When they landed at their base, Standiford Field, just north of Godman, one pilot had his F-51 refueled and serviced with oxygen, and took off to search the area again.  He didn’t see anything.

At three-fifty the tower lost sight of the UFO.  A few minutes later they got word that Mantell had crashed and was dead.

Several hours later, at 7:20P.M., airfield towers all over the Midwest sent in frantic reports of another UFO.  In all about a dozen airfield towers reported the UFO as being low on the southwestern horizon and disappearing after about twenty minutes.  The writers of saucer lore say this UFO was what Mantell was chasing when he died; the Air Force says this UFO was Venus.

The people on Project Sign worked fast on the Mantell Incident.  Contemplating a flood of queries from the press as soon as they heard about the crash, they realized that they had to get a quick answer.  Venus had been the target of a chase by an Air Force F-51 several weeks before and there were similarities between this sighting and the Mantell Incident.  So almost before the rescue crews had reached the crash, the word “Venus” went out.  This satisfied the editors, and so it stood for about a year; Mantell had unfortunately been killed trying to reach the planet Venus.

To the press, the nonchalant, offhand manner with which the sighting was written off by the Air Force public relations officer showed great confidence in the conclusion, Venus, but behind the barbed-wire fence that encircled ATIC the nonchalant attitude didn’t exist among the intelligence analysts.  One man had already left for Louisville and the rest were doing some tall speculating.  The story about the tower-to-air talk.  “It looks metallic and it’s tremendous in size,” spread fast.  Rumor had it that the tower had carried on a running conversation with the pilots and that there was more information than was so far known.  Rumor also had it that this conversation had been recorded.  Unfortunately neither of these rumors was true.

Over a period of several weeks the file on the Mantell Incident grew in size until it was the most thoroughly investigated sighting of that time, at least the file was the thickest.

About a year later the Air Force released its official report on the incident.  To use a trite term, it was a masterpiece in the art of “weasel wording.”  It said that the UFO might have been Venus or it could have been a balloon.  Maybe two balloons.  It probably was Venus except that this is doubtful because Venus was too dim to be seen in the afternoon.  This jolted writers who had been following the UFO story.  Only a few weeks before, The Saturday Evening Post had published a two-part story entitled “What You Can Believe about Flying Saucers.”  The story had official sanction and had quoted the Venus theory as a positive solution.  To clear up the situation, several writers were allowed