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First edition, 2010

Published in the United States

Copyright 2010 by Francis Ridge

All rights reserved. No part of this report may be
reproduced in any form, without written permission
from the copyright holder, unless by a reviewer who
wishes to quote passages.

Printed in the United States of America
 

 

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Acknowledgments

 

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Introduction



There are at least 1500 good reports in the Blue Book files 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. In April of 2006, at WFIE reporter Drew Speier's request, I reluctantly agreed to do an interview on the Mantell case, one that even many pro-UFO researchers had thrown out. WFIE wanted to do it because it was somewhat a "local" incident, and it was both sensational and controversial. I finally agreed to do it in the hope that WFIE would do something better in the near future with any of our many better UFO reports or something new that might develop. Since I wanted to do this interview right, for the record, I set out to show the media and the public the importance of what we DID have on the case.

First of all, there were at least seven reasons why I have always felt that the Mantell incident was important and that a cover-up was probably involved:

1) In I960, I was a NICAP Subcommittee Chairman in SW Indiana. A scientific consultant to our team 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, a field investigator and head of a rapid response team for local and regional reports, with other things in my area of responsibility besides events 12-years in the past and in another state..

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 (C-W) 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) I had known about this but Dan Wilson, our NICAP team's archive researcher found documents confirming that 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. In another document we found the object was described as "1/10th the size of the full moon". Yet another, "Tremendous" size was used to describe the object at Godman Field at 1:45 PM.

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, both in Ohio. UFO sightings in the region! We found those documents, too.

6) Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe: "Many ranking officers who had laughed at the saucer scare stopped scoffing. One of these was General Sory Smith, now Deputy Director of Air Force Public Relations. Later in my investigation, General Smith told me: 'It was the Mantell case that got me. I knew Tommy Mantell very well - also Colonel Hix, the C.O. at Godman. I knew they were both intelligent men -not the kind to be imagining things."

7) The planes flown by Mantell and his wing men were F-51 Mustangs. In 1948, the designation P-51 (P for pursuit) was changed to F-51 (F for fighter) and the existing F designator for photographic reconnaissance aircraft was dropped because of a new designation scheme throughout the USAF. This 400-mph fighter could overtake a non-powered balloon...... in no time.

With that much already a given, I did the interview. The internet version of the show was viewed by many that weekend. That Monday morning , a well-meaning UFOlogist sent me and the Current Encounters email list a note, asking just what I had that made me think that Mantell was chasing anything other than a balloon. Before I could respond to that email, our team's number one analyst, Brad Sparks, responded. We really started digging that day and haven't stopped yet.

Getting ready for the "flak" and what looked like a second interview in July, for the best defense possible for the incident, my team did a complete case work-up. The report went from a 1/2" thick hard copy 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 by what we found.

The lighter-than-air balloon theory was blown away. Cover-ups and lies jumped right off the pages of the Air Forces' own documents. An accident report and newspaper clippings proved that even the wing men had lied. By July we were able to tell the public the truth about the balloon theory, and that Captain Thomas Mantell had not lost his life chasing a weather balloon. But the rest had to be held back, until now.

The end result is the report you are reading right now. For that, we have to thank the persistence of WFIE and reporter Drew Speier. And we couldn't have done it at all without the help of Brad Sparks (researcher, consultant, analyst), Rebecca Wise (Project Blue Book Archive), Dan Wilson (document archive researcher), and Jean Waskiewicz (NICAP Database, news clipping search, transcripts)..

Francis Ridge
NICAP Researcher & Archivist
http://www.nicap.org/ 

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This is the original account of the famous Mantell Incident, as told by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, in his book in 1956. (Ref.1). Nothing has been changed in this version so that the reader can quickly get through the main gist of the story which has been told many times by many people. If you are well-versed in that regard, you may skip this section and move on. - Francis Ridge


Edward J. Ruppelt:
On January 7 all of the late papers in the U.S. carried headlines similar to those in the Louisville Courier: "F-51 and Capt. Mantell Destroyed Chasing Flying Saucer." This was Volume I of "The Classics," the Mantell Incident.

At one-fifteen on that afternoon the control tower operators at Godman AFB, outside Louisville, Kentucky, received a telephone call from the Kentucky State Highway Patrol. The patrol wanted to know if Godman Tower knew anything about any unusual aircraft in the vicinity. Several people from Maysville, Kentucky, a small town 80 miles east of Louisville, had reported seeing a strange aircraft. Godman knew that they had nothing in the vicinity so they called Flight Service at Wright-Patterson AFB. In a few minutes Flight Service called back. Their air Traffic control board showed no flights in the area. About twenty minutes later the state police called again. This time people from the towns of Owensboro and Irvington, Kentucky, west of Louisville, were reporting a strange craft. The report from these two towns was a little more complete. The towns people had described the object to the state police as being "circular, about 250 to 300 feet in diameter," and moving westward at a "pretty good clip." Godman Tower checked Flight Service again. Nothing. All this time the tower operators had been looking for the reported object. They theorized that since the UFO had had to pass north of Godman to get from Maysville to Owensboro it might come back.

At one forty-five they saw it, or something like it. Later, in his official report, the assistant tower operator said that he had seen the object for several minutes before he called his chiefs attention to it. He said that he had been reluctant to "make a flying saucer report." As soon as the two men in the tower had assured themselves that the UFO they saw was not an airplane or a weather balloon, they called Flight Operations. They wanted the operations officer to see the UFO. Before long word of the sighting had gotten around to key personnel on the base, and several officers, besides the base operations officer and the base intelligence officer, were in the tower. All of them looked at the UFO through the tower's 6 x 50 binoculars and decided they couldn't identify it. About this time Colonel Hix, the base commander, arrived. He looked and he was baffled. At two-thirty, they reported, they were discussing what should be done when four F-51's came into view, approaching the base from the south.

The tower called the flight leader, Captain Mantell, and asked him to take a look at the object and try to identify it. One F-51 in the flight was running low on fuel, so he asked permission to go on to his base. Mantell took his two remaining wing men, made a turn, and started after the UFO. The people in Godman Tower were directing him as none of the pilots could see the object at this time. They gave Mantell an initial heading toward the south and the flight was last seen heading in the general direction of the UFO.

By the time the F-51's had climbed to 10,000 feet, the two wing men later reported, Mantell had pulled out ahead of them and they could just barely see him. At two forty-five Mantell called the tower and said, "I see something above and ahead of me and I'm still climbing." All the people in the tower heard Mantell say this and they heard one of the wing men call back and ask, "What the hell are we looking for?" The tower immediately called Mantell and asked him for a description of what he saw. Odd as it may seem, no one can remember exactly what he answered. Saucer historians have credited him with saying, "I've sighted the thing. It looks metallic and it's tremendous in size.... Now it's starting to climb." Then in a few seconds he is supposed to have called and said, "It's above me and I'm gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet." Everyone in the tower agreed on this one last bit of the transmission, "I'm going to 20,000 feet," but didn't agree on the first part, about the UFO's being metallic and tremendous.

The two wing men were now at 15,000 feet and trying frantically to call Mantell. He had climbed far above them by this time and was out of sight. Since none of them had any oxygen they were worried about Mantell. Their calls were not answered. Mantell never talked to anyone again. The two wing men leveled off at 15,000 feet, made another fruitless effort to call Mantell, and started to come back down. As they passed Godman Tower on their way to their base, one of them said something to the effect that all he had seen was a reflection on his canopy.

When they landed at their base, Standiford Field, just north of Godman, one pilot had his F-51 refueled and serviced with oxygen, and took off to search the area again. He didn't see anything.

At three-fifty the tower lost sight of the UFO. A few minutes later they got word that Mantell had crashed and was dead.

Several hours later, at 7:20 P.M., airfield towers all over the Midwest sent in frantic reports of another UFO. In all about a dozen airfield towers reported the UFO as being low on the southwestern horizon and disappearing after about twenty minutes. The writers of saucer lore say this UFO was what Mantell was chasing when he died; the Air Force says this UFO was Venus.

The people on Project Sign worked fast on the Mantell Incident. Contemplating a flood of queries from the press as soon as they heard about the crash, they realized that they had to get a quick answer. Venus had been the target of a chase by an Air Force F-51 several weeks before and there were similarities between this sighting and the Mantell Incident. So almost before the rescue crews had reached the crash, the word "Venus" went out. This satisfied the editors, and so it stood for about a year; Mantell had unfortunately been killed trying to reach the planet Venus.

