Date: June 27, 2006
Distribution: MEDIA, CE, SHG, NCP
Mantell, 1948, Lies, New Discoveries,
Cover-ups, and the EOTS
By Francis Ridge, <nicap@insightbb.com>





The full report on the Mantell case can be found on the NICAP site at
http://www.nicap.org/mantelldir.htm

In regards to the Mantell Case, there are about 1500 Air Force reports, where the witnesses actually lived to tell about their encounters with UFOs, many of which would make any sensible person sit up and take notice. And those reports come directly from the Air Force files. But in April of this year, at Drew Speier's (WFIE TV) request, I agreed to report on the importance of what we DID have on the case and, for the best defense possible for the incident, my team did a complete case work-up. The report went from a 1/2" printout to a document compilation over 4" thick. I can't speak for everyone, but I don't know any person that wasn't surprised in some way with what we found. For that, we have to thank the persistence of WFIE and reporter Drew Speier.

First of all, there were five reasons why I have always felt that the Mantell case was important and that a cover-up was involved:

1) In 1960, a scientific consultant to our NICAP Subcommittee at Vincennes, Indiana, who had worked for Project SIGN, told me that the Mantell case was NOT explained and that the incident had shaken a lot of people up. I was "small potatoes" back then, and a field investigator and head of a rapid response team for local and regional reports.

2) The Air Force-inspired, 1952 LIFE Magazine article by Robert Ginna, five years after the incident took place, stated that the case was unsolved.

3) In 1956 a former head of Project Blue Book (Capt. Ed Ruppelt) stated in his book ("The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects", page 41): "According to the old timers at ATIC, this report (Chiles-Whitted case) shook them worse than the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it."

4) In the 1948 Mantell case the State Police had gotten reports of an object described as "circular, about 250' to 300' in diameter," and moving westward at a "pretty good clip." In my opinion no one would describe a balloon of any kind in this way.

5) Besides the State Police reports there had been evidence of at least two other UFO sightings, one at Lockbourne AFB, another at Clinton County AFB.


Discoveries often come while searching for something else. Nineteen forty-eight was an important year in UFO history for a lot of reasons, and I'm not sure but I seriously believe the answer to the whole UFO riddle lies somewhere in that year, if not the summer of 1947. And although we still cannot prove Thomas Mantell was chasing a UFO, as yet, there is evidence that indicates that UFOs were operating in the area. New evidence proves that Venus was ruled out very early and that Mantell could not have seen the Skyhook balloon, let alone be fooled by it. If he wasn't chasing Venus or a balloon, what WAS he chasing. By default I believe we have Mantell in a UFO incident.
 
The re-investigation, inspired by WFIE, turned up the following information:

1) Records show that the 70-foot Skyhook balloon that is now known to have been in the area was south of Nashville, Tennessee., and at about 150 miles distance was too small or far away to be seen from Godman Field at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  The balloon would have had to be something in the neighborhood of 1,000 feet in diameter to be both visible and prominent enough for anyone to pay attention to it.

2) The AF secretly concluded the Mantell case was "unexplained," a fact that was not documented until this renewed investigation, after almost 58 years.  The AF had always dismissed it as either a Skyhook balloon or the planet Venus, neither of which were visible, apparently.

3) If there was ever a question of what Mantell had said over his radio that day, a SECRET Air Intelligence Report, ordered destroyed, clearly states in paragraph k.:

"On 7 January 1948, a National Guard pilot was killed while attempting to chase an unidentified object up to 30,000 feet. While it is presumed that this pilot suffered anoxia, resulting in his crash, his last message to the tower was, 'It appears to be metallic object....of tremendous size...directly ahead and slightly above....I am trying to close for a better look.' " Full document can be found at http://www.nicap.org/docs/airintelrpt100-203-79.pdf

4) Alfred Loedding, a Project SIGN investigator from Wright Field, arrived at Godman Field on January 9, 1948 and made a thorough investigation. He then gave strict orders that no reports would be given out:
http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB3-714

5) Air Force final conclusions for sightings for January 1948 list the Mantell case (Godman AFB) as a "balloon" and the other three UFO reports ( Lockbourne AFB, Columbus, Wilmington)  the planet "Venus". Other documents prove the conclusions are false. Lives are lost in the service during routine training missions and war, but this incident shook a lot of people up.  Why?
http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB1-15

6)  Not only had the Kentucky State police gotten reports of a huge object, they may have observed it!
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs8.htm

