In 1948, my great-grandfather witnessed a UFO which may be linked to a well-known case from the same year.

Hey all. I would like to preface my post with saying this is my first post on the UFO subreddit and on Reddit altogether. I’ve watched this subreddit for a while now, and the information and discussion regarding this phenomenon has captivated me, especially because of my family’s story I am about to relate to you now. I hope my post will be clear and informative, and I will try to respond to any questions I can.

When I was little, my grandmother had told my siblings and I about an interesting event that her father had witnessed when she was about 10 years old. She was born in 1938, so it was 1948 when this event occured. My great-grandfather was something of an entrepreneur, and had tried many lines of business over his lifetime. He had also served in the civilian workforce during World War 2 and was amongst some of the first people to view the then-classified blueprints of the jet fighters, so his knowledge of aircraft was advanced to say the least. The business he ran at this time was a small candy and tobacco truck, which he drove around their hometown of Macon, Georgia and to neighboring towns to make sales. One warm evening, he was making some last stops on the way back home. He was driving down a road past a large field to his right, and that’s when he noticed a strange object hovering around 50 feet above the cornfield, I would say around 250 feet away from him. This object was almost 100 feet long, he guessed, and appeared cigar shaped. It was perfectly silent and completely smooth on all sides. Around the “equator” of the craft, there was a ring of lights which steadily pulsed across the craft. My grandmother said that her father believed they were windows, but the pulsing nature of them makes me believe they were lights emanating from some part of the crafts main functions.

To continue, her father stopped and got out of his vehicle to examine this strange sight. Unfortunately, he did not have a camera in his vehicle, and even if he did, it would have been too dark to get a clear photograph of the craft. He said the craft hovered there, perfectly silent, for almost five minutes. He said he had this funny feeling that during that time he was watching him, it was watching him back. This completely unnerved him. After some time of observing it, the craft instantaneously and silently shot off at an incredible speed, which left my great-grandfather astounded. He was quite sure, because of his experiences during the time he worked with a high-level security clearance during the war, that the military had nothing nearly that high-tech.

He resumed his last rounds, still wondering what he had seen. He made a brief stop at a gas station to drop off some tobacco and candy, when one of the farmers who owned the surrounding fields came in the store dripping with mud in a fit of rage. He complained that a strange “thing” flew over his field and made all of his cows break out of the fence in fright, and that he had to round them all up again. This at the very least reassured my great-grandfather he was not hallucinating, and that the craft he saw was real.

Once he got back home, he told both my grandmother and his wife about the thing he had seen. My great-grandmother suggested he call Warner Robins Air Force Base, the base he had worked at during his civilian workforce days, to report the sighting. The base was only about 15 miles away from where they lived. When he called the base and told them what he saw, they responded that they had also seen the object and were taking care of it.

Over the next few days, there was a number of local newspapers had received the story and had published it on the front page. It was later found out that the same night, the same or possibly similar object had been seen by more people in Georgia and Alabama as well.

This led me down a path of research in an attempt to find more information, and if I could find any notable sighting that was close or on the date of the sighting my great-grandfather had. It was without a doubt that other people had seen this UFO/UAP. I had found a particularly convincing, and relatively famous UFO encounter two pilots had, which is called the Chiles-Whitted Sighting. Briefly, this sighting occured when, late at night on the 24th of July, 1948, a cigar-shaped, or “rocket-ship” like object flew past an airliner flying above Montogomery, AL. The two pilots said they had visual contact with the object for about 15 seconds before it flew upwards into a cloud ( The Chiles/Whitted Sighting (ufocasebook.com), Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter – Wikipedia ). This sighting aligns with my great-grandfather’s sighting not only because the year and season are the same, but also because the object they saw was very similar in comparison, and that Warner Robins had seen a UFO on the same day this encounter took place.