To the press, the nonchalant, offhand manner with which the sighting was written off by the Air Force public relations officer showed great confidence in the conclusion, Venus, but behind the barbed-wire fence that encircled ATIC the nonchalant attitude didn't exist among the intelligence analysts. One man had already left for Louisville and the rest were doing some tall speculating. The story about the tower-to-air talk, "It looks metallic and it's tremendous in size," spread fast. Rumor had it that the tower had carried on a running conversation with the pilots and that there was more information than was so far known. Rumor also had it that this conversation had been recorded. Unfortunately neither of these rumors was true.

Over a period of several weeks the file on the Mantell Incident grew in size until it was the most thoroughly investigated sighting of that time, at least the file was the thickest.

About a year later the Air Force released its official report on the incident. To use a trite term, it was a masterpiece in the art of "weasel wording." It said that the UFO might have been Venus or it could have been a balloon. Maybe two balloons. It probably was Venus except that this is doubtful because Venus was too dim to be seen in the afternoon. This jolted writers who had been following the UFO story. Only a few weeks before, The Saturday Evening Post had published a two-part story entitled "What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers." The story had official sanction and had quoted the Venus theory as a positive solution. To clear up the situation, several writers were allowed to interview a major in the Pentagon, who was the Air Force's Pentagon "expert" on UFO's. The major was asked directly about the conclusion of the Mantell Incident, and he flatly stated that it was Venus. The writers pointed out the official Air Force analysis. The major's answer was, "They checked again and it was Venus." He didn't know who "they" were, where they had checked, or what they had checked, but it was Venus. The writers then asked, "If there was a later report they had made why wasn't it used as a conclusion?" "Was it available?" The answer to the last question was "No," and the lid snapped back down This interview gave the definite impression that the Air Force was unsuccessfully trying to cover up some very important information, using Venus as a front. Nothing excites a newspaper or magazine writer more than to think he has stumbled onto a big story and that someone is trying to cover it up. Many writers thought this after the interview with the major, and many still think it. You can't really blame them either.

In early 1952 I got a telephone call on ATIC's direct line to the Pentagon. It was a colonel in the Director of Intelligence's office. The Office of Public Information had been getting a number of queries about all of the confusion over the Mantell Incident. What was the answer?

I dug out the file. In 1949 all of the original material on the incident had been microfilmed, but something had been spilled on the film. Many sections were so badly faded they were illegible. As I had to do with many of the older sightings that were now history, I collected what I could from the file, filling in the blanks by talking to people who had been at ATIC during the early UFO era. Many of these people were still around, "Red" Honnacker, George Towles, Al Deyarmond, Nick Post, and many others. Most of them were civilians, the military had been transferred out by this time.

Some of the press clippings in the file mentioned the Pentagon major and his concrete proof of Venus. I couldn't find this concrete proof in the file so I asked around about the major. The major, I found, was an officer in the Pentagon who had at one time written a short intelligence summary about UFO's. He had never been stationed at ATIC, nor was he especially well versed on the UFO problem. When the word of the press conference regarding the Mantell Incident came down, a UFO expert was needed. The major, because of his short intelligence summary on UFO's, became the "expert." He had evidently conjured up "they" and "their later report" to support his Venus answer because the writers at the press conference had him in a corner. I looked farther.

Fortunately the man who had done the most extensive work on the incident, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, head of the Ohio State University Astronomy Department, could be contacted. I called Dr. Hynek and arranged to meet him the next day.

Dr. Hynek was one of the most impressive scientists I met while working on the UFO project, and I met a good many. He didn't do two things that some of them did: give you the answer before he knew the question; or immediately begin to expound on his accomplishments in the field of science. I arrived at Ohio State just before lunch, and Dr. Hynek invited me to eat with him at the faculty club. He wanted to refer to some notes he had on the Mantell Incident and they were in his office, so we discussed UFO's in general during lunch.

Back in his office he started to review the Mantell Incident. He had been responsible for the weasel-worded report that the Air Force released in late 1949, and he apologized for it. Had he known that it was going to cause so much confusion, he said, he would have been more specific. He thought the incident was a dead issue. The reason that Venus had been such a strong suspect was that it was in almost the same spot in the sky as the UFO. Dr. Hynek referred to his notes and told me that at 3:00 P.M., Venus had been south southwest of Godman and 33 degrees above the southern horizon. At 3:00 P.M. the people in the tower estimated the UFO to be southwest of Godman and at an elevation of about 45 degrees. Allowing for human error in estimating directions and angles, this was close. I agreed. There was one big flaw in the theory, however. Venus wasn't bright enough to be seen. He had computed the brilliance of the planet, and on the day in question it was only six times as bright as the surrounding sky. Then he explained what this meant. Six times may sound like a lot, but it isn't. When you start looking for a pinpoint of light only six times as bright as the surrounding sky, it's almost impossible to find it, even on a clear day.

Dr. Hynek said that he didn't think that the UFO was Venus.

I later found out that although it was a relatively clear day there was considerable haze.

I asked him about some of the other possibilities. He repeated the balloon, canopy-reflection, and sundog theories but he refused to comment on them since, as he said, he was an astrophysicist and would care to comment only on the astrophysical aspects of the sightings.

I drove back to Dayton convinced that the UFO wasn't Venus. Dr. Hynek had said Venus would have been a pinpoint of light. The people in the tower had been positive of their descriptions, their statements brought that out. They couldn't agree on a description, they called the UFO "a parachute, an ice cream cone tipped with red," "round and white," "huge and silver or metallic," "a small white object," "one fourth the size of the full moon," but all the descriptions plainly indicated a large object. None of the descriptions could even vaguely be called a pinpoint of light.

This aspect of a definite shape seemed to eliminate the sundog theory too. Sundogs, or perihelia, as they are technically known, are caused by ice particles reflecting a diffused light. This would not give a sharp outline. I also recalled two instances where Air Force pilots had chased sundogs. In both instances when the aircraft began to climb, the sundog disappeared. This was because the angle of reflection changed as the airplane climbed several thousand feet. These sundog-caused UFO's also had fuzzy edges.

I had always heard a lot of wild speculation about the condition of Mantell's crashed F-51, so I wired for a copy of the accident report. It arrived several days after my visit with Dr. Hynek. The report said that the F-51 had lost a wing due to excessive speed in a dive after Mantell had "blacked out" due to the lack of oxygen. Mantell's body had not burned, not disintegrated, and was not full of holes; the wreck was not radioactive, nor was it magnetized.

One very important and pertinent question remained. Why did Mantell, an experienced pilot, try to go to 20,000 feet when he didn't even have an oxygen mask? If he had run out of oxygen, it would have been different. Every pilot and crewman has it pounded into him, "Do not, under any circumstances, go above 15,000 feet without oxygen." In high-altitude indoctrination during World War II, I made several trips up to 30,000 feet in a pressure chamber. To demonstrate anoxia we would leave our oxygen masks off until we became dizzy. A few of the more hardy souls could get to 15,000 feet, but nobody ever got over 17,000. Possibly Mantell thought he could climb up to 20,000 in a hurry and get back down before he got anoxia and blacked out, but this would be a foolish chance. This point was covered in the sighting report. A long-time friend of Mantell's went on record as saying that he'd flown with him several years and knew him personally. He couldn't conceive of Mantell's even thinking about disregarding his lack of oxygen. Mantell was one of the most cautious pilots he knew. "The only thing I can think," he commented, "was that he was after something that he believed to be more important than his life or his family."

My next step was to try to find out what Mantell's wing men had seen or thought but this was a blind alley. All of this evidence was in the ruined portion of the microfilm, even their names were missing. The only reference I could find to them was a vague passage indicating they hadn't seen anything.

I concentrated on the canopy-reflection theory. It is widely believed that many flying saucers appear to pilots who are actually chasing a reflection on their canopy. I checked over all the reports we had on file. I couldn't find one that had been written off for this reason. I dug back into my own flying experience and talked to a dozen pilots. All of us had momentarily been startled by  reflection on the aircraft's canopy or wing, but in a second or two it had been obvious that it was a reflection. Mantell chased the object for at least fifteen to twenty minutes, and it is inconceivable that he wouldn't realize in that length of time that he was chasing a reflection.