7) The original Venus explanation for Mantell, and later the incidents in Ohio, are false. A restricted document shows A. B. Deyarmond from Project SIGN saying Venus was out and the case was unsolved.
http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=USAF-SIGN7-26

8) A letter from Headquarters 315th AF Base Unit, Godman AF Base, Fort Knox, Kentucky, 12 April 1948 to Commanding General AMC states:

"Capt. James F. Duesler is no longer a member of this Organization, therefore status of investigation promised Mr. A. C. Loedding by subject officer cannot be determined." Here Loedding was not given information because Capt. Duesler was not available. But where was Duesler's written  report and where was this captain?
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs16.htm


Besides a number of classic cases,  1948 has a number of other very important events.

There is even more evidence that something big must have happened that we still haven't discovered.


Missing Reports

The transcript of the March 18, 1948 meeting of the Air Force Science Advisory Board (AFSAB) was released by the government in 1996. Most of the Secret level meeting was devoted to presentations about various conventional Air Force advanced technology and technical intelligence projects, for a while Col. Howard McCoy, Director of Intelligence at AMC, discussed the UNconventional:
 
Col. McCoy:
"We have a new project - Project SIGN - which may surprise you as a development from the so-called mass hysteria of the past summer when we had all the unidentified flying objects (note, the phrase which Ruppelt coined years later) or discs. This can't be laughed off. We have over 300 reports which haven't been publicized in the papers from very competent personnel, in many instances - men as capable as Dr. K.D. Wood and practically all Air Force, Airline people with broad experience. We are running down every report. I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of those crash in an area so that we could recover what-ever they are."

McCoy had said that there were "over 300 reports", "which haven't been publicized". This was a surprise to us because the Blue Book microfilm lists only about 130 incidents. Bruce Maccabee suggested that McCoy might have simply made an error, but many of these HAD been publicized.

One document from the Project SIGN report shows 243 domestic and 30 foreign, but was written sometime later in the year. I seriously doubt McCoy erred. So where did 170 cases go? And balloons, mirages, Venus, hallucinations, etc., don't crash, nor would they excite people like Col. McCoy. By the way, this was a secret-level meeting and McCoy was only a colonel. Roswell would have had a Top Secret classification. McCoy couldn't have used that evidence even if he knew about it, and he may not have had the clearance OR  the need-to-know.
http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB85-9

In a Secret Air Force document dated 8 Nov. 1948 it mentions 180 incidents, 120 shy of what McCoy had stated.
http://home.insightbb.com/~nicap/docs/mantell/doc160.htm
 
In August of 1948, the Top Secret  "Estimate of the Situation," (EOTS) concluding UFOs were interplanetary space ships, was sent to Air Force Chief of Staff. (specifically Aug. 5, 1948, the date Maj. Donald Keyhoe gave after actually seeing a copy in 1952.)

Capt. Ruppelt:
"According to the old timers at ATIC, this report shook them worse than the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it. A quick check on a map showed that the UFO that nearly collided with the airliner would have passed almost over Macon, Georgia, after passing the DC-3. It had been turning toward Macon when last seen. The story of the crew chief at Robins AFB, 200 miles away, seemed to confirm the sighting, not to mention the report from near the Virginia North Carolina state line."

"In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an 'Estimate of the Situation.' A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary! "

According to Ruppelt

"It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.

"When the estimate was completed, typed, and approved, it started up through channels to higher command echelons. It drew considerable comment but no one stopped it on its way up."


While the people on Project Sign were now involved with the Lt. George F. Gorman dogfight with a UFO, the Top Secret Estimate of the Situation was working its way up into the higher echelons of the Air Force. According to conventional wisdom it got to the late General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then Chief of Staff. We are told that he wouldn't "buy" interplanetary vehicles! The report lacked proof. A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to bolster their position but had no luck, the Chief of Staff just couldn't be convinced. Here we have the experts telling a military man what they thought we had and he simply says, "No"? At the very least this should have started one of the biggest investigations in history, but instead Project SIGN was downgraded to GRUDGE and competent scientists, but yet  "believers", were purged out of the system.

Recently we discovered something in the original Ruppelt book manuscript that suggests that Vandenberg may not have even seen the report, which is even spookier. What would have happened that caused  someone to withhold such explosive evidence to higher command? Vandenberg either got the report and killed it, or he didn't get it at all. Either way something is vitally wrong here.

