A Fighter Pilot Chases a UFO: The Deadly Mantell Incident

The military has long had a strange relationship with UFOs. It has reported them around military areas on numerous occasions, and although it acknowledges that they represent an intrusion into airspace and even admits these craft are displaying nearly impossible maneuvers, it still wants to sweep it all under the rug. Military pilots in particular have been met with a lot of otherworldly sights up in the air, and on some occasions they have even supposedly engaged these mysterious objects.

One of the most famous, well-publicized, and allegedly deadliest UFO dogfights supposedly happened in January of 1948. It revolves around Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell, who was a seasoned WWII ace pilot and a war hero, being the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for his brave actions and heroism during the war. In other words, he was no rookie and no nut job, and on January 7, 1948 Mantell was piloting a F-51D Mustang along with three other pilots from the 165th Fighter Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard, in the area of Godman Field, at Fort Knox, Kentucky on a training exercise, when a strange series of events would begin to unfold.

It started with a report to Godman field from a Kentucky highway patrolman warning that he had seen a large circular object about 300 feet in diameter lurking about in the sky near Maysville, Kentucky, after which several other reports came in of people seeing the same thing in the vicinity of Owensboro and Irvington. Shortly after this, at approximately 1:45 PM, a Sgt Quinton Blackwell at Fort Knox made visual contact with the strange object along with two other qualified personnel in the tower, and it was described as being “very white” with a red border along the bottom. The thing was also seen at Clinton County Army Air Field in Ohio, with the witnesses saying it had “the appearance of a flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist,” and an observer at Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio reported that it had spectacularly dropped all the way down to the ground, only to suddenly soar to an altitude of 10,000 feet and speed off before crashing.

Seeing the object as a potential threat to air traffic in the area and looking to find out exactly what it was, Mantell and the other pilots in the air in the area at the time were ordered to go investigate the phenomenon and make visual contact. One of them had to return to base after he ran low on fuel, but the other three pilots dutifully approached the mysterious object, and Mantell would make visual confirmation, reportedly telling air traffic control that it was “metallic and of tremendous size.” The other pilots would give a slightly different description, saying that they could not exactly make out what it was and that it was too indistinct at the time to make a proper verification. They advised Mantell to hold off on pursuing the object until they could more concretely identify what they were dealing with, but the WWII fighter ace ignored this and boldly tore off after it in hot pursuit.

The other two pilots followed him as he gained altitude, but were then forced to abort because one of the pilots had a low oxygen supply and the other had no oxygen mask at all, so they were unable to climb too high and unable to follow Mantell on his hellbent objective to catch up with the object. The two pilots were forced to break off and head back as Mantell continued to chase the anomalous object, which seemed to be retreating upwards, passing an altitude of 22,500 feet. As he passed this threshold, it seems that Mantell must have blacked out from a lack of oxygen, as his plane was seen to stop its ascent and then begin a perilous spiraling descent towards the ground far below. The out of control plummet ended with Mantell’s aircraft careening down to crash into a farm south of Franklin, Kentucky at 3:18 PM, and emergency crews were immediately sent out to the site. The UFO itself then vanished from view and was not seen again.

It wasn’t thought that Mantell could have possibly survived the horrific crash, and this was indeed correct. The pilot was found dead and burned in the wreckage, and there were some odd clues found in that the seatbelt had been completely shredded for unknown reasons and his watch had stopped at exactly the time that the plane had come down. It is uncertain what else was found there, but considering that a UFO had been involved and the story began getting splashed all over the media, rumors would soon begin to fly. Various rumorsadde4d macabre rumors such as that Mantell’s body had been found unburned and fully intact, that it had been full of bullet holes or alternately tiny burned holes indicative of some unknown laser weapon, or that there had been no body at all, as well as that the entire plane had actually been disintegrated in mid-air, or that the wreckage had been highly magnetized or radioactive. There was absolutely no evidence for any of this, but the public eagerly ate it up and it created an added mystique and sensationalism to it all.

Theories ran amok that Mantell had been shot down by a top secret air craft or even a UFO. As far as the military was concerned, it was a classified issue, but many Air Force officials said that they believed that Mantell had died after misidentifying the planet Venus for an unidentified object and then losing oxygen as he got too high in his impossible pursuit. However, this hypothesis seems odd, as according to astronomers Venus at the time was not bright enough to be seen, at most as a vague pinpoint of light, let alone mistaken for an enormous shining metallic craft like the one described. The official stance would change when it was found that the Navy had been carrying out a top secret program called Project Skyhook at the same time, which entailed testing the use of special high-tech, high-altitude meteorological balloons for the purpose of intelligence gathering. The idea was that the balloon could have been mistaken for a mysterious craft, and then foolishly pursued by Mantell. Of course, considering that the official stance is rarely completely trusted by the public, there is of course the idea that he really did chase an alien UFO.

There are a few problems with the balloon theory, such as why such an experienced pilot would not recognize it for what it was, and the fact that the object was also tracked by numerous other trained sources who also did not recognize it as a balloon, and the fact that no one seems to be able to tell if there was even one of those balloons in the area at the time. It also seems to have displayed very non-weather balloon-like behavior with the report of the object dipping down to ground level and shooting up to the sky, as well as displaying amazing acceleration. Whatever it was that Mantell chased or thought he was chasing, it has never really been satisfactorily explained, and nothing really matches all of the details, the experience of the pilot, and the preceding sightings by numerous other observers before the incident. It has gone on to have the distinction of being the first known death of a pilot directly as a result of a UFO, in this case not necessarily an alien craft, but an unidentified object. In the end, it is a weird tale with many questions, and has become perhaps the most well-known case of a pilot engaging an unidentified flying object.