Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
7: Unidentified Aerial Podcast #1 - The three pillars of UFOlogy, 1948
413 Plays3 years ago
Dave Partridge (Creator of Shadows of your Mind magazine) & Graeme Rendall (Author) are two of the UK's best when it comes to the history of UFOs.
In this episode they discuss;
Thomas Mantell death, 7th January 1948,
Chiles-Whitted encounter, 24th July 1948,
George Gorman "dogfight" case, 1st October 1948,
Simpson encounter of January 1944
The alleged Churchill WW2 story
And more
Join them as they explore the rich, often times forgotten, history of UAP/UFOs. Each episode, they will go back into the decades to explore the famous & lesser known cases of the time. From World Wars, to Cold Wars, from top secret government projects to the speculative, each episode is carefully researched and presented to allow you to make up your own mind and connect the dots from years gone by.
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
In this episode they discuss;
Thomas Mantell death, 7th January 1948,
Chiles-Whitted encounter, 24th July 1948,
George Gorman "dogfight" case, 1st October 1948,
Simpson encounter of January 1944
The alleged Churchill WW2 story
And more
Join them as they explore the rich, often times forgotten, history of UAP/UFOs. Each episode, they will go back into the decades to explore the famous & lesser known cases of the time. From World Wars, to Cold Wars, from top secret government projects to the speculative, each episode is carefully researched and presented to allow you to make up your own mind and connect the dots from years gone by.
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon. I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucer. In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours.
Meet the Hosts
00:00:32
Speaker
You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery.
00:00:53
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first episode proper of the Unidentified Aerial podcast with myself, Dave Partridge, editor of Shadows of Your Mind magazine.
Positive Feedback and Focus on 1940s UFOs
00:01:01
Speaker
And my co-host is somebody I'm genuinely able to call a friend and a colleague, Mr. Graham Rendell, author of UFOs Before Roswell. How are you doing tonight, Graham? I'm fine, Dave. It's good to be back with you on this inaugural episode.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm really looking to dig into this. I mean, we've had a lot of positive comments from the preview episode that we did a couple of weeks ago, and it's good to finally get our teeth into something. Yeah, definitely. It's something I've been looking forward to doing for a long while when we sort of got together and thought, yeah, we could probably do
Captain Mantell's Fatal UFO Chase
00:01:35
Speaker
this. So yeah, let's get stuck into things.
00:01:38
Speaker
Right, and today we're going to look at three unusual cases, I guess you could call them, from 1948. For people who didn't catch the preview episode, we are focusing this series on the 1940s and everything UFO related. And tonight we want to look at the cases of Captain Thomas Mantell. We'll start off with him, who was a casualty of what we could say is a UFO chase.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's certainly right. I mean, there's obviously debate as to what he was actually chasing, but there's no doubt about it. Unfortunately, the man did die in the course of the actions of 7th of January 1948. Yeah, I mean, from doing the research on the case, from what I can tell, this was in the town of Maysville, Kentucky, where a number of people saw strange looking objects in the sky in the early afternoon.
00:02:37
Speaker
They don't know what it was. Television wasn't really invented at that point. You know, not many people would have had them anyway. This is post World War Two. And, you know, there's still a bit of fear, I guess you could say coming from coming off the back of all that.