About the only theory left to check was that the object might have been one of the big, 100-foot-diameter, "skyhook" balloons. I rechecked the descriptions of the UFO made by the people in the tower. The first man to sight the object called it a parachute; others said ice cream cone, round, etc. All of these descriptions fit a balloon. Buried deep in the file were two more references to balloons that I had previously missed. Not long after the object had disappeared from view at Godman AFB, a man from Madisonville, Kentucky, called Flight Service in Dayton. He had seen an object traveling southeast. He had looked at it through a telescope and it was a balloon. At four forty-five an astronomer living north of Nashville, Tennessee, called in. He had also seen a UFO, looked at it through a telescope, and it was a balloon.

In the thousands of words of testimony and evidence taken on the Mantell Incident this was the only reference to balloons. I had purposely not paid too much attention to this possibility because I was sure that it had been thoroughly checked back in 1948. Now I wasn't sure.

I talked with one of the people who had been in on the Mantell investigation. The possibility of a balloon's causing the sighting had been mentioned but hadn't been followed up for two reasons. Number one was that everybody at ATIC was convinced that the object Mantell was after was a spaceship and that this was the only course they had pursued. When the sighting grew older and no spaceship proof could be found, everybody jumped on the Venus band wagon, as this theory had "already been established." It was an easy way out. The second reason was that a quick check had been made on weather balloons and none were in the area. The big skyhook balloon project was highly classified at that time, and since they were all convinced that the object was of interplanetary origin (a minority wanted to give the Russians credit), they didn't want to bother to buck the red tape of security to get data on skyhook flights.

The group who supervise the contracts for all the skyhook research flights for the Air Force are located at Wright Field, so I called them. They had no records on flights in 1948 but they did think that the big balloons were being launched from Clinton County AFB in southern Ohio at that time. They offered to get the records of the winds on January 7 and see what flight path a balloon launched in southwestern Ohio would have taken. In a few days they had the data for me.

Unfortunately the times of the first sightings, from the towns outside Louisville, were not exact but it was possible to partially reconstruct the sequence of events. The winds were such that a skyhook balloon launched from Clinton County AFB could be seen from the town east of Godman AFB, the town from which the first UFO was reported to the Kentucky State Police. It is not unusual to be able to see a large balloon for 50 to 60 miles. The balloon could have traveled west for a while, climbing as it moved with the strong east winds that were blowing that day and picking up speed as the winds got stronger at altitude. In twenty minutes it could have been in a position where it could be seen from Owensboro and Irvington, Kentucky, the two towns west of Godman. The second reports to the state police had come from these two towns. Still climbing, the balloon would have reached a level where a strong wind was blowing in a southerly direction. The jet-stream winds were not being plotted in 1948 but the weather chart shows strong indications of a southerly bend in the jet stream for this day. Jet stream or not, the balloon would have moved rapidly south, still climbing. At a point somewhere south or southwest of Godman it would have climbed through the southerly-moving winds to a calm belt at about 60,000 feet. At this level it would slowly drift south or southeast. A skyhook balloon can be seen at 60,000.

When first seen by the people in Godman Tower, the UFO was south of the air base. It was relatively close and looked "like a parachute," which a balloon does. During the two hours that it was in sight, the observers reported that it seemed to hover, yet each observer estimated the time he looked at the object through the binoculars and time-wise the descriptions ran "huge," "small," "one fourth the size of a full moon," "one tenth the size of a full moon." Whatever the UFO was, it was slowly moving away. As the balloon continued to drift in a southerly direction it would have picked up stronger winds, and could have easily been seen by the astronomers in Madisonville, Kentucky, and north of Nashville an hour after it disappeared from view at Godman.

Somewhere in the archives of the Air Force or the Navy there are records that will show whether or not a balloon was launched from Clinton County AFB, Ohio, on January 7, 1948. I never could find these records. People who were working with the early skyhook projects "remember" operating out of Clinton County AFB in 1947 but refuse to be pinned down to a January 7 flight. Maybe, they said.

The Mantell Incident is the same old UFO jigsaw puzzle. By assuming the shape of one piece, a balloon launched from southwestern Ohio, the whole picture neatly falls together. It shows a huge balloon that Captain Thomas Mantell died trying to reach. He didn't know that he was chasing a balloon because he had never heard of a huge, 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloon, let alone seen one. Leave out the one piece of the jigsaw puzzle and the picture is a UFO, "metallic and tremendous in size."

It could have been a balloon. This is the answer I phoned back to the Pentagon.

******

Ref. 1:  "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects", Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956, (pages 31-39)

 

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Part 1 - 2: Captain Thomas Francis Mantell, Jr.

 

 

During World War II, Mantell was assigned to the 440th Troop Carrier Group, 96th Troop Carrier Squadron, 9th Air Force. He was awarded Distinguished Flying Cross, and Air Medal w/3 GLCs for heroism. Following the war he returned to Louisville, joining the newly organized Kentucky Air National Guard, as Flight Leader, "C" Flight, 165th Fighter Squadron, Kentucky Air National Guard on 16 February 1947.:

 

 

 

 

On Saturday, 29 September 2001, the Simpson County Historical Society unveiled a historical marker in honor of Thomas F. Mantell, Jr. The marker is located at the Franklin, Kentucky exit off Interstate 65, next to the office building of Simpson County Tourism.

 

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Part 1 - 4:   2005 - Prior to Re-Investigation

At the close of the year, 2005, the Mantell case directory had files containing what others had written about the case, plus several Project Blue Book documents. The printed-out file was about an inch thick. By the time we conducted the re-investigation in 2006, the file was over four times that size.

The following 21 Air Force documents were in that original file at the NICAP site, thanks to the efforts of UFO researcher, Dan Wilson. The key documents regarding this case were in the first of the four groups below, transcribed by our own, Jean Waskiewicz.

1)  On November 9, 2005, our A-Team UFO researcher, Dan Wilson, found these three "RESTRICTED" documents, dated, January 7, 1948. Listed as a report of unusual incidents that took place in several locations. Sightings were reported, (1) In Kentucky; (2) In Ohio at Lockbourne AFB tower and Clinton County Tower who advised that a great ball of light was traveling southwest across the sky; (3) In Missouri, at St. Louis Tower advising that a great ball of light was passing directly over the field - Scott AFB Tower also verified this; and (4) "A call was received from Air Defense Command advising us to alert Coffeyville, Kansas, Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and Kansas City Missouri, and that they had plotted the object as moving WSW at 250 miles per hour." These three documents confirm the original story as reported by Captain Edward Ruppelt, in his 1956 book. Newly found newspaper reports also tell us that someone had called an ambulance (Fire Dept) and they had arrived before the police. Apparently this is how Mantell's body was removed from the plane before State Police got there, and before the accident investigators arrived. But there were more surprises ahead.

The document numbers below that have the (*) correspond to the actual versions that can be found at the end of this chapter. ALL of the documents LISTED can be found on the NICAP website. The transcripts of those selected documents are provided immediately BELOW the relevant doc numbers.



2) "Mantell Incident", January 7, 1948, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio. Two-page document checklist on observations of objects from 0720 hours to 1925 hours.



3) This series of twelve documents dated January 7, 1948 mentions the witnesses: (1) T/Sgt Quinton A. Blackwell, Chief Operator in control tower at Godman Field; (2) PFC Stanley Oliver, on duty in control tower Godman Field; (3) USAF Capt. J. F. Duesler Jr., in control tower Godman Field; (4) USAF Capt. Cary W. Carter, at Godman Field; (5) Col. Guy G. Hix, at Godman Field; and the lead pilot himself, (6) Capt. Thomas F. Mantell, flight leader in NG 869 F-51 aircraft. The docs listed are mentioned for-the-record only at this point.
 

4) On November 10th, 2005, Dan Wilson submitted this four-page AF Form 14, Report of Major accident, Jan. 7, 1948, near Franklin, Ky, Capt. Thomas F. Mantell 0-806873, Fatal. The accident summary says that Mantell went up to 25,000 feet and possibly as high as 30,000 feet, and that he passed out for lack of oxygen. According to other reports, Mantell's last words was that he was at 15,000 feet and would go to 20,000 feet and if no closer would abandon chase. USAF-SIGN1-310 held a vital clue, but a better version of those documents was uncovered by Wilson on June 1st of 2006. Fact: Mantell had oxygen! From the very beginning we had the evidence right under our noses, and later, analyst Brad Sparks amply pointed this out and was able to use other evidence to prove it.

