What was the Mantell incident?
The Mantell incident occurred in Kentucky on January 7, 1948. That afternoon, a large, bright object was seen in the sky from the control tower of Godman Army Air Field and elsewhere. A flight of P-51 fighters flying nearby was asked to check it, and its leader, Captain Thomas Mantell, climbed in pursuit of the object.
The last radio call and the crash
Mantell radioed that the object “appears metallic and of tremendous size,” and kept climbing. But his aircraft did not carry enough oxygen equipment for high altitude. Contact was soon lost, his fighter crashed, and Mantell was killed. Widely reported as a pilot who died chasing a UFO, it even spread the rumor that he was “shot down by a UFO.”
Was it a balloon?
Air Force investigators believe Mantell kept climbing above about 7,000 meters, lost consciousness from lack of oxygen and crashed because he could no longer fly the plane. The object he was chasing was first explained as Venus, but later it was considered likely to have been a large high-altitude “Skyhook” research balloon secretly launched by the U.S. Navy. Reflecting sunlight, the huge balloon looked like a shining metal object from both the ground and the air.
The start of UFO investigations
The incident was one of the triggers for the U.S. Air Force to begin serious investigation of UFO sightings. The Kenneth Arnold sighting and the Roswell incident had happened the year before, in 1947, at a time of rising interest in flying saucers.
