Alfred Loedding
An aeronautical engineer who became one of the first UFO investigators within the US Air Force. Earlier, he had patented a low-aspect-ratio aircraft that was similar to the shape of many reported flying saucers.
Loedding is known for his involvement in his investigation of the Chiles-Whitted incident for Project SIGN, an investigative body created by the Air Force to look into UFOs. The first thing Project SIGN wanted to do was to impress upon airline pilots the idea that they should not reveal such incidents to the press before they reported them to the Air Force. On July 30, 1948 Alfred Loedding, Project SIGN's civilian engineering analyst, arrived at Eastern Airlines office in New York and and personally asked the airline's Vice President of operations to forward any future flying object sightings directly to Col McCoy at Wright Field. Eastern's President, Eddie Rickenbacker, was suspicious about Loedding and wrote directly to McCoy to confirm the instructions. When Rickenbacker was satisfied that Loedding was who he said he was, he issued orders to his pilots to do as Project SIGN asked.
It's not difficult to understand the dilemma that the Chiles-Whitted sighting presented to Project SIGN. If the description of the object was accurate, a huge rocket resembling current US concepts for a satellite launcher (which had not been revealed to the public, but was probably familiar to Air Force Intelligence personnel) had been hurtling over the southeast US.