 

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Part 2 - 1:    March 2006 - The Re-Investigation Begins

 

In March of 2006 I had several messages on my answering machine.  Maybe it's my age, or maybe it's all the years I've been chasing UFOs, I don't know. I'm more reluctant about doing over-the-phone interviews or spending a lot of time with reporters these days. I get much more accomplished with research and archival work and don't need distractions. The man calling left his number and I finally got around to returning his call. His name was Drew Speier, and he was a reporter from Evansville, Indiana's TV Channel 14, WFIE. He never mentioned it, but I soon found out that it was ratings time and they were planning on doing a story on a somewhat local UFO event. The Mantell incident was more regional than local, of course, but it had  a sensational  twist to it, something the media loves, and apparently the viewers too. I told him that I was familiar with the case for two reasons: First, every serious UFO enthusiast knew about the case. It's a dramatic and well-known part of UFO history. Secondly, it was a case that was part of my database because it WAS regional.  The Mantell case directory, which was on the NICAP web site, didn't have much listed other than the fact that Ed Ruppelt had written about it in his book in 1956, and Kevin Randle had written a massive 5-part, forty-page report. For over 58 years the case had been written about in about every book and mentioned on numerous TV shows, and had finally been written off as a mistaken balloon, with the pilot killed in either a freak accident or misgauging his ability to fly at certain altitudes without oxygen. In effect, everybody had written it off. I had serious reservations about that, however, some of those personal, but I had to assume I was not always right and my peers are the ones I answer to with the NICAP archiving.

Drew & I had a few lengthy discussions about my work and UFOs in general, and we discussed the Mantell case and how it was not really a showcase sighting among serious researchers. But WFIE still wanted to do the show on Mantell. In April, at WFIE reporter Drew Speier's request, I reluctantly agreed to do a filmed interview on the Mantell case. I consented to do it in the hopes that WFIE would do something better in the near future with any of our many better UFO reports or something new that might develop. Since I wanted to do this interview right, for the record, I set out to show the media and the public the importance of what we DID have on the case. I had figured, too, that our conclusions were not going to provide the image the show was trying to project. This was going to be an IFO, an "Identified Flying Object".

When we investigate a case there is a list of things we do routinely and the final report includes them all:
 

The Project Blue Book Archive is a website which provides free online access to the National Archives Blue Book microfilm collection, and has so far posted documents of,  to about mid-1954, which is still a fraction of the Blue Book microfilm. The site and work is conducted by Rebecca Wise, a very dedicated researcher and also a member of the NICAP A-Team. The Blue Book Archive provides a fully searchable interface to high-resolution document scans relating to the US government's investigation of the UFO phenomena. Also available are high-quality CD-ROMs of the microfilms, which can be purchased directly from the website.

Documents mentioned in this report are listed by number, and selected ones actually presented at the end of each chapter are marked with an asterisk (*). The less pertinent documents that CAN be examined are listed but not provided here due to lack of room in this already hefty report. These ARE provided on the NICAP website. In most cases the transcript (or part) is provided.

So here, for the record, is the official

SIGHTING INVESTIGATION ACTIVITY LOG:

March 8, 2006
Using the search engine for the Project Blue Book Archive, as we have for other cases the last few years, the keyword "Mantell" brought up four printed pages, 37 references, to BB documents, a good place to start. Immediately I found an interesting nine pages of documents on the Mantell Incident Report.  Minus doc. 671, these documents describe the incident and the possible cause of a series of reports. The Air Force claimed Venus was the main culprit for the other reports that day, while the secret Skyhook balloon was what Mantell was supposed to have been chasing. My report and the documents cited are at:
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell_668-677.pdf 
MAXW-PBB3-668-677
March 10, 2006
On March 10th I sent an email to researcher Brad Sparks and advised that WFIE TV at Evansville, Indiana, wanted me to do an interview about Mantell for May release. I told him that I wanted to divert Drew Speier to a better case, but couldn't change his mind. But the Mantell incident had always bothered me. I didn't buy the explanation. Mantell should have been able to run into the damned thing at the speeds the P-51 can muster. The state police reported an object 250 feet wide, hardly the description of a distant skyhook. Buried in those many reports are some anomalous objects. Just a coincidence? And if the skyhook answer was so obvious, why did it take so long to come up with that conclusion? People in the AF were scratching their heads years later. Plus , there were some newly found documents we had on file.

Brad Sparks stated:

I advised Brad that the "newly found documents" were obtained by Wendy Connors and Mike Hall, and the web page showing these was at http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell4.htm



When Wendy found out I was doing research on the Mantell incident, we were discussing other things, but using her great sense of humor often, she sent me a "mystery photo". I didn't have a clue, but it turns out to be a photo of (L-R) Captain Thomas F. Mantell & Lt. A. W. Clements. This was a cropped version of a larger photo of the full crew that day (See Part 1-2).

The following are the transcripts, produced by Jean Waskiewicz, with the actual documents not found in the Blue Book files located at the end of this chapter.

------------------------------

Connors Doc #1 (*)

103rd AACS SQUADRON
LOCKBOURNE ARMY AIR BASE\
COLUMBUS 17, OHIO

14 JANUARY 1947

SUBJECT:  Report of Unusual Circumstance   

Conners Doc #4a (*)

DETACHMENT 733RD AF BASE UNIT
103RD AACE SQUADRON
LOCKBOURNE ARMY AIR BASE
COLUMBUS 17, OHIO

14 JANUARY 1948

Conners Doc #4b Page 2 (*)

Conners Doc #5 (*)


March 29, 2006
On March 29, I emailed Loren to see if we could post information about Mantell from his UFOs: a History, 1948. I had Jean scan the section for limited in-house use until we got the OK. Later, on June 4th, Loren would approve this in order to update the case file we were putting together.

May 12, 2006
Over a month had passed since I had been in contact with WFIE and I sent a DVD copy of the Greene-Rouse production, "U.F.O." to Drew Speier to be used for b&w era footage. Four days later I got an email from Drew:


I had told him 1946, which was an error, but it was in 1948, that the designation P-51 (P for pursuit) had been changed to F-51 (F for fighter) and the existing F designator for photographic reconnaissance aircraft was dropped because of a new designation scheme throughout the USAF. Later in the month we filmed my portion of the show.

May 23, 2006
The show aired on WFIE-TV, Channel 14. It was only the beginning. The evidence would continue to mount and the need for a second interview and another show explaining our new findings was a certainty.
 

---

Part 2 -2:  WFIE Show Aires

 

May 23, 2006

The show aired on WFIE-TV, Channel 14. It did so well it required another installment to be filmed in July. We had uncovered reams of documents, telling a story much different than most UFOlogists had thought. A week later I posted the transcript.

------------------------------

Form: Media Transcript
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 19:51:24 -0500
From: Francis Ridge <nicap@insightbb.com>
Subject: Mystery: Pilot Crashes While Pursuing UFO
Part 1, May 23, 2006, WFIE Interview


May 23, 2006 04:15 PM
Reporter: Drew Speier
New Media Producer: Rachel Chambliss

Transcript:
It's a mystery dating back to 1947. A UFO allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. That story is well documented, but equally puzzling was this mystery regarding a UFO in the skies above Kentucky just a few months after the Roswell incident.

In 1956, a government film addressed this case, a case that'll never be solved because Captain Thomas Mantell from Simpson County, Kentucky, an experienced pilot and World War II Ace, took the answer to his grave.

It made headlines across the country.  January 7th, 1948, 1:30 pm, Kentucky State Police receive reports of a UFO near Godman Air Force Base. The unidentified object is described as a big, bright, shiny star. (Ridge: The second line is a soundbyte WFIE used that came from the Edwards Encounter tape, and does not describe the Godman sighting).

Four F-51 Mustangs, on their way to Standiford Air Force Base in Kentucky, are contacted by the tower. They're ordered to investigate a white object, some 300 feet in diameter. One plane returns for fuel and oxygen, the other three approached the object.

Pilot Thomas Mantell says he sees it ahead of him. The planes climbed to 22,000 feet, too high for WWII fighters without oxygen. Two returned to the base, leaving Captain Mantell in sole pursuit of the unknown.