Eyewitness Reports and Military Involvement
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's very true. There was, you know, everybody was sort of up a height in terms of the Cold War started, there was possibilities of Russian aircraft flying around and snooping and all that kind of thing. So there's a lot of things going on in this time. I mean, you talk about Maysville, and that's actually a name that's in the report, but there was no such place as Maysville. If you look at that part, you know, those parts of Kentucky where this event happened,
00:03:18
Speaker
They've probably mixed the name up with two places, one was called Madisonville and that's probably where these kind of events or this sighting took place because actually before Mantell and his colleagues were made aware of whatever this thing was, there'd been some sightings which led up to the chase. So you had
00:03:43
Speaker
a highway patrolman who was based in a place called Madisonville in Kentucky about 55 miles to the southeast of Godman Field which is at Fort Knox for the people who aren't aware of where it is and he'd seen through he'd seen this object which he claimed was some 200 to 300 feet in diameter
00:04:03
Speaker
and that information had been phoned through to the tower, to the control tower at Godman Field, but it wasn't the only report that was there. As you mentioned, there was from over this place allegedly called Maysville, both the Fort Knox Military Police and the local state police had reports coming in from residents and other people in the area of a large circular object
00:04:26
Speaker
and they were saying about 250 to 300 feet across. So all this information was getting fed to the control tower and they didn't really know what to make of it but in fact there'd also been reports in places called Elizabethtown in Lexington and they were further away and even six hours earlier in the day there'd been something without way described as having no wings in all control services
00:04:49
Speaker
and looking at an aluminium appearance have been seen over in Edwardsville in Illinois, which is a neighbouring state. So there was something going on in the area. Just nobody at that time knew what it was. No, exactly. And, you know, I feel a hell of a lot smarter just when I'm listening to you for the last two minutes.
00:05:09
Speaker
Well yeah I mean I've been looking at this case quite deeply so I mean I'm not an expert on it and you know I wouldn't claim to me but there's a lot going on here it's not just as simple as somebody who chased a UFO and then unfortunately died there's a lot more to this case when you delve in deeper.
00:05:25
Speaker
So, you know, the first kind of description we have of this object was the two people in the tower. There was one technical sergeant called Quentin Blackwell, and a private who was called Stanley Oliver, and they were both on duty that day. And they'd got calls from downstairs in the base commander's office saying, look, you know, there's this
00:05:46
Speaker
unidentified object in the area. So they started looking for it through binoculars and they saw something up at at least what they reported as 15,000 feet and one of them described to investigators as looking like quotes, an ice cream cone topped with red.
00:06:03
Speaker
And that's how they describe it. So a strawberry sauce on it. Oh, well, yeah, there you go. And this is about this is sorry, this is about sort of 1345 to 1350 hours CST and it's near Godman Field.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, because from my understanding as well, when government Howard checked this out, they immediately phoned right field. Just to check whether they had any experimental aircraft in the sky at the time. And they responded, no, we've only got like a B-29 and an A-26 on photographic missions in that area.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's very true. So Guy Hicks, who was the Colonel, he was the base commander at Godman Field. He'd actually made that phone call, and he'd been told that there was nothing apart from what you said there within the area that could have explained this particular object.
Captain Mantell's Pursuit of the UFO
00:06:52
Speaker
And actually, Hicks went up to the control tower himself to see what was happening. And to the southwest, he said he could see a small white object.
00:07:02
Speaker
didn't know whether it was radiating light itself or reflecting it, but through binoculars to some of the other stuff there, somebody else thought it looked like a parachute with bright sunlight being reflected from it. So there was a bit of dispute as to what it actually was, but also there was this kind of description of this red light or red kind of marking around its lower section.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, because I think the balloon theory was also proposed at the time. You know, is a parachute. It could be a balloon or whatever. But, you know, as we see.
00:07:34
Speaker
from then on, once they scrambled the, you know, few P-51s to go and take a look at it, that's where things go a bit more interesting. Well, so the F-51 Mustangs, they changed the name from P-51 for a pursuit of an F fighter in the beginning of 1948. So that's why in some reports you'll see them listed as P-51s and others as F-51s. But the actual four aircraft had been
00:08:00
Speaker
They were being flown up from Marietta in Georgia because they'd been there over Christmas. They'd had something wrong with these airplanes and they'd been left there. So the four pilots had actually traveled to Georgia to pick them up and fly them back to what they call Stanford Field, which is in Louisville in Kentucky, just slightly to the north of Fort Knox. And that's why they were flying near the airfield when they were radioed to say, can you investigate this object?
