Chasing The Unknown

On January 7, 1948, a pilot named Captain Thomas F. Mantell who was a member of the Kentucky Air National Guard was piloting an F-51 airplane from Standiford Air Force Base in Kentucky…he was accompanied by three other planes…at around 1:30 PM, the Kentucky State Police began receiving reports from concerned citizens regarding a large circular object that was flying over the city of Mansville, KY... in just minutes, the area of the sightings expanded to cover other nearby cities...it was described as a large, metallic flying craft…and it was seen clearly from the tower of Godman Air Force Base…the object was described as being large, round, whitish in color, with a red light toward its bottom side…and seemed to be moving slowly toward the south…a little over an hour after the first reports came in, Mantell's group was asked to investigate the suspicious object…Mantell and two other planes headed to the coordinates where the visual sightings had been made...Mantell climbed to 15,000 feet, and upon reaching that position, he radioed the following statement back to the control tower..."The object is directly ahead of and above me now, moving at about half my speed... It appears to be a metallic object or possibly reflection of Sun from a metallic object, and it is of tremendous size... I'm still climbing... I'm trying to close in for a better look”…he kept soaring higher and higher, but the other two planes broke off the chase…they later said that the object was small and indistinct that they could not identify it...by all accounts, Mantell must have passed out from hypoxia, that is lack of oxygen, at about 30,000 feet or so…his plane then leveled off at that height…then the plane began to plunge back towards earth…it eventually crashed on a farm…Mantell's watch had stopped at exactly 3:18 PM, and his body was still securely strapped in his plane…he had spent about 45 minutes in a desperate flight, chasing the unknown...by 3:50 PM, the giant craft was no longer visible from the Godman Air Force Base, but reports continued to flood in as the UFO continued southward into regions of Tennessee…later investigations by the US Air force indicated that Mantell may have died while chasing what was called a Skyhook balloon, which in 1948 was a top-secret project that Mantell would have had no knowledge about…there have been some wild stories regarding the incident…such as Mantell’s body was riddled with bullets…the crash was radioactive, and other tales…no one knows for sure what happened out there…it is perhaps a mystery that will never be solved.