Minutes later, Mantell with another transmission states, "Mantell to tower: it appears to be a metallic object, and it's of tremendous size."

Captain Mantell kept climbing, most likely past 30,000 feet. Radio contact was lost.

Minutes later, less than two hours from the initial sightings, Mantell's F-51 crashed on a farm in Franklin, Kentucky. His watch stopped at 3:16 p.m. His body, still strapped in his plane. By all accounts, he passed out from a lack of oxygen, forcing his plane to plunge to the ground.

Today, a historical marker sits near the site where Mantell's plane went down in Franklin, Kentucky. In fact, it went down on a farm nearby Joe Phillips farm. His son, a school child then, was one of the first on the scene.

William Phillips Jr. recalls, "We heard this real loud boom, you know. It actually shook the house. In fact, the best I remember it was two of them, like an explosion."

Phillips Jr. was six years old and home sick with his younger sister when the crash occurred.

He says, "We ran to the window, and just happened to pick the right window, and see it hit the ground, as it hit the ground."

The news of the incident immediately made headlines. Newspapers reported Mantell had been shot down by a magnetic ray from a flying saucer. The story took on a life of its own.

Mantell was the first person ever to die while pursuing an unidentified flying object.

The military's response - it was most likely a weather balloon.

Phillips Jr. argues, "I can't see that a balloon could move and out run a P-51. The P-51 was the fastest thing the military virtually had in '47."

It's a story that, almost 60 years later, is still talked about in Franklin, Kentucky where Mantell was born and, oddly enough, died, just a few miles from the Simpson County tourism building where he's honored.

Dan Ware, Simpson County Tourism, says, "There are many UFO buffs who stop by to ask and see what we've got, and want to know as much as they can about the story. It continues to fascinate people, even after 50 years."

To this day, people still wonder what Captain Mantell was chasing.

Second segment:

Just over 58 years ago, a Kentucky National Guard pilot crashed his plane and died while pursuing a UFO. It was a story that made headlines and one that's still talked about today. But the question remains, what was Captain Thomas Mantell chasing that day?

A 1956 documentary on UFO's detailed the Mantell case, which occurred in January of 1948. It happened just months after another celebrated incident in Roswell, New Mexico, where a UFO had reportedly crashed in the summer of 1947.

Newswatch spoke with the man who was the commander of the Kentucky Air National Guard when the Mantell case occurred and a former Chief of Staff with the Guard to get their takes on what happened. Newswatch also talked with a UFO researcher. And as you might guess, we got two different opinions.

Francis Ridge, UFO researcher, says, "It is a classic to this day."

Francis Ridge, who is with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, is talking about the case of Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, Captain Thomas Mantell.

He explains, "He decided to go after this object which was, according to his description, large and metallic, tremendous in size."

Mantell, a World War II Ace, was chasing a UFO on the afternoon of January 7th, 1948, when he crashed his plane and died. The mystery died with him on a farm in Franklin, Kentucky.

Ridge and others remain convinced Mantell was chasing an object not of this world. (Ridge: Although a mystery in many ways, we do not consider the Mantell case an "unknown". There are over 1500 incidents we DO consider as "unknowns".)

Ridge says, "Several years later, when they restructured the project because Project Sign was the first one, and they were serious, and they came to the conclusion that they were dealing with something from somewhere else."

Project Sign later became Project Blue Book. Because Mantell was a well respected pilot, it gave the UFO story credibility. And the military was concerned.

Ridge defends, "If you look in the Blue Book records, which is the Air Force records, it shook a lot of military people up."
The man, who was the Commander of the Kentucky Air National Guard at the time of the incident, is retired Major General Phillip Ardery. He's now 93 and lives in Louisville. He remembers the Mantell case.

General Ardery recalls, "I'm fascinated with it, that's all I can say about it. I find it a very, very interesting part of my experience."
Ardery believes Mantell was confused and didn't realize he had reached an altitude with no oxygen. He also believes Mantell wasn't chasing a UFO at all.

General Ardery argues, "There are times, we can imagine things that really are not there."

Retired Brigadier General Edward Tonini, joined the Kentucky Air National Guard in 1969. He eventually became Chief of Staff and finished his career at the Pentagon.

General Tonini says, "It was universally accepted that this was not a UFO but a balloon."

He says officers, like Mantell, did not know of a highly classified secret program involving balloons, which is why Mantell thought he was chasing a UFO and why it was difficult for the military to explain the Skyhook Balloon Theory away. (Skyhook was not a highly classified project but a highly publicized one. What they were USED for might have been at times, but with over a hundred launches a year, they apparently didn't attract much attention.)

General Tonini says, "As a result, even it if were a balloon, that was part of a Navy secret project. Nobody was going to come out and say that's what it was because it was classified." (Ridge: Records show, actually FAIL to show, any launch responsible for this incident, which was preceded by and followed by UFO sightings.)

The military's position remains firm. So does the position of those who investigate UFO sightings, like Mantell's, for a living.

Ridge says, "It always impressed me that he was chasing something other than a balloon, even though to this day, it would be very difficult to prove it. One thing about it though, after searching all the records and after the Air Force claimed that it was a Skyhook Balloon, they have pretty good records on all the launches, but they never could establish a launch date for that day."

One footnote, there were several reported sightings of UFO's on the day of Mantell's death, including in Madisonville and Owensboro.

Newly found documents, left off of the official Blue Book records, show that some of these objects were maneuvering and could not be attributed to balloons of any kind.

For now, it all remains a mystery.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

------------------------------

May 25, 2006
Two days after the show aired, Dan Wilson found some maps of the area located in Blue Book files. These are presented, for the record, and may be accessed by using the URL provided.
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs5.htm
MAXW-PBB3-657-666

He then found a 19-page checklist found in BB files.
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs4.htm
MAXW-PBB3-678-695

In his 1956 book, Capt. Edward Ruppelt had claimed that nobody agreed on what Mantell had said during his radio transmissions. Ruppelt had suggested more than once that only UFO buffs have ever reported Mantell saying anything specific about the UFO. Two years prior to the book release, in the 1954 True article, Ruppelt had stated:

Notice the use of the term "squawk box", which is a reference to the Plan 62 mentioned earlier. In the very same article, just prior to the remark above, Ruppelt commented on the phrase:


This alone strongly suggests Mantell was NOT chasing the planet Venus, and a Top Secret report in our possession also minces no words about what Mantell had said. Later, you'll see further evidence that Air Force personnel listening in on Plan 62 speakerphones, heard and reported specific comments by Mantell AND his wingmen and those on the ground.

I emailed a pdf file to Drew Speier, which was the April 28, 1949 Top Secret report, citing page 12, par. 2k at
http://nicap.org/docs/airintelrpt100-203-79.pdf


May 26, 2006
Dan Wilson found 8x10 glossy photos of remains of Mantell's F-51 located in BB files.
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs6.htm
MAXW-PBB3-783-799
 
I already had copies of better versions of crash photos previously supplied by Wendy Connors. I decided to post those too. A montage of those photos is supplied with this report at the end of this chapter (Part 2-2) AND from the URL provide below.
http://www.nicap.org/mantell_crash.htm


Jerome Clark, wrote:


I reminded Brad Sparks that Captain Edward J. Ruppelt (former Project Blue Book Director) had stated that no skyhook balloon launch record could be found to account for the Mantell object. This was a a few years after the incident and with the Air Force ready and willing to put an identified label on the Mantell incident. Question: How did Barry Greenwood & Robert Todd accomplish in 1990 what Blue Book would have given its eyeteeth for 40 years earlier?

Sparks responded:


May 27, 2006
Dan Wilson found duplicates of USAF-SIGN8-240-241, the same interesting documents, but with different numbers that we mentioned in Part 1-4. They again refer to the State Police report of a huge, relatively low altitude object moving at high speed.


Ruppelt had detailed all of this in his book in 1956. We have illustrated them previously under different BB numbers, USAF-SIGN1-371-373 at the end of Part 2-1. Dan's paper lists them again at: .
http://www.nicap.org/docs/mantell/mantell480107docs8.htm
NARA-PBB2-853
NARA-PBB2-854
NARA-PBB2-855
Frame 853 is also at
MAXW-PBB3-710

NARA-PBB2-854 was a potential bombshell that was right in front of us for days before it hit home:


This was a verified sighting of the famous Skyhook balloon, a secret project that was supposed to be the real answer to the Mantell incident and not the planet Venus.

