Project Blue Book Case File
Godman AFB, Ken., January 1948 - Incident Number: 33January 1948
Summary
At about 1:20 p.m. on January 7, 1948, the Kentucky State Highway Patrol began receiving calls from residents of western Kentucky reporting a large, circular, metallic-looking object in the sky. The Patrol relayed the calls to Godman Field, an Army Air Field outside Fort Knox, where the tower itself soon spotted the object: a brilliant, white, ice-cream-cone-shaped form holding its position at extreme altitude.
At around 2:45 p.m., a flight of four Kentucky Air National Guard F-51 Mustangs led by Captain Thomas F. Mantell Jr., en route from Marietta, Georgia to Standiford Field in Louisville, was diverted by Godman tower to investigate. Mantell continued to climb after his three wingmen broke off the chase due to lack of oxygen equipment. He reported the object as metallic and tremendous in size, and continued upward. Around 3:15 p.m., his radio went silent. His F-51 was found later that afternoon on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky, broken into pieces. Mantell, age 25, was killed in the crash.
Mantell was the first U.S. military pilot known to have died while pursuing a UFO. The case became national news within hours and remained one of the most-cited incidents of the postwar UFO era. It also became a flashpoint for the Air Force's evolving stance on the topic. The original investigators concluded that Mantell had likely chased the planet Venus, while later analysts argued he had pursued a Skyhook research balloon, a then-classified Navy high-altitude project that civilians and most military pilots would not have known existed.
Project Sign, the Air Force's first UFO investigation program and the institutional predecessor to Project Blue Book, opened a thick case file on the incident. Investigators interviewed Godman tower personnel, Mantell's surviving wingmen, ground witnesses across western Kentucky, and aviation experts familiar with high-altitude aircraft and balloons. The file includes the original radio transcripts from Godman tower, the crash investigation report, and weather data for the afternoon.
The Air Force's classification on the Mantell case shifted across decades of internal review. Project Blue Book inherited the case file from Project Sign and ultimately filed it as "unknown," with internal notes referencing both the Skyhook hypothesis and acknowledging that no definitive identification was possible from the evidence available. The Skyhook explanation remains the most widely-accepted in the historical literature, but the case file itself does not record a final, signed-off determination.
The full case file (75 scanned pages of original witness statements, the Kentucky Air National Guard incident report, Godman tower records, weather data, and follow-up correspondence with civilian researchers and members of the press across the 1950s and 1960s) is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.
Reported location
Godman AFB, Ken., January 1948 - Incident Number: 33
Date of incident
January 1948
State / country
? / XX
Page count
75 scanned pages
USAF evaluation
unknown
Microfilm
T1206, Roll 2