About the only theory left to check was that the object might have been one of the big, 100-foot-diameter, “skyhook” balloons.  I rechecked the descriptions of the UFO made by the people in the tower.  The first man to sight the object called it a parachute; others said ice cream cone, round, etc.  All of these descriptions fit a balloon.  Buried deep in the file were two more references to balloons that I had previously missed.  Not long after the object had disappeared from view at Godman AFB, a man from Madisonville, Kentucky, called Flight Service in Dayton.  He had seen an object traveling southeast.  He had looked at it through a telescope and it was a balloon.  At four forty-five an astronomer living north of Nashville, Tennessee, called in.  He had also seen a UFO, looked at it through a telescope, and it was a balloon.

In the thousands of words of testimony and evidence taken on the Mantell Incident this was the only reference to balloons.  I had purposely not paid too much attention to this possibility because I was sure that it had been thoroughly checked back in 1948.  Now I wasn’t sure.

I talked with one of the people who had been in on the Mantell investigation.  The possibility of a balloon’s causing the sighting had been mentioned but hadn’t been followed up for two reasons.  Number one was that everybody at ATIC was convinced that the object Mantell was after was a spaceship and that this was the only course they had pursued.  When the sighting grew older and no spaceship proof could be found, everybody jumped on the Venus band wagon, as this theory had “already been established.”  It was an easy way out.  The second reason was that a quick check had been made on weather balloons and none were in the area.  The big skyhook balloon project was highly classified at that time, and since they were all convinced that the object was of interplanetary origin (a minority wanted to give the Russians credit), they didn’t want to bother to buck the red tape of security to get data on skyhook flights.

The group who supervise the contracts for all the skyhook research flights for the Air Force are located at Wright Field, so I called them.  They had no records on flights in 1948 but they did think that the big balloons were being launched from Clinton County AFB in southern Ohio at that time.  They offered to get the records of the winds on January 7 and see what flight path a balloon launched in southwestern Ohio would have taken.  In a few days they had the data for me.

Unfortunately the times of the first sightings, from the towns outside Louisville, were not exact but it was possible to partially reconstruct the sequence of events.  The winds were such that a skyhook balloon launched from Clinton County AFB could be seen from the town east of Godman AFB, the town from which the first UFO was reported to the Kentucky State Police.  It is not unusual to be able to see a large balloon