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Was pilot first known casualty of a UFO?

By Mike Conley | The McDowell News

Published: December 10, 2008

In July 1947, amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold made the first widely reported sighting of a UFO in the United States. His sighting of nine strange objects flying in formation over Mount Rainer in Washington state sparked what became the modern UFO phenomenon.
And less than a year later, an Air Force captain would become what many consider to be the first known casualty of a UFO.
On the afternoon of Jan. 7, 1948, tower operators at Godman Airfield, which was the airstrip for Fort Knox, Ky., got some reports about a weird object seen flying over nearby Maysville, Ky. Several witnesses said it was a metallic, circular object about 250 to 300 feet in diameter and shaped like a parachute. The tower operators looked out their window and could see it for themselves, according to a Web site.
At about the same time, four F-51 planes returning from Georgia were approaching the airfield. Capt. Thomas Mantell Jr. led the planes. The tower operators asked Mantell if he and his group could fly closer to the object and check it out. Mantell volunteered to fly towards the object. He radioed the tower back and said it was metallic and very large. He also estimated the object's speed to be the same as his, which was about 180 miles per hour.
Mantell kept after the object and two other pilots, 1st Lt. Albert Clemmons and 2nd Lt. B.A. Hammond joined him in the pursuit. The weird object kept flying higher in the sky. The pilots continued to climb higher so they could get a better look at it but only one of their planes had oxygen equipment available. That equipment was necessary for flying at altitudes higher than 20,000 feet.
After following Mantell to about 22,000 feet, Hammond and Clemmons decided to break off the chase. They radioed Mantell to let him know what they were doing but they got no response. Mantell's plane continued to climb higher, according to a Web site.
Just a few minutes later, a man named William C. Mayes was at his rural home outside Franklin, Ky. He heard a strange sound and went outside his house to see a plane circling overheard a few times. The plane then went into a nosedive. It crashed in the front yard of a nearby farm. Mantell had been killed in the crash.
The Air Force was immediately worried about what had happened. One of their best pilots was dead and a UFO might have killed him. Some investigators thought that the object was a craft from another world and it was responsible for shooting down Mantell. Other government officials claimed the object was really the planet Venus and Mantell had blacked out after climbing too high without oxygen.
In those days, the government often dismissed UFO reports by saying that people were actually seeing Venus and didn't know the difference. But this object moved and disappeared from view after a period of time. Planets don't do that.
A few years later, Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt took over Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official investigation into the UFO phenomenon. He decided to reopen the Mantell case. Ruppelt concluded that the object sounded a lot like a Skyhook balloon, which was a top secret Navy project for high altitude testing. But Ruppelt could not determine from which base the balloon was launched.
Meanwhile, wild rumors had circulated about what had happened to Mantell. Some investigators said his body was missing from the plane and had never been recovered. Others whispered that the body was full of strange wounds and marks and that there was damage to the plane not caused by the crash. These people believed that aliens had shot down Mantell's plane.
For decades, government officials and UFO investigators alike wondered what exactly had happened to Mantell and his plane. It was an enduring mystery. But in the 1990s, researchers found that a Skyhook balloon had been launched in Minnesota just two days prior to the encounter on Jan. 7, 1948. After studying wind and weather patterns at the time, they concluded that the Skyhook balloon would have been in the area of Godman Airfield on that day. They determined that Mantell's plane crashed because he suffered from a lack of oxygen at such a high altitude.
But others are not so sure. Some UFO investigators point out that similar objects were spotted shortly afterwards by people in Clinton, N.C. and Circleville, Ohio. Those objects could not all be Skyhook balloons, they say.

Contact Mike Conley at 652-3313, ext. 3422 or e-mail nconley@mcdowellnews.com.