Then another document, one much more recent than any from the BB files, dated July 20, 1964, was discovered. From the Civil Aeromedical Research Institute, Federal Aviation Agency to T/Sgt Moody, Foreign Technology Division, WPAFB. It described a similar crash in 1964 of an F-51, the same plane flown by Mantell.



May 28, 2006
The Current Encounters mailing  list received an email from Mary Castner of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. She had seen the TV interview on the internet and was wondering what I meant when I said, "It always impressed me that he (Mantell) was chasing something other than a balloon, even though to this day, it would be very difficult to prove it. One thing about it though, after searching all the records and after the Air Force claimed that it was a Skyhook balloon, they have pretty good records on all the launches, but they never could establish a launch date for that day." Castner, and about everyone else in the "UFO business", had accepted the Skyhook balloon theory based on Todd & Greenwoods research. It would soon be another in a series of mistakes anyone could have made. History was about to be re-written and a cover-up exposed.

USAF-SIGN1-377 (*)
is a clearer version of MAXW-PBB3-714, found three weeks later, on June 21, by Tom DeMary. 

MAXW-PBB3-713 states that, besides Mantell and his wingmen, the ones noted to be in attempted pursuit of the unknown object, two other aircraft taking off from Standiford Field might have been directed to go after it.

In Part 2 - 3 we explore some Blue Book documents in detailed transcripts.

 

---

Part 2 - 3:  The Documents Speak

 

At this time we will go over what the primary documents tell us about the Mantell incident. This document (and 6 enclosures), signed by Lt. Colonel E. Garrison Wood, USAF reads as follows:

MAXW-PBB3-713

The following transcripts of the above reports were produced by Jean Waskiewicz. The noted documents (which are presented in their actual form at the end of this section) are documented reports from witnesses, Pfc. Stanley Oliver,  T.Sgt. Q. A. Blackwell, Capt. Cary W. Carter, Capt. James F. Duesler, Jr., Col. Guy F. Hix, Commanding Officer, and  Lt. Paul I. Orner.


USAF-SIGN1-374
1. Pfc. Stanley Oliver statement



USAF-SIGN1-375


MAXW-PBB3-684
CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS


MAXW-PBB3-685


 
USAF-SIGN1-279 CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS





MAXW-PBB3-718 ,234,235
MAXW-PBB3-718
3. Capt. Gary Carter statement



SIGN8-PBB3-234
CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS


USAF-SIGN8-235

CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS MAXW-PBB3-833
MAXW-PBB3-691



NARA-PBB2-866
MAXW-PBB3-683


With this information now under our belt, we stop for a moment to discuss  the Air Force project that went into operation the same month Mantell was killed chasing a UFO on that afternoon of January 7th, 1948.

---

Part 2 - 4:  Project SIGN

There is a large amount of ground to cover with the Mantell incident, but for a moment let's discuss the UFO project which had just "officially" began in January of 1948, a few weeks after the tragic incident. Project SIGN, the forerunner of Projects Grudge and Blue Book, was actually started a month before, if not years before and was referred to as "Project Saucer".

May 28, 2006, continued:
Michael D. Swords is a Professor of Natural Science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His major professional and involvements are teaching and writing in the areas of general sciences and anomalous phenomena. His teaching centers about human biology, the history and philosophy of science, scientific methodology, and the "parasciences" of which UFOlogy is a member. His writings have concentrated mainly on topics in UFOlogy, parapsychology, and cryptozoology, and several have been published in the "MUFON UFO Journal". A very relevant paper is:
Project SIGN & the Estimate of the Situation (2000).

Dr. Michael D. Swords writes:

Wendy Connors:

Dan Wilson's reports to the A-Team:

Fran Ridge:
USAF-SIGN1-377
is a better version of MAXW-PBB3-714, transcript below (Frame 377, see Part 2-2) .                                


The next day, May 29, Brad Sparks sent the group an email: He had gotten the records on the balloon flight.
Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:
I then discovered two restricted documents, one which tells more about what Mantell had said than any previous document found. MAXW-PBB3-681 reads in part:


Interest in the case re-investigation was mounting, but some were questioning why re-investigate in the first place?

Mary Castner of CUFOS wrote:

Fran Ridge:
As I told the list members, first of all, I was approached in March by Drew Speier of WFIE to help on a story they wanted to do on the Mantell incident. To set the record straight, I told him that there were MUCH better reports and that the Mantell incident was not even an "unknown". He insisted that it was a "local" story and told me that it would possibly lead to other stories if it went well. May was ratings month and that was the release period.



Later that day I found this document, showing the Project SIGN first quarter sightings, early on lists the case as solved, yet doesn't do an across the board balloon explanation to explain the rash of sightings in the region. Venus is the explanation for ALL of them, except the Mantell incident. The Jan-Feb-March sighting listings lists the sighting at Godman as a "balloon"!!!
NARA-PBB1-15 (*)

The Air Force publicly blamed the planet Venus as the cause for all of the series of sightings, including the daylight incident in Kentucky (not Mantell). In actuality, however, many of the intelligence officers in TID's Sign project were slowly becoming convinced UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin during the course of the long accident investigation that continued through April. Loedding and Sneider got the Venus idea from Dr. Hynek who had only offhandedly suggested the planet as one possible explanation. They, however, used it as a cover or a quick fix to explain away what, at the time, became a very widely publicized incident in the midst of what was obviously going to be a long investigation. Sign team members thought they might have to suggest a far more shocking conclusion, but not before they had the time to develop the theory.

 

---

Part 2 - 5:  Balloon Deflated

 

---

Part 2 - 6:  The Accident Report

On June 1, 2006, while we waited on the 127-page accident report from Rod Dyke's Archives for UFO Research, Dan Wilson located some of documents in the BB Archive files.

 




On this day during the re-investigation sequence, a very controversial aspect of the Mantell tragedy came up. One source had mentioned Mantell's plane and his body were riddled with tiny pinholes. A short discussion ensued.

Don Ledger:
 

Brad commented on this later on September 12 (2008) and it is placed here for its contextual value: "Yes, as I discovered earlier this year, there were two (2) UFO's, the main object at 205-210 degrees azimuth chased by Mantell, and the second one at 240-250 degrees tracked intermittently by theodolite on the roof of the hangar at Godman Field at the same time."

Actually, Dan Wilson had found the documents citing this information two years prior and we posted them on May 28, 2006.  Jean Waskiewicz had provided the transcripts.




Fran Ridge:

June 2, 2006

I asked Jean to send the file on Mantell from Loren's UFO History to Brad ASAP.

Fran Ridge:


------------------------------

(Note: Transcripts for these documents, created by Jean Waskiewicz and released on Aug. 10, 2006, are moved up in this chronological timeline to match these documents secured by Dan Wilson).

Incident 30, Captain Charles McGee statement:




                    Charles E. McGee
                    Captain USAF

Transcripts available for Incident 32, Lt. C.W. Thomas statement

 

---

Part 2 - 7:  Deyarmond Says Case "Unexplained"

Brad Sparks:









Dick Hall:  
Joel Carpenter:
 
Brad Sparks:

Dan Wilson:

 

---

Part 2 - 8 - Incident 30:  The Clinton County Incidents

---

Part 2 - 9 - Incident 33: The Fort Knox Sightings 

NARA-PBB2-860







Det 733D AFBU        



USAF-SIGN1-279


USAF-SIGN1-280




About 1445, flight leader (NG 869) reported sighting object “ahead and above ­ still climbing” At 15,000 ft he reported “Object directly ahead and above and moving about half my speed.” Again “it appears metallic of tremendous size.” Still later “I’m still climbing ­ object is above and ahead moving about my speed or faster ­ I’m trying to close in for better look.” This was about 1515. Five minutes later the other two ships turned back. NG 800 reported “it appeared like the reflection of sunlight on an airplane canopy” Shortly afterward this same pilot (NG 800) resumed search going to 33,000 ft, 100 miles south but did not sight anything.





