for 50 to 60 miles.  The balloon could have traveled west for a while, climbing as it moved with the strong east winds that were blowing that day and picking up speed as the winds got stronger at altitude.  In twenty minutes it could have been in a position where it could be seen from Owensboro and Irvington, Kentucky, the two towns west of Godman.  The second reports to the state police had come from these two towns.  Still climbing, the balloon would have reached a level where a strong wind was blowing in a southerly direction.  The jet-stream winds were not being plotted in 1948 but the weather chart shows strong indications of a southerly bend in the jet stream for this day.  Jet stream or not, the balloon would have moved rapidly south, still climbing.  At a point somewhere south or southwest of Godman it would have climbed through the southerly-moving winds to a calm belt at about 60,000 feet.  At this level it would slowly drift south or southeast.  A skyhook balloon can be seen at 60,000.

When first seen by the people in Godman Tower, the UFO was south of the air base.  It was relatively close and looked “like a parachute,” which a balloon does.  During the two hours that it was in sight, the observers reported that it seemed to hover, yet each observer estimated the time he looked at the object through the binoculars and timewise the descriptions ran “huge,” “small,” “one fourth the size of a full moon,” “one tenth the size of a full moon.”  Whatever the UFO was, it was slowly moving away.  As the balloon continued to drift in a southerly direction it would have picked up stronger winds, and could have easily been seen by the astronomers in Madisonville, Kentucky, and north of Nashville an hour after it disappeared from view at Godman.

Somewhere in the archives of the Air Force or the Navy there are records that will show whether or not a balloon was launched from Clinton County AFB, Ohio, on January 7, 1948.  I never could find these records.  People who were working with the early skyhook projects “remember” operating out of Clinton County AFB in 1947 but refuse to be pinned down to a January 7 flight.  Maybe, they said.

The Mantell Incident is the same old UFO jigsaw puzzle.  By assuming the shape of one piece, a balloon launched from southwestern Ohio, the whole picture neatly falls together.  It shows a huge balloon that Captain Thomas Mantell died trying to reach.  He didn’t know that he was chasing a balloon because he had never heard of a huge, 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloon, let alone seen one.  Leave out the one piece of the jigsaw puzzle and the picture is a UFO, “metallic and tremendous in size.”

It could have been a balloon.  This is the answer I phoned back to the Pentagon.

During January and February of 1948 the reports of “ghost rockets” continued to come from air attaches in foreign countries near the Baltic Sea.  People in North Jutland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany reported “balls of fire traveling slowly across the sky.”  The reports were very sketchy and incomplete, most of them accounts from newspapers.  In a few days the UFO’s were being seen all over Europe and South America.  Foreign reports hit a peak in the latter part of February and U.S. newspapers began to pick up the stories.