Brad Sparks has pointed out that Vandenberg may have received an oral briefing from AMC without seeing the EOTS or reading the big thick document, or maybe it never quite got up to him, but to an assistant or an executive officer, or maybe a Deputy Chief of Staff, etc. So there is a spectrum of possibilities. But Ruppelt clearly states in the unpublished portions of his book manuscript that the EOTS got rejected in the Air Staff and had to send a delegation to defend their case.

Brad Sparks:
At the Pentagon, AF Director of Intell Gen. Cabell ordered the Analysis of Flying Disc Incidents (later designated AIR 203 on July 27, 1948, and wanted it completed for him by Aug. 15, a SUNDAY.  Notice that weekend and especially Sunday work and deadlines are extremely rare and only done in cases of emergency, thus underlining the seriousness of Cabell's orders.

Suddenly, however, on Aug. 5, 1948, everything changed.  The EOTS from AMC arrived by TOP SECRET courier and pandemonium evidently broke out in AF Intelligence, disrupting the tight deadlines for its FD Analysis (each level of staff review set deadlines for completion well before the document was to reach Cabell, the first one being Aug. 11, a higher level on Aug. 13, etc.).

Apparently the Air Estimates (AE) Branch headed by Col. Robert N. Smith was very excited by the ETH conclusions of AMC and wanted to incorporate that analysis into the FD Analysis being drafted by AE Branch.  However the powers-that-be did not like this and the next day, Aug. 6, they took the unusual step of wrenching the FD intelligence drafting responsibility away from AE Branch right in the middle of the tight deadlines and gave it to the Defensive Air (DA) Branch, a rather skeptical anti-ETH unit with the (later infamous) Major Aaron Jeremiah Boggs on its staff.  AE was sidelined to a perfunctory rubber-stamp advisory role on whatever DA produced, quite a humiliating change.  Something very serious must have happened to make such a huge change in mid-stream to bring in new people to write the FD Analysis, and that was the EOTS with its interplanetary spaceship conclusion.

Suddenly the tight deadlines were missed, and DA Branch was given all the time it wanted, apparently to come up with an alternative to AMC's ETH, with no explanation in the paper trail and nothing explained ahead of the dire Sunday deadline, thus it must have been unrecorded oral discussion.  Well past the Sunday deadline, on Tuesday Aug. 17 a note was made on a routing memo about the change of team from AE to DA, and then drafting work slowed down to a period of MONTHS when just a few days earlier the work was supposed to have been done within TWO WEEKS.

The first draft of the FD study was finally prepared in Oct. 1948, now upgraded to TOP SECRET, conveniently waiting until after the competition (AMC's EOTS) had been safely wiped out.  AMC's EOTS had already been rejected at mid-levels of the Air Staff evidently by the anti-UFO AF Director of R&D Gen. Laurence Craigie, back in Aug. 1948.  Then a larger revised version of the EOTS with more backup was presented circa Oct 1 to Craigie's successor Gen. Donald Putt, apparently thinking the new guy might be more open.  But Putt evidently refused to overturn Craigie's rejection decision though allowing AMC to go over his head to appeal the verdict all the way to Gen. Vandenberg if they wished.  AMC could not break the chain of command, a court-martial offense, without express permission of a command rank officer, and there is no actual appeal process, Putt seemed to be cutting AMC a break.  But no one above Putt wanted to overturn Craigie either so the EOTS died.  Maybe Putt knew that would happen.  A story of interagency intelligence politics on a hot-button topic of tremendous controversy.

Ridge:
There is something missing in this picture:
According Capt. Ed Ruppelt, "A few days after the DC-3 (Chiles-Whitted) was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary! "

There had to be more to it than this. A few days after the Chiles-Whitted DC-3 (Montgomery, Alabama) Case occurred on June 24th, the Estimate of the Situation was drafted. Ruppelt calls the case Vol. II of the Classics; Mantell being Vol. I . He then said that, within days after the EOTS was signed, sealed, and sent on its way, the third big sighting of 1948, Vol. III of the Classics took place: the Gorman (Fargo, North Dakota) Dogfight. Were there other cases, in the "missing reports", that convinced the analysts the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis was correct?  Nothing in the Ruppelt cases seems to warrant such a strong conclusion.

Bruce Maccabee had mentioned this, but since it was a statement by Kevein Randle, I'll quote the original source:

"Others, including a colonel who was a lieutenant in 1948, claimed that Vandenberg required the mention of all physical evidence including the Roswell case removed from the study, and then rejected the report. No one felt the urge to rewrite it when all the best evidence had been removed on the orders of the Commanding General."