00:08:24
Speaker
The four aircraft were from Sea Flight 165, sorry, the 165th Fighter Squadron, Kentucky Air National Guard. So they were approaching Godman Field from the south and the leader of the flight was, as you say, was Captain Thomas A. Mantell. Do you want to talk about, do you want me to talk a bit about his background just for a couple of minutes? Well yeah, I mean I think also before you go any further we should mention that you are pretty much an expert on
00:08:52
Speaker
aviation. You've been to Siberia. You've written books on airfields in the north of England and you've written book UFOs before Roswell examining the food fighter phenomena during World War II.
00:09:11
Speaker
You do have this incredible knowledge of aviation and aircraft, which is unparalleled, I think, certainly within the ufology circles. Well, that's kind of it to say, Dave. I would never call myself an expert, even in aviation. I've certainly got a bit of knowledge that I've accumulated over the years, but thank you for that. In terms of Thomas Mantel, I mean, at the time of the incident, he was, I think he was 25 years old.
00:09:36
Speaker
He was a World War II veteran, but not in fighter aircraft. He'd actually, I believe he'd been part of a troop carrier squadron, you know, flying C-47 Skytrains, that's a Dakota to you and me, parachute aircraft at the time. He'd actually taken part in Normandy landings. So he helped to drop parachutes from the 101st Airborne Division over Normandy.
00:10:04
Speaker
But he'd also, he'd been decorated, I think he'd been given the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission in September 1944, which may have been to do with Arnhem. So he was decorated, he was an experienced pilot, but actually on transport aircraft and not necessarily on fighters, like a single-seat fighter like a Mustang.
00:10:25
Speaker
He'd had about, I think it was seven months' experience with the Kentucky Air National Guard. He'd actually signed up to join them when they were federalized in 1947, because he'd stayed on in the Air Force after the war. But he didn't have a huge amount of experience in terms of flying single-seat fighters, but enough to be a recognized leader in the squadron, to be a leader of a flight of four aircraft.
00:10:52
Speaker
Now the other people in the flight, there were four in the flight, it was him. And there was Lieutenant Albert Clemens. He was another kind of flight leader. So Mantel's sort of wingman was called Hendrix. And then Clemens had a, he had a wingman called Hammond as well. So they had
00:11:16
Speaker
had you know there was two flight leaders and a wingman for each of them but overall charge of the flight was actually it was Thomas Mantel he was the captain. Yeah you know when they were on their way or you know they're being buzzed in by the tower saying can you take a closer look at this because we have we have no one else in the area who can get up there quick enough but we want to make sure
00:11:41
Speaker
you know, we want to identify this before it leaves, you know, especially if it's if they're worried about the Russians at that time as well. Yeah, I mean, they also say they were the only aircraft in the area that could do anything about it. They could have scrambled aircraft from Standford Field at Louisville, but they wouldn't have got to the position in time, especially when you got four aircraft there already. Now, one of the aircraft flown by Hendrix, he just he ended up sort of just flying straight to the
00:12:09
Speaker
to the actual where they were going because he said he didn't have enough fuel so he just kept going was it Hendrix or Hammond sorry I think it was Hammond I think I might have the name wrong there I don't know which one is it no I think I think you're right with Hendrix yeah I am right so yeah it's all these all these names which are quite the same no sorry it was Lieutenant Hendrix he said he didn't have enough fuel left so he just kept going he didn't want anything to do with this so he had Mantell, Clements and Hammond
00:12:37
Speaker
kept going and they were the ones who responded initially to the reports of the object and they started climbing up to get to an altitude where they could follow the object. They didn't actually just make a beeline for it. Apparently what they did was they climbed in a circle in a spiral to get to about 14,000 feet and then they made a beeline for the object in a more shallow climb. Yeah and you know when they got there and when they
00:13:05
Speaker
Montel apparently reported in at seven and a half thousand feet and you know one of the other pilots was heard say you know where the hell are we going yes because they just called on to look for something in the sky they don't know where it is what it is and as far as they're aware you know they got there and all they're seeing is blue sky all around them and above them and it was only until they started climbing that they did see something at
Crash Investigation and Theories
00:13:34
Speaker
12 o'clock high. Yeah, that's how it works, the story goes. And Clements, he was interviewed after all these events, and he said that they weren't told by Mantel what they were chasing or what they were looking for. It was just a case of they were playing follow my leader. Now that actually happened quite a lot back then as well, because you have these stories, not just this one, but you have other stories where you'll have problems with radios and things like that, or there's miscommunication or lack of communication. So it's not uncommon.