AIRWAYS AND AIR COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE, ATC









NARA-PBB2-866



MAXW-PBB3-682

CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS


MAXW-PBB3-683

USAF-SIGN1-374










USAF-SIGN1-375




MAXW-PBB3-684



MAXW-PBB3-685

















NARA-PBB2-832
          
CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS


NARA-PBB2-833







NARA-PBB2-834


















USAF-SIGN8-235



















MAXW-PBB3-690



MAXW-PBB3-691






 

USAF-SIGN8-238


T/Sgt. Quinton A. Blackwell:      NG 869: At 1445. “Object traveling at 180 MPH








NARA-PBB2-825



NARA-PBB2-826

 

---

Part 2 - 10 - Incident 48:   The Alert Crew Sightings

CHECK-LIST ­ UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS






CONFIDENTIAL














USAF-SIGN1-524








USAF-SIGN1-517

 

---

Part 2-11:  "...Was Not The Planet Venus"

Fran Ridge:

 

---

Part 2-12: Pickering Re-Interviewed

------------------------------

 

---

Part 2-13:  "Appeared to Touch the Ground"

 

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Tom DeMary:

Brad Sparks: Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:
 
Drew Speier:

 

---

Part 2 - 14:    The Press Reports

 

---

Part 2-15:   Plan 62

June 6, 2006

Dan Wilson: 

Brad Sparks:

Dan Wilson:

------------------------------

June 7, 2006


Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:
Air Force History Office research by Dan Wilson shows that Plan 62 was already in place 14 months before the Mantell incident.:

Dan Wilson located this information:


Tom DeMary:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Dan Wilson:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Jean Waskiewicz:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Dan Wilson:

----------------------------------------

June 8, 2006

Mary Castner:

---------------------------------------


Brad Sparks:

 

---

Part 2-16:    Skyhook 160 Miles From Mantell

Tom DeMary:

Brad Sparks:

Dick Hall:

------------------------------

June 11, 2006

Tom DeMary:

Brad Sparks:

Joel Carpenter:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Fran Ridge:

Jan Aldrich:

Brad Sparks:





Don Ledger:

------------------------------

June 12, 2006

Brad Sparks:

Tom DeMary:

Brad Sparks:

 

---

Part 2-17:  The Accident Report Arrives

June 13, 2006

Brad's computer had problems so his response to Tom DeMary's June 4 comments were delayed until this date:

Brad Sparks: Tom DeMary: Brad Sparks: Tom DeMary:
Brad Sparks: Tom DeMary: Brad Sparks: Tom DeMary: Brad Sparks:
   Joel Carpenter:
Jean Waskiewicz:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:
Dick Hall:
Brad Sparks:
Dick Hall:

Mark Rodeghier:

------------------------------
June 14, 2006

Joel Carpenter:
Mary Castner:
-------------------------------
June 15, 2006
Brad Sparks:
* (Dan Wilson had discovered the Deyarmond document and posted USAF-SIGN-28 on June 3rd. MAXW-PBB3-704 is a composite of that document. It was later discovered that Michael Swords had mentioned this in 2000 in his paper on Project SIGN & the Estimate of the Situation)..

Joel Carpenter:

Richard Hall:

------------------------------

June 16, 2006

Tom DeMary:


Dan Wilson:


Dan Wilson:

 

---

Part 2-18:    WFIE - The Second Interview

June 28, 2006, continued.

Fran Ridge:

--------------------------------

Form: 97, Media Coverage
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 07:25:27 -0500
From: Francis Ridge <nicap@insightbb.com>

Subject: UFO or Balloon? Either Way Man Dies In Pursuit
WFIE Interview, Mantell Case
Part 2, June 28, 2006 (air date: July 26, 2006)


Reporter: Drew Speier
New Media Producer: Rachel Chambliss

A Newswatch follow-up to a story we first brought you in May.

It was one of Kentucky's most famous and controversial UFO cases. It involved Kentucky National Guard Pilot Thomas Mantell, who crashed his plane and died in 1948 while chasing what he thought was a UFO.

------------------------------

---

Part 2-19: "Cover-up of the Complicity"

Final entry for June 28, 2006:

Brad Sparks:

------------------------------

June 29, 2006

Dan Wilson:

Brad Sparks:

Jean Waskiewicz:
Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

Brad Sparks:

Fran Ridge:

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:

------------------------------

June 30, 2006

Fran Ridge:

Brad Sparks:
Fran Ridge:

Fran Ridge:


Brad Sparks:

 

---

Part 2- 20: The Real Work Begins

Called

 

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Part 3- 1: Summary & Preliminary Analysis

This summation and preliminary analysis deals with what our team found during the re-investigation of the Mantell Incident that I began on March 8th of 2006 as a result of Channel 14 (Evansville, Indiana) Drew Speier's request to do a story I originally objected to, which aired on May 23rd, 2006. This summation will try to expound on this without re-hashing my seven reasons for thinking there was more to the case than the current wisdom suggested. In other words, prior to this re-investigation I was willing to accept the conclusion of my colleagues, that Mantell had died in an accident chasing a balloon of some type.

When the re-investigation began on March 8th, the first thing we did was to re-examine the old Mantell case file. There were three documents in that file that we had not paid too much attention to. One that mentioned a "Plan 62" which had no real significance to us at that time. Another, a hard-to-read inverted image in black with white letters at the bottom that read, "Oxygen system was not serviced. System was in working order." Yet another document that said Mantell's body was removed before the Air Force accident team got there.

PLAN  62
Somewhere in an old email from Dan Wilson is a report he filed on Plan 62. The report was not tied to any particular sighting, so the file got sidestepped and was lost. But Wendy Connors document # 6 had mentioned  "Plan 62".  Three months into our re-investigation Plan 62 became the topic of discussion in the Mantell case. Brad Sparks had a pretty good idea of what he thought it was, and later found more details. In the fall of 2008 Dan Wilson was able to get an official document from the Air Force Historical Studies Office.

My research into Mantell led me to examine Captain Ed Ruppelt's unedited manuscript for his book, "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects". It mentioned the Plan, but not by number. This then, was an important early discovery. Ruppelt's slip-up in his manuscript had mentioned that "The people on Project SIGN worked fast on the Mantell Incident, [in fact they heard about it through Flight Service while it was all in progress.]..."   Our investigation was to show that Air Force personnel mentioned hearing about sightings that infamous day at the other bases as the event was actually unfolding.

Here is what Brad Sparks added in June: "The Air Defense Command (ADC) used the Plan 62 intercom system, through the Air Transport Command's Flight Service Centers, and the air traffic controllers of the Airways and Air Communications Service (AACS) in those centers and outlying bases, to coordinate the use of air traffic control towers and radars to track the UFO. This was because at that time the ADC had only two operating radars in the nation, both too far away, across the continent on the West Coast (at Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Arlington, Wash.)." 

Ruppelt had said in his published book (page 33) that "rumor had it that the tower had carried on a running conversation with the pilots and that there was more information than was so far known." Ruppelt stated the rumors were not true. The evidence proves him wrong or a liar. We now know that a lot of people heard Mantell and his men. Project SIGN was even in on it, live!!!!

OXYGEN
Our report on file on the Mantell Incident file by the end of 2005 had documents that strongly suggested that something strange had been going on in the region, and one of those documents was USAF-SIGN1-310. A better version of this document was uncovered by Dan Wilson on June 1st of 2006, but we actually had it in December of 2005. The bottom of document USAF-SIGN-310 clearly reads,  "Oxygen system was not serviced. System was in working order." Regarding Mantell having oxygen, my take was that the system, like an automobile with a gas tank, carburetor and fuel pump, was in working condition, except it had not been fueled or topped off with oxygen. Brad believes Mantell not only had to have had oxygen, but has found supporting evidence in the Accident Report that we obtained and transcribed for our use and supplied to him. 

BODY REMOVED
USAF-SIGN1-372 documents that State Police officer Joe Walker arrived at the crash scene and stated that the pilot's body had already been removed. We later learned that the ambulance crew had done this and it was reported in a newspaper.  The source was the Franklin (Kentucky) Newspaper of January 8, 1948. "Mrs. Joe Phillips said she called the telephone operator and asked for an ambulance and for help to be sent to the crash site." And the very next line read: "The body of the deceased pilot has been removed from the scene by ambulance men and were transported to the Booker Funeral Home, waiting for the family's instructions, which was to be informed of the tragedy by the authorities at Fort Knox."

NOT A BALLOON
Later on in the same document mentioned above, it states that a Dr. Seyfert from Vanderbuilt University had spotted an object SSE of Nashville, Tennessee. This turned out to be the infamous Skyhook that the Air Force tried to blame for the object that fooled everybody and subsequently lured Mantell to his death. 

