... it is quite evident to the Intelligence Officers who interviewed these men that they had certainly seen some very unusual object which they could not identify but was just as certainly not any conventional type of aircraft.
... inquiries in this matter should be made in such a manner as not to indicate air force interest.
PROJECT SIGN BEGINS WORK
For the first half of 1948, Project Sign studied UFO reports and analyzed evidence at Wright-Patterson AFB. Many of the reported objects were domed discs or cigar-shaped, maneuvered in formation, accelerated swiftly, and made reversals in flight. The Sign team, however, never agreed fully on the nature of these reports. Factions existed, variously believing UFOs to be nonsense, foreign technology, interplanetary spaceships, public psychosis, or a fad spawned by postwar nerves. The idea that this might derive from German technology had not died out, based on an army memorandum dated January 21, 1948, which essentially repeated the thesis and verbiage of the Schulgen memo, and stressed the need to continue investigating leads that flying saucers might be Soviet in origin.1
On January 7, 1948, one of the earliest and most controversial UFO cases occurred in the history of the U.S. military, and ended in the death of an experienced fighter pilot. At 1:20 P.M., a large object was seen by the commanding officer and others at Godman AFB, Kentucky. Personnel described it alternatively as a bright disc-shaped object, round, and cone-shaped. The object was still visible at 2:30 P.M., when a flight of P-51s flew by the base. Capt. Thomas Mantell, the flight commander, was asked to look into it, if his mission allowed. Accompanied by two other planes, he tried to intercept the object. After climbing to fifteen thousand feet, his fellow pilots turned back because they were not equipped with oxygen. Nor was Mantell. Known to others as a cautious man, he nevertheless kept going.
At about 2:45 P.M., Mantell reported, “I have the object in sight above and ahead of me, and it appears to be moving at about half my speed or approximately 180 miles an hour.” When asked to describe it, he replied, “It appears to be a metallic object, and it is of tremendous size.” At about 3:15 P.M., or about thirty minutes after he first sighted the object, Mantell made his last contact with the base: “Directly ahead of me and slightly above, and is now moving at about my speed or better. I am trying to close in for a better look.” He told one of the pilots that he would climb to twenty thousand feet and if no closer would abandon chase. Mantell’s plane soon went into a downward spiral and crashed, almost certainly after he lost consciousness from lack of oxygen.
Mantell’s description of the object was not fully declassified until 1985. Thus, the air force explanation that he had mistakenly chased the planet Venus initially went unchallenged, despite the seeming implausibility of the answer. No one in the air force seems to have believed it. The encounter, for instance, had been in the midafternoon, several hours before sunset. Also, Mantel had obviously not described a celestial object. A review of the case in late 1948 concluded, “It is apparent ... that the object sighted ... was not the planet Venus. Therefore, this sighting must be considered as unexplained.” Note that Mantell’s description of the object as a “metallic object” of “tremendous size” came well before his crash, thus presumably before a lack of oxygen would have impaired his judgment.
In 1952, the air force, under continuing media pressure about the incident, ordered Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt to reopen the case. Ruppelt learned that beginning in late 1947, the navy had secretly been launching high-altitude photographic reconnaissance Skyhook balloons from Clinton County Air Field, in Wilmington, Ohio. The balloons were large, with a diameter of about one hundred feet, and could move along jet streams at the speeds indicated by Mantell, and often flew at sixty thousand feet or higher. Ruppelt noted that on the same day as Mantell’s sighting, many witnesses in Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky had reported an object that could have been a balloon. He checked the weather and wind patterns for the day and concluded that Mantell’s object