00:14:03
Speaker
But they were just playing follow my leader with Mantell and that's what they do. They were following him, not just on his wingtip. It got the point where Clements and Hendrix were dropping back a bit, apparently, but that's not what the official story says. But we'll get into that in a second. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, when they when they saw what they were supposedly chasing, they were asked about
00:14:30
Speaker
know, what does it look like? How fast is it going? And they responded, you know, it's going about half of our speed, you know, but it's going away from us. I mean, their speed was, you know, getting on for, you know, 350 400 miles an hour at the time, I believe. Yeah. And so as they're climbing, you know, I think it was Hammond,
00:14:51
Speaker
one of the pilots at 22,000 feet, he radioed in and said he hasn't got any oxygen equipment. So he turned around and went back to the airfield. So when you look at some of the records, you'll find that this official version of when they said they were at 22,000 feet, that's possibly an error because Hammond was having, he didn't have, you know, the only person who had an oxygen mask or a working oxygen system was Clements.
00:15:19
Speaker
And all arrests didn't, so Mantel didn't have an oxygen mask on him apparently, and it's debatable whether Hammond did or not, but in any case, the aircraft had not been, they didn't have their oxygen supplies
00:15:35
Speaker
topped up when they left georgia because there was no reason for it usually if they were on a mission and they were back in their home base the oxygen levels would be topped up so you can actually breathe oxygen when you went above say ten thousand feet because the higher you go in an aircraft
00:15:50
Speaker
you know, you get to a point where you have to breathe oxygen, because there's not enough oxygen in that level. So you have to have your own onboard supply. So you'll find that either aircraft are pressurised, like an airliner, so people can breathe normally, even though so you don't have your own personal oxygen supply. And obviously, when you see the films when you know there's a problem with the aircraft, all the masks drop down. But fighter aircraft back in those days, and even now, when they go above a certain altitude, you've got to breathe oxygen, you can't just breathe it normally without a mask.
00:16:19
Speaker
so they didn't have the correct equipment to be able to go much higher than about sort of 12 to 14 000 feet without problems starting and this is what you get into the problems into the realms of what you call anoxia which is like of oxygen or hypoxia there's different names for it but anoxia is the word and now it creeps up on you and in this case I mean
00:16:40
Speaker
Mantell did black out. But it's not one of those things where it can happen gradually. Sometimes it can happen straight away. Other times it can happen gradually. And you get a kind of loss of where you are of awareness and all this kind of thing. But it appears that Mantell managed to go higher than Clemens and Hammond did. Hammond apparently was already having problems at 15,000 feet. Now,
00:17:07
Speaker
When the official records say that he got to 22,500 feet before him and Clements apparently broke off the off the climb and left Mantel to keep on going, there's no way that somebody who was having problems at 15,000 could have got to 22,500 feet without probably dying.
00:17:28
Speaker
This is where the story sort of goes a bit kind of awry from the official version to possibly what actually happened. So you mentioned before about the kind of when Mantell was left at 22,500 feet off on his own and they turned back. It's more likely that they turned back a lot lower because apparently the last radio message Godman Tower had from Mantell was at 20,000 feet.
00:17:56
Speaker
Or rather, he said he was climbing to 20,000 to have a better look. And that's the last thing. So the stories change between the people who survived and what was said to the tower. Sure. And then Blue Book, Project Blue Book, they produced a report as well.