So, on March 8, 2006, the re-investigation began. My first interview was on May 23rd, with Drew Speier on Channel 14 on the Mantell Incident.

On May 27, 2006 we found another version of USAF-SIGN1-372. It was NARA-PBB2-854 and it mentioned again the famous Skyhook SSE of Nashville.

Who in the Air Force investigated the Mantell incident? Early on in our re-investigation it was clear that the Air Force took the case seriously. And by 1952 it had still shaken the Air Force up. Michael D. Swords wrote: "The core personnel for the project were probably the most talented group to work on UFOs until the Air Force ended its investigation in 1969. Aiding chief officer, Capt. Robert R Sneider, were two outstanding aeronautical engineers, Alfred Loedding and Alfred B. Deyarmond. Completing the group was nuclear and missile expert Lawrence Truettner. The quality of these people indicates the seriousness (and the comparative difference in later years) with which the Air Force considered the flying disk problem."

On May 28, 2006, Dan Wilson found document MAXW-PBB3-714, that mentions Alfred Loedding from Project SIGN. Wilson: "The cover-up of the Mantell case begins with the timely discovery of a document (MAXW-PBB3-714) signed by base commanding officer, Colonel Guy F. Hix. In the document below it clearly states that the civilian investigator (Alfred Loedding) from Wright Field, arrived at Godman Field on January 9, 1948 and made a thorough investigation. After obtaining statements and full information on the matter, he (Loedding) issued instructions that no report on the subject would be made until further instructions were given."

We also discovered on MAXWELL-PBB3-713 that two other aircraft had taken off from Standiford Field and might have been directed to go after the object. But nothing else was found to verify this.

By May 29 Brad Sparks was checking on balloon launches and found impossibilities and extreme coincidences all over the place. The big skyhook balloon could not have been launched from Camp Ripley. More lies and evidence of a cover-up.

By May 31, Rod Dyke advised that the Archives for UFO Research (AUFOR) had a copy of the Official Accident Report (Inquiry # 10-480107-1) It was essential that we order the FULL official accident report, and this was done immediately. Up until then we had pages from it, but not the entire document. It was supposed to be 450 pages; then was supposed to be 250 pages, and when we finally got it, it was 127 pages. What happened to the other pages, and what's on those missing documents? We don't know.

By June 3 we had the great maps from Mary Castner & Joel Carpenter.

On June 3, Dan Wilson found docs that showed that even nine months AFTER the Mantell incident, it was listed as unexplained. 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:

On June 5. Dan found the interview of Pickering by Bill Jones. One report of a UFO that "dipped down touching a grass strip that was a cleared extension of the runway."

Brad checked Pickering's 1948 account that we posted which specifically places the object maneuvering over Commercial Point 3-5 miles to the WSW of Lockbourne and disappearing into the high overcast at 120 degrees (ESE) at the end of 20 minutes of maneuvers which had included a landing or near-landing.  "This makes a circling of the base consistent with appearing on both sides of Lockbourne, east and west.  Can't make it out to be in one direction only so as to make it Venus -- which was not in the ESE at 120 degs azimuth. Thanks for locating the BB Archive doc refs as it led me to the unsanitized name of the Lockbourne amateur astronomer Control Tower operator I previously discussed who turns out to be Frank M. Eisele. This is now bringing to memory that maybe McDonald investigated this case and maybe interviewed Eisele and others (it's a vague memory, not sure)." Albert Pickering's testimony nailed down the object's position relative to Mantell. It was no longer guesswork.

Kevin Randle stated that Mantell's death was a tragic accident complicated by his violations of AF regulations. But Mantell was asked to investigate this object and in the military if you are asked, that's the same as an order. This strongly implies he had oxygen because he knew the limitations of flying above 14,000'.

By June 9, Brad made it clear, Mantell could not have seen any kind of balloon 160 miles away. On the tenth he mentioned that he didn't know if the sighting was of an IFO or a UFO, but if it was a Skyhook or a UFO, it wasn't very well documented either way. By now even Tom DeMary is convinced, by new calculations, that Godman Tower couldn't have seen a balloon at 160 miles. Nor could the object, described by state police as 250-300 feet wide moving a pretty good clip.

On June 13 Jean received the Accident Report. Jean was able to reproduce the entire report in four pdf files so that Brad and others could do their own analyses. On the same day Brad pointed out that USAF-SIGN7-26 clearly states that Deyarmond was convinced the UFO was not Venus. This was the first time such an anti-IFO statement had ever been made by the Air Force, and at a time when they were scrambling to explain a case that had badly shaken them.

On July 26 (Airedale) my second interview with Drew Speier on Channel 14 took place. Our findings to-date were discussed.

FINDINGS
The picture presented of Mantell chasing a Skyhook balloon to his death with the region filled with IFO reports is false. There were UFO reports in the region. The story of how Mantell said some things but nobody was sure exactly what, is a lie. Everybody heard what went on through Plan 62, even Project SIGN people heard it. Mantell didn't just go above 14,000' and violate regulations. He was under orders and he knew what he was doing. If he had oxygen problems that resulted in anoxia and passing out, it was due to a problem, not him going hell-bent-for-leather after a pinpoint of light in the afternoon sky. And he reported more than that. The biggest balloon available that day was too far away to be a factor. The case was covered up and declared as unsolved, and was still unsolved and shook up the Air Force five years later.

During the next few months we went over the data we had compiled, including the accident report records.  Although our team had made many important new discoveries, the importance of the Mantell case came into sharp focus with Brad Sparks analytical skills on the Accident Report. After several delays due to other pressing matters Sparks wrote the first draft of his analysis. Our report presented here includes our preliminary analyses and Brad's findings. Others wanting to provide their own separate analyses are welcome to do so and their reports will be made part of the case record as provided.

Francis Ridge
Investigator & Researcher
NICAP Site Coordinator & Archivist

 

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Part 3- 2: An Analysis by Brad Sparks

Reconstruction of Mantell Flight Profile - Summary Table

TIME	MILES	ALTITUDE	CLIMB	GROUND	EVENT /	LANDMARK
PM	FROM	(FEET)	RATE	SPEED	NEARBY
CST	GODMAN		FT/MIN	MPH
1:42	289	0	0	0-300	First two F-51's	take off from Marietta AAF,  Ga.
1:43	289	0	0	0-300	Last two F-51's	take off from Marietta AAF,  Ga.
2:50	10	5,000	0	300		Position report, ~30 mi SW (~SSW) of  Standiford AAF, Louisville, Ky. (~10 mi S of  Godman)
2:51	5	5,000	0	300
2:52	0	5,000	3,000	180		Mantell and men enter max climb spiral directly over Godman Tower
2:53	0	8,000	3,000	180		Still in climb over Godman
2:54	0	11,000	3,000	180
2:55	0	14,000	3,000	180		Leveled out from spiral climb vectored straight SSW to 210
2:56	5	14,600	600	300
2:57	10	15,200	600	300
2:58	15	15,800	600	300
2:59	20	16,400	600	300
3:00	25	17,000	600	300		Max range F-51 visible from Godman w/unaided eye
3:01	30	17,600	600	300
3:02	35	18,200	600	300
3:03	40	18,800	600	300
3:04	45	19,400	600	300
3:05	50	20,000	600	300
3:06	55	20,600	600	300
3:07	60	21,200	600	300
3:08	65	21,800	600	300		Near Bowling Green airport
3:09	70	22,400	600	300		Clements abandons Mantell, who now climbs at combat max rate/speed
3:10	75	23,000	2,000	240
3:11	79	25,000	2,000	240		Mantell passes out (?), loses control of plane which begins descending in a spiral
3:12	83	23,000	-2,000	240		Picks up speed
3:13	87	21,000	-2,000	300		1st spiral complete
3:14	92	19,000	-2,000	300
3:15	-92	17,000	-3,000	350		2nd spiral complete
3:16	-92	14,000	-4,000	400
3:17	-92	10,000	-10,000	500 to 200		Mantell regains consciousness (?) tries to throttle back (?). Plane breaks up at Mach limit, engine  overheats, vertical dive then flat spin (?)
3:18	92	0	0	0		Impact 4 miles S of Franklin, Ky, plane hard lands on belly.

 

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