UFO History: January 7, 1948 - The Mantell UFO Incident

Another day has passed by and there was some interesting news. The FBI finally confirmed that the email that was published by the suspect of the Las Vegas bombing was verified. While that doesn’t mean that the information inside is valid, it does add to the mystery.  Are there gravidic drives? Maybe there are, maybe we will find out. 

Diving into UFO History for January 7 takes me back to 1948 and an incident that was investigated by Project Bluebook and, you guessed it, deemed a weather balloon from Project Skyhook. For those that have never heard of it, here is some backstory. 

In the late 1940s, Project Skyhook was conceived of as a means by which plastic balloons could be used to transmit or send instruments into the stratosphere to conduct research. This project carried forward work from an earlier project, Helios, that General Mills and Jean Piccard initiated to use arrays of giant plastic balloons to carry humans aloft. Balloons, long used for collecting meteorological data, now offered the opportunity of collecting highly specialized information and photographs. 

Getting back to the incident, on 7 January 1948, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, died when he crashed his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky, United States, after being sent in pursuit of an unidentified flying object (UFO). 

According to reports, Mantell pursued the object in a steep climb and disregarded suggestions to level his altitude. At high altitude, he blacked out from a lack of oxygen; his plane went into a downward spiral and crashed. According to former U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, no one could recall Mantell's description of the object, but there are rumors that he described the object as metallic and of tremendous size.

What makes this interesting is that there were other planes in the sky with Mantell at the time, yet none of their testimony or accounts can be found while diving into this. This incident was one of the most publicized early UFO reports and was eventually investigated by Project Blue Book. Their conclusion was that he died chasing a top secret Skyhook balloon.