00:18:18
Speaker
Yes. And in there it says, you know, pilot Clements refuelled and went back up to 32,000 feet. But, you know, he couldn't see Mantell and he couldn't see what Mantell was supposed to be chasing when he got back up there. That's right. But then again, it was by that time it was too late because whatever it was around had gone. You know, he went back and had his oxygen supply topped up. And that would have taken some time as well and to get the aircraft refuelled because he was having to fly back to Louisville from further south and Godman.
00:18:47
Speaker
But also with the talk about this kind of climb where in the official records about them trying to chase.
00:18:54
Speaker
whatever this thing was. And they were saying they were at full power. But they were at full power for quite a long time. Now, there's a thing about full power in an aircraft, in a Mustang or other aircraft at that time. You would have a bit where you could push the throttles through the stops in what we call war emergency power, which is basically the most power you could get from an aircraft. And you actually broke through a kind of seal on the throttles, on the engine to get this kind of power. But it could only happen for about five minutes. Otherwise, you'd blow your engine up.
00:19:23
Speaker
Now, they reckon that they were at full power for 15, 20 minutes or more. That's not what happened because the engines would have seized or blown up or whatever. So there seems to be a bit of debate in the records about what they were talking about, how quick they were going, and how they were climbing.
00:19:42
Speaker
and all this kind of thing. If you look into the records, all of them, some of it doesn't quite add up. But what is certain is that Mantell, for whatever reason, was left on his own, possibly, well, in the records, say 22,500 feet, but actually, it's possibly a lot lower down, say 18, 19, 20,000 feet. He was on his own, and that's
00:20:04
Speaker
incontrovertible, you know, that's actually what happened. So he was left chasing whatever this object was in the distance. Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned about, you know, like the war power, the kind of the boost that you gave the engine, you know, and, you know, one of the reports, you know, the post-mortem reports said that the aircraft had exploded before it hit the ground. So if he's pushing the engine that hard,
00:20:35
Speaker
And for that amount of time, it's not inconceivable that it did. No, just disintegrate and blow up in midair. That's right. So when you look at the eyewitness accounts of the... Well, let's go back a bit. The aircraft actually crashed just before the Tennessee border. So just south of a town or southwest of a town called Franklin, which is next to the border with Tennessee. It's almost on a direct line between Fort Knox and Nashville.
00:21:01
Speaker
and it crashed into somebody's backyard, into a farmer's backyard. Now the aircraft, the witnesses had actually seen it from the ground nearby coming down. And they also remembered seeing it chasing a bright object, which one person, he was only about five or six years old at the time, but he described it as being as bright as an arc welder seen in the distance. So he'd seen or allegedly seen whatever Mantell was chasing.
00:21:28
Speaker
And then he saw the aircraft, if he said, level off. And then two other people watched as it dived down in a tight spiral and it crashed into this place near Franklin. Now, as you say, on the way down, it broke up.
00:21:43
Speaker
And that can also be, if it was coming down in a very sort of fast vertical dive, it was likely that the aircraft may have just disintegrated anyway. So it's not necessarily the case that it was to do with the engine. And there's also a report from the crash investigation that the engine was only a quarter power.
00:22:01
Speaker
in terms of the controls. So that would mean it wasn't actually at full boost or somewhere approaching that. Again, that's a bit of a kind of contradiction, if you like.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's all these contradictions that you find in the files, as you've mentioned before. You know, apparently the wreckage was scattered over, you know, a good sized area, almost a mile, and they struggled to find the wing and the propeller and, you know, parts of the tail section immediately. Whereas, you know, the fuselage and the rest of the plane and the cockpit, you know, that was kind of in situ on this farm where it finally hit the ground.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah, so there's also one of the reasons that was suggested afterwards about the crash and why it broke up is because there was only a partially full fuel tank in the aircraft and in a spiral dive the tail section might have been ripped off because the fuel would be sloshing around the tanks and the centre of gravity moving and all the rest of it. It was apparently an
00:23:03
Speaker
I'm not, again, an expert in this. However, I have read that it was a possibility that the aircraft broke up because of those particular conditions that the aircraft found itself in as it was diving towards the ground. But there was a crash investigation. There were people sent there from Sandiford Field to try and sort of see what was going on. And as you say, they couldn't find bits of the aircraft. There were also stories at the time
00:23:29
Speaker
that, and these are quite lurid stories that came into the press, that Mantell's body and the airframe were riddled with little holes. Now that was something I read when I was a kid, when I first, you know, this is going back 40 years ago, when I first heard about this story. And I thought that was rather strange. And then since then, I've never heard any proper explanation about that other than these stories. And they've got no truth limit at all. I've seen pictures of the crash. I've seen pictures of the wreckage. I'm actually looking at one right now.
