On the night of 2–3 November 1957 fifteen people rang the police of this Texas town within a few hours, all with the same account: a glowing object had settled onto the road ahead of them, their engine had died and their headlights had gone out, and when the object lifted away the engine started again on its own. They called independently, from points all around the town, and two of them were the sheriff and a patrolman. The US Air Force's Project Blue Book closed the case in two days, attributing it to ball lightning in a thunderstorm; the weather record for that night shows no storm. Levelland survives in the literature as the densest of the "vehicle interference" cases — an episode where what matters is not the shape of the object but what happened to the engines.

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Montgomery and the Chiles–Whitted Encounter

On the night of 24 July 1948 the crew of an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 was over Alabama. Captain Clarence Chiles and First Officer John Whitted saw a cigar-shaped object with two rows of glowing windows and a tail of flame coming towards them; it passed and climbed away. Both men banked hard to avoid it. One passenger confirmed a flash of light. On the ground that same night a similar object was reported over Robins Field in Georgia. The modern explanation is a large fireball, several of which crossed the south-eastern states in those weeks. The row of windows remains the detail a fireball accounts for least well.