgia, and a first chronological sighting, unpublished and unknown in the literature, at dinner time at a drive-in restaraunt in Greenville, SC that evening. This sighting was by a young military man, unnamed here, who went on to have a distinguished military career, but who did not report this sighting until I met him 3 years ago. He saw a brightly lit "cigar shaped" object go slowly by in the distance, seen by many at the burger shop, only to see it come back by in the opposite direction a few minutes later. It had a blue glow around the edges of a red/orange body.
He distinctly remembers the newspapers all over the south the next morning, reporting the Eastern Airlines UFO sighting. This was before the January 1953 Robertson Committee which stopped media from serious reporting of UFO incidents after a few years, and a time of great public interest due to Kenneth Arnold's report of June 24th 1947, and Roswell July 2nd, 1947, both in national media.

Chiles-Whitted was just months after the Aztec, NM crash/landing March 1948, of a 99 foot diameter disc with 14 dead bodies on a Hart Canyon mesa, described in the epic Frank Scully book, "Behind The Flying Saucers" in 1950, and researched extensively for a new book being published by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey of NC.

The "cigar" shape, or "rocket" shape, is exactly what Chiles and Whitted drew for investigators in 1948.....red/orange with a blue tint around the edges....
The Chiles-Whitted sighting is an important well documented case, strikingly similar to these two sightings by airliners from this week and May 2008. A google search of "Chiles-Whitted UFO" will bring up many sites with much documentation on this facinating case, well worth researching now for similarities to the incident this week. Check out Chiles and Whitteds' origional hand sketches of the 1948 rocket on the "above top" link above...........complete with the square windows they saw which were "brightly illuminated from within".......

The Liberty County Sheriff and FAA are out looking in the swamps of east Texas, and along the Trinity River, for a "launch or landing" spot for the Friday object, I doubt they will find anything. It may be "unexplained" like the "rocket" that flew by the Continental 737 there last May, or the Eastern DC-3 of the late night of July 24th, 1948. (insert woo woo music here).

NOTE: Between January 1952 and October 1956 , the Air Force had 18,662 major aircraft incidents/losses with about one plane a day of those lost chasing UFO's. Pilots were under orders starting 1952 to shoot one down for examination by the military....see book, "Shoot Them Down" 2007, by Frank C. Feschino......many pilots lost their lives trying, only to have the records show, "pilot error" and "engine failure" and other bogus excuses. These men deserved better.

I will be very interested to see if Main Stream Media get back to this story at all..........or if they do, what bogus excuse they release. "

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