00:23:57
Speaker
And there are no holes like that. And they also did an investigational autopsy on the body, obviously. Unfortunately, Thomas Mantel's head was actually removed from his body during the crash, but there were no holes in it.
00:24:14
Speaker
in his body at all. So those stories, unfortunately, are totally incorrect. And there were other stories about death rays and being hit by a Russian missile, all these things again, they're all just, you know, they were just newspaper talk, basically. Sure. I mean, if there was any kind of missile or any, you know, adversary with
00:24:34
Speaker
you know weaponry on board then that would have been picked up and people would have seen that anyway that's right um i mean yeah i mean i said project blue book was looking at it was project sign at the time um and i some of the explanations that you know the investigators came up with you know after the event once they'd spoken to everybody and spoken to the tower and
00:25:03
Speaker
It seems a bit ridiculous when they bring up something like, oh, Mantell was chasing Venus through his cockpit. That's right. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the things that came up. I mean, there was one other explanation. So they were talking about a balloon that might have been launched nearby. And there's a few stories about that. But you're right. Venus was something that came into it. But it was because
00:25:26
Speaker
Well, we'll go into Jay Allen Hynek. And he was an astrophysicist from Ohio State University. And he'd been contracted to give advice to Project Sign, which was the first official UFO investigation for the US Air, for the US Air Force. And he was contracted at the end of 1947. And this is, of course, is before he's worked with Blue Book. He did work for Grudge as well, which is a successor to Sign and the predecessor to Blue Book. And he was paid to be a consultant to effectively debunk
00:25:56
Speaker
each and every case that was presented. He even said apparently after Blue Book that he sort of enjoyed this but that's what he was doing and he originally offered
00:26:10
Speaker
the plan of Venus as an explanation, saying that it was in the same part of the sky that was the object that Mantella was chasing. But then Heineck had changed his mind on this by about 1952, when Edward Ruppelt took over as Project Blue Book director, and he reckoned then, and this is four years afterwards, that Venus would not have been bright enough to be seen that day because there was a considerable haze in the sky at the time, and it would have obscured what was effectively just a bright star.
00:26:38
Speaker
so and it would have only been even just a pinpoint of light so there was no way that Mantel could have picked out or anybody else could have picked out Venus in the way they did. So that was one explanation that was thrown out at the time that seemed to satisfy the investigators in terms of project sign and anybody else who was looking from you know an internal kind of point of view
00:27:02
Speaker
And then when they put it out there into the press or whatever for them to pick up, then that was something that could have well been seized upon. But actually there was another explanation as well. Do you know about that one?
00:27:15
Speaker
Well yeah I mean I was just checking up to see who actually filed the original report and yeah it was a Captain Arthur T Jelly,
Balloon Theory and Project Sign's Stance
00:27:24
Speaker
who was the shift supervisor at Godman Airfield at the time. But yeah the Skyhook balloon kind of got me as well, you know.
00:27:36
Speaker
someone in an F-51 is going to know the difference between a Skyhawk balloon, the planet Venus, or a glare off his cockpit window. He's not going to risk climbing up to however high he went with the lack of oxygen if he's chasing ghosts.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. There was a story about a balloon because it's Nashville, so that's like further south from where the aircraft crashed, but not that far away.
