At 1:30 in the afternoon, January 7, 1948, the central
tower at Godman Air Force Base outside Louisville, Kentucky, received a
strange telephone call. The people of tiny Maysville, KY, about 80
miles east of the base had sighted a large, white object with a red light
moving swiftly over the town. Soon other communities in the object's path
were adding to the alarm. Calls from Owensboro and Irvington contributed
details: the craft was circular, 250-300 feet in diameter, and moving westward
at great speed.
At 1:45, Godman sighted the object. The spotter,
sure he was not seeing an airplane or weather balloon, contacted Flight
Operations. The operations officer, accompanied by the base intelligence
officer and the base commander, Colonel Hix, soon joined the tower crew.
All of the assembled men observed the strange bogey through 6 X 50 binoculars,
and agreed that it was not identifiable as any known aircraft.
THE CHASE
2:30 arrived, and the object remained visible. A flight
of F-51s came into view as they passed over Godman en route to nearby Standiford
Air Force Base. The tower radioed the flight leader, Captain Thomas
F. Mantell, Jr., and requested that he engage and attempt to identify the
strange visitor. One of the four planes was low on fuel and received
permission to continue on to Standiford. Mantell and his remaining
wing men turned and began to climb toward the shimmering disc.
At 10,000 feet, Captain Mantell pulled ahead of his companions.
"I see something above and ahead of me and I'm still
climbing," he reported. "I've sighted the thing. It looks metallic and
it's tremendous size... Now it's starting to climb." Then a few seconds
later, "It's above me and I'm gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet."
The two wing men leveled of at 15,000 feet and tried
frantically to reach their leader by radio. The F-51s, postwar versions
of the famed P-51 Mustang, were not equipped with oxygen, so to fly over
15,000 feet was to court near-certain oxygen deprivation and loss of con-sciousness.
THE CRASH
Mantell's plane leveled off at 30,000 feet, then plunged
into a spiral dive. It crashed on the Franklin, KY farm of William
J. Phillips. The flier's watch had stopped at 3:18 PM.
Project Sign, the official Air Force UFO investigation
agency at that time, was quick to publicly explain the inci-dent, concluding
that Captain Mantell had misidentified the planet Venus. He flew
beyond safe altitude limits, blacked out, and plummeted to his death.
UFOlogists immediately countered that Venus had been
too dim to be seen at all in the sunlit afternoon, let alone to be mistaken
for a "metallic object" of "tremendous size."
But the apparent official certainty convinced news-paper
reporters, and the early media speculation that Mantell had been shot down
by invaders from another world, or, more conservatively, from Russia, was
soon replaced by the official line.
A SILENCED WITNESS
But there was plenty of reason to doubt that line, not
least of which was the testimony of Richard T. Miller. At the time
of the Mantell incident, Miller was standing in the operations room of
Scott Air Force Base, in Belleville, Illinois, listening in on the entire
exchange between the
F-51 crew and Godman tower. According to his report,
Mantell's final transmission was, "My God! I see people in this thing!"
Miller also claims to have learned from inside sources that the doomed
F-51 had remained airborne for an extended period of time after having
run completely out of fuel, a fact no ordinary explanation could account
for. According to Miller, the original conclusion reached by Air
Force investigators was that Mantell had died "Pursuing an intelligently
controlled unidentified flying object." But before this finding could
be publicly released, Air Technical Intelligence officers from Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base arrived to confiscate all evidence, and to make clear that
no deviation from the Venus story would be tolerated.
Another witness, Captain James F. Duesler, examined the
Mantell wreckage shortly after the pilot's body had been removed.
He was dumbfounded to discover that no damage had been done to the surrounding
trees, as would be expected had the F-51 glided into the field, nor was
there any furrow in the ground such an approach would necessarily have
created. Neither had the nose-heavy craft hit the ground nose-down, the
most likely result of a downward, uncontrolled spin. The vehicle, instead,
appeared to have simply "belly-flopped" directly into the clearing where
it was found, without causing even a fraction of the damage to the airplane
or the crash site that should have occurred according to calculations factoring
the plane's known weight and estimated speed of descent. Duesler saw no
blood whatsoever in the cockpit. Even beyond this eyewitness testimony,
common sense argued powerfully against the notion that Mantell, a highly-experienced
military pilot, would risk life and limb chasing the tiny pinpoint of light
Venus must have been that afternoon, had it been visible at all.
WHO KILLED THOMAS MANTELL?
Speculation concerning the true culprit behind the tragedy
began immediately. Civilian UFOlogists were quick to point out that
Venus, even if it had been visible that afternoon, was at least 15 degrees
lower in the sky than the reported position of the object. Project
Sign offered the possibility that Mantell had seen a Project Skyhook balloon,
though no specific launch could be traced to that day. Saucer debunker
Donald Menzel wrote that the disc Mantell believed he was pursuing had
actually been a "sun dog" or "mock sun" caused by the reflection of sunlight
off ice crystals in cirrus clouds of the upper atmosphere. Contactee
George Adamski's Space Brothers informed him that the crash had been accidental,
the result of the magnetic field of their spaceship encountering the poor
design of Mantell's plane.
A little over a year later, the Air Force backed away
from its stance of certainty, releasing a revised "official report" on
the Mantell incident on April 27, 1949. Penned by none other than future
civilian UFOlogist Dr. J. Allen Hyneck, the report framed a vague new picture
of the previous year's events in what Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was,
himself, about to enter UFOlogical history as head of Project Sign's immediate
descendent, Project Grudge, referred to as "weasel wording." According
to Hyneck's report, the object Captain Mantell died chasing was probably
Venus, though that was doubtful, as Venus was too dim, so it might have
been a balloon. Or maybe even two balloons.
This weak revision placed the question of exactly what,
or maybe who, overflew Godman Air Force Base on that gray January afternoon
squarely back into the realm of uncertainty and speculation, where it remains
to this day. Scarcely mentioned in our modern "Age of the Abductee," the
tragic death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell, Jr. remains one of the most
compelling cases in UFO history.