June 3rd, 2006; the beginning of another day into the re-investigation
of the Mantell
Incident. Just the night before, we had been talking about the
Venus
answer that the Air Force was trying to use to explain everything that
happened in the region, except for the encounter by Mantell and maybe
some of his wingmen. But now the evidence for something else in the
area was starting to mount.
Dan Wilson:
Between 7:20 and 7:55 P.M.,
Control
Tower
operators and four members of the alert crew at Clinton County Air
Base, observed a bright object leaving a gaseous green mist. The object
gained and lost altitude at terrific bursts of speed.
MAXW-PBB3-408-429 (For detailed
transcripts see Part 2-8,9, & 10) I know some docs _say_ that but I
read
all of the actual witness statements from Clinton County AAF/AFB and
some report they saw it beginning at 7:00 PM rather than 7:20 and some
say it disappeared at 8:00 PM rather than 7:55 (they all reported in
EST so the CST times for consistency would be given as 6:00 to 7:00 PM
CST), and they have drawings showing a cone shaped object, as they
describe. Vladimir Rubtsov, RIAP:
Dear Mr. Thouanel, (you said
Mantell
case is a mystery, a real
one. Nobody knows what happened. Even today) Completely agree! As far
back as the late 1970 I happened to discuss this case with some
competent people in the Borisoglebsk Air Force Flight School (Russia)
and all of them believed that Mantell case could not be easily
"explained away". Brad Sparks:
Mantell chased the object for 90
miles
at up to 360 mph (he
specifically radioed that was his speed before the final climb).
Secondly how come he didn't catch up with it going 6 miles a minute, it
would take less than 5 minutes??? Instead he chases it for 1/2
HOUR?? I would only add one more comment: Maximum possible range
to see a 100 ft Skyhook is 50-60 miles otherwise it is smaller than the
MAR subtended angle of about 1 arcminute. And that 50-60 miles is
assuming very generously that ALL 100 feet of the Skyhook is lit up by
sunlight in the daytime of course (NOT visible at all at NIGHT) which I
doubt very much. Looking at the 1994 CAUS article photos of the
Jan 6, 1948, launch NOT from Camp Ripley (Moore lied even about that)
but launched from 50 miles away at Milaca, Minn., it looks like maybe
the 100 foot length includes about 50 feet of cabling to the instrument
package and about 50 feet of balloon. IF that is correct (it needs to
be checked out) and the Skyhook balloon envelope was only about 50 feet
in size then it could not have been seen farther than 25-30 miles away.
Fran Ridge:
That's been the whole haunting
part of
the incident to me all
along. Steve Curtiss is a friend of mine, a local pilot. F-51's can
really cruise. Brad Sparks;
It is now a serious question in
my mind
as to how anyone could
have even seen the alleged Skyhook and perceive shape details unless it
was within about 10 MILES of the observer. It looks like the
balloon sac was only half of the 100 feet cited, or only 50 feet in
size. Mantell could not have seen such a Skyhook from 90 miles
away, couldn't chase it for 1/2 hour at speeds of 200-360 mph (3-6
miles per minute). Mary Castner:
The one thing I do see is on the
7th in
Nashville we have a wind
speed of 20 and then 10, 10...not sure how this relates to altitude or
if it does, but it does pick up faster later (or higher?) so this may
account for that apparent STATIONARY report for a time so in two hours
it would have covered 20 miles. If spotted first in Maysville then Ft.
Knox area..., but again I get temp, direction, speed, but geo_hgt and
press_mb I am lost and don't know how it interrelated. Brad Sparks:
Since the soundings from
Nashville at 3
PM on Jan 7, 1948, cut off
at 11,000 ft, I looked at 3 PM on the days before and after to see what
the general pattern was and to see if they got higher altitude
readings. (I should not have to explain why 3 AM soundings are
IRRELEVANT to what was going on with the winds around Mantell's crash
at 3 PM on Jan 7, as night weather is different from late afternoon for
meteorology reasons I don't need to go into. Of course 3 AM
soundings will be relevant farther back up a Skyhook path to Minn. but
not at NASHVILLE where Seyfert sighted a balloon-like object at
4:30-4:45 PM.) http://www.nicap.org/mantell/winds_aloft.htm Jean Waskiewicz:
Brad, I have attached the
pages
from Loren's 1948 History
that pertain to this incident. Brad Sparks:
So there were 1:00 and 1:10 PM
sightings then at 1:20. Godman/Ft
Knox itself had sightings reported to Godman Tower from MP's. Obviously
Loren's notes show he got all this from BB files so they must be in
there somewhere. Also he has LOTS of errors including MISQUOTING
Seyfert to drop out the "first" seen moving SSE and omits "then W." Dick Hall: These are some of the reports
(I saw
a few that turned up in
Allen Hynek's personal files several years ago) that convince me
something more than a Skyhook balloon was there. Skyhooks simply don't
zoom up and down at high speed. Maybe there was a Skyhook present that
caused some of the
sightings (even that has not been clearly established, I don't think),
but if so, Brad Sparks has done a pretty good analysis disputing that
interpretation for the Mantell object. It is quite possible that a
Skyhook intermittently visible could
have been present and caused some sightings. Wouldn't be the
first time in UFO history that witnesses confused two separate objects.
I recall a MUFON case where police had a legitimate UFO sighting, then
began to confuse a distant USAF aircraft for the UFO they had seen
earlier. Those things happen.
Joel Carpenter: Document shows concern over
similar
crash in 1964 (Oregon).
Brad Sparks:
Yes indeed. And I suspect,
my
inference reading
between the lines, that the FAA was bothered that in the Oregon case
the body was a mess but with Mantell it was mostly intact. Also
the Mantell Accident Summary says there was no evidence of any sliding
along the ground. It came down absolutely 90 degrees
vertically. That's surprising. Brad Sparks: Great maps!
http://nicap.org/mantell/mantell_overlay2.jpg (*) Right off the bat I can see that Flight B on 1-6-48 went slightly W of S at about a heading of 190 degs, reaching its maximum altitude of 80,000 ft in 3 hours -- thus we can forget about the Skyhook being at 100,000 ft over Kentucky. Its MAXIMUM height was only 80,000 ft. I don't know where the 100,000 ft came from but the actual tracking shows it is WRONG. http://nicap.org/mantell/mantell_sparks_maps.htm Dan Wilson: These November 1948 documents
below show that even nine months AFTER the
Mantell incident, it was listed as unexplained.
USAF-SIGN7-26
(*)
USAF-SIGN7-27 (*) USAF-SIGN7-28 (*) are pages from a restricted Routing and Record Sheet document, signed by A. B. Deyarmond, Asst. Deputy for Technical Analysis, AMC, part of which is presented here from frame 28:
"ROUTING
AND
RECORD SHEET
"SUBJECT:
Godman
Field Air Force Base
Sightings - 7 Jan
1948 and 19 Aug 1948
"From
MCIAXO-3 TO MCIAO
"1. Re
Sighting of
7 Jan 1948 : Reference is
made to your
conversation with Capt. Sneider on 19 October 1948 concerning your
desire for a check on the position and visibility of Venus on 7 Jan
1948 between the hours 1330 and 1350 as compared to the position
of an unidentified aerial object.
"4. The
evidence
obtained from MCREXE44
conclusively proves that
this object was not the planet Venus." |