00:28:07
Speaker
was at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, there was an astronomer there had actually spotted a balloon with cables and a basket attached to it and it was moving in about half four in the afternoon. He'd actually seen it and he reported this to the United States Air Force and that had got passed through the channels but of course this was hours afterwards and then you know that information had got through to Godman and to Wright Field and it had been written up
00:28:33
Speaker
So they weren't sure whether that was part of it because it was in this sort of general area, but not quite, but actually just to muddy the waters a bit later on and used afterwards. Edward Ruppelt, as just mentioned before, who became the director of Blue Book, he mentioned another story about a balloon. He sort of suggested
00:28:53
Speaker
that one had been launched from I think southern Indiana somewhere. I can't remember the exact name of the location that he actually said it had been launched from but he suggested that a balloon had been launched from somewhere and that it had sort of drifted over that general area. If I come across if I remember the name I'll mention it but that appeared I believe
00:29:17
Speaker
If I can remember rightly, I think that might have been in a book he wrote as well about this balloon and it sort of threw a spanner in the works because it was quite kind of seductive in terms of an explanation.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, I've got it. It's Dr Safer to the Vanderbilt University. Yeah, he's the astronomer who saw the first one. But actually, yeah, but Ruppelt actually did mention about another balloon. This is from a different launching area, because the one that Vanderbilt saw, so the Vanderbilt astronomers saw, had actually been launched from Minnesota the previous day.
00:29:49
Speaker
and it had drifted but it had drifted to the west and the south of Nashville so there's no way that Godman Field Tower would have seen that object nor Mantell would have seen it from the kind of distance that you're talking about there. Yeah exactly and you know what was interesting to me as well is that a few hours later Godman received a call from St Louis Tower advising that there's another ball of light
00:30:15
Speaker
you know, passing directly over the field. That's right. There's been one scene to the east beforehand and that's where they ended up seeing it. So there had been, yes, there'd been other sightings. Yeah. I mean, this one was moving at 250 miles an hour, moving west, southwest. Yeah, which is not the loop. No, not even against the wind.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, so the place that Repel said that it was being this sky who balloon had been launched from was Clinton County Air Force Base, which was nearby, but it was actually across the border. It was on the side of the Ohio River. And if if it had happened, it would have been in a position to be a factor. However,
00:30:53
Speaker
There were some checks made about people who were actually involved in the Skyhook launches during that period. Now these investigations were done in 1951 or 1952 or something. And apparently this professor, and he was called Charles Moore, he was part of a research team that were involved in these experiments between 1947 and 1949. He confirmed that yes, this place was used as a launch site, but not of the period sated. So they weren't flying from there.
00:31:22
Speaker
And as you mentioned, that ball of light that passed over St Louis was made many hours after that sky who would have drifted over the area anyway. So it kind of been the same thing.
Eastern Airline Pilots' UFO Encounter
00:31:31
Speaker
And actually, the kind of Clinton County that this thing that Reppelt posited didn't happen. Yeah, although, you know, some reports do distort all the figures and the calculations and they do say, you know,
00:31:47
Speaker
A balloon would have been in the area of government at the time of the sightings, but that makes no difference that three or four experienced flight pilots
00:31:59
Speaker
are chasing a balloon, right? That's right, yes. And also, I've been seeing them as well, yeah. No, it's right. Now, you see these stories a lot back then, that balloons were given as explanations for not just this case, but other cases as well. There's quite a lot of them. And that was the thing that just leapt at, because it made sense. You can see it from almost from the investigator's point of view, if they want to write off a case as earlier, that's solved.
00:32:27
Speaker
And if there's any hint of a balloon activity anywhere in the area, then that's the thing to write it off as. Yeah. And, you know, we can agree that it is a tragedy for, you know, everyone associated with Captain Mantao at the time. But it still does remain one of the great unexplained encounters and incidents when people look back, you know.
00:32:53
Speaker
How many years are we now? 74, 75 years. For the information that we have, and yet we're still no clearer to finding a definitive reason as to why that plane either broke up or why he was chasing it for so long and so high.
00:33:15
Speaker
that's right the only things we do know for certain is there was an object that they chased that he didn't have oxygen in the aircraft to use and he died of anoxia chasing something that
00:33:26
Speaker
nobody has actually been able to identify to this day. So yes, it's a very, very sad story. And this far forward in time, it's unlikely that any further information is going to appear unless there's some radical kind of release of reports that have never been sort of hinted at in the past, that we're not going to sort of come up with the goods, unfortunately.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, right. Well, I think we need to move on from Thomas Mantell now. I mean, as you say, there were plenty of other sightings that were going on at the time. You know, just six months later, July 23rd, 1948, we had the Eastern Airline pilots, Charles and Whittard, who were flying their DC-3 near Montgomery, Alabama. It was, you know, like quarter to three in the morning.
00:34:16
Speaker
clear skies near enough, moonshining, and they come across this incredibly huge object which Shay described as three times larger than a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this thing was huge. I mean, they were flying in Eastern Airlines, DC-3 aircraft. Again, this is like a C47, but in civilian guys. And there's Captain Clarence S. Childs and his first officer, John B. Whitted. And they were operating Flight 576 from Houston to Atlanta.
00:34:47
Speaker
Now, actually earlier, a little bit earlier, there'd been two other Eastern Airlines aircraft to the northeast. One was over Virginia, another one was in the vicinity. These were flights 571 and 573, and the crews from both those aircraft had also seen something strange.
00:35:06
Speaker
they'd seen a brilliant light, something that looked like what they described as a slow-moving meteor, but it was traveling on a horizontal flight path. Now, when you see meteors from, you know, high up, they do look as though they're flying over an arc, not in a straight line. But those sightings only lasted for seconds before the light disappeared off to the southwest in the direction of Chiles and Whitted's aircraft.
00:35:31
Speaker
And this was maybe a sort of 10, 10 minutes earlier, 10 to 15 minutes before the case that was over Montgomery, you know, that you've mentioned there. Yeah, I mean, it was also said that there were observers at an airfield in Mason, Georgia as well, who had seen a long dark wingless tube in the skies around 2am. That's right, yes. You know, Charles and Richard, they described this thing as an aerial submarine.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's huge. I mean, look, I'm looking at a drawing that the child actually made of it at the moment while I'm talking to you. And, you know, it looks impressive anyway, it's a effectively what you could suppose you could describe as a torpedo shape. Yeah, it's got like kind of a pointer almost a slightly pointed nose.
00:36:16
Speaker
and a fatter kind of cigar-shaped middle section and then it takes us to what apparently is like kind of a almost like an exhaust port or something like that and then it's got these what they describe as these two banks or lines and wind what they said were windows along the side it's all very very strange.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yes I mean they were saying it glowed with a dark blue light and these portholes or vents were emitting this incredibly bright white light as they got closer and you know for people who aren't aware of how big a Boeing B-29 Superfortress is
00:36:53
Speaker
if you think that, you know, the RAF's largest aircraft during World War Two were, what, the Halifax and the Lancaster bombers? The Lancaster was the biggest, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the B-29s was, what, 30 feet or 30 meters? It was a lot bigger, yeah. I mean, it had a crew of like 10 or so. It was enormous, you know. And these things were bigger. So you think of a B-29,
00:37:20
Speaker
They're quite large aircraft. And also they knew they could recognise and they could measure this thing against it and compare it. And this also, they impressed them. And it takes a lot to impress an airline pilot or pilots generally, but this thing did actually leave a lasting impression.
00:37:38
Speaker
I mean originally they thought it was a one of the Americans new jet aircraft that they weren't expecting to see what they what they saw as it was because originally all they saw was a light ahead of them it looked it was leaving a glowing trail behind it and a child's he he basically said to to Whitted like you know it's probