Chiles-Whitted encounter

At about 2:45 a.m. on 24 July 1948, Eastern Air Lines captain Clarence Chiles and co-pilot John Whitted reported that a glowing, wingless, cigar-shaped object with two rows of lit windows and a flame from its tail passed close by their DC-3 and pulled up into the clouds within ten to fifteen seconds. One passenger, awake, saw only a bright streak. The pilots reported to the Air Force after landing in Atlanta, and Project Sign treated it as one of the 1948 cases that convinced its staff that UFOs were real. Later Air Force and civilian analysis, by Hynek and Donald Menzel among others, noted that the two pilots disagreed on details, that meteor activity was high that week and that a huge fireball crossed North Carolina and Tennessee two days later, and concluded they saw a bolide, and Project Blue Book formally listed it as a meteor in 1959. Some later accounts in the discovery material misdescribe the pilots as Air Force crew; they flew for Eastern Air Lines.

A bright fireball (bolide) seen at night from a cockpit, with structure supplied by the observers

• Wikipedia: Chiles-Whitted UFO encounteren.wikipedia.org