Chiles-Whitted case. But after a few minutes I saw it was almost
impossible.

First, rockets at White Sands are launched and controlled with utmost
care. There have been no reported cases of such a long-distance
runaway.

Second, if such a rocket had gone astray, it would certainly have
caused wild confusion at White Sands until they found where it landed.
Hundreds of people would have known about it; the story would be
certain to leak out.

Third, such a rocket would have had to travel from White Sands to
Macon, Georgia, then circle around south of this city for over forty
minutes. (If it had kept on at the speed observed at Robbins Field, it
would have passed Montgomery long before the DC-3 reached the area.)
In addition, the rocket would have had to veer sharply away from the
airliner, as both pilots testified, and then zoom into the clouds. No
high-atmosphere test rocket has automatic controls such as this would
require. {p. 71} And if it had gone astray from White Sands, the
station's remote control would no longer be guiding it.

The Eastern Airlines "space ship," then, was not just a fugitive
rocket. But it could be a new type of aircraft, something
revolutionary, developed in absolute secrecy.

Other airline pilots had reported flying disks racing along the
airways, though none that I knew of had described projectile-like
objects. Chiles and Whitted insisted the mystery ship was not a disk,
and the report from Robbins Field agreed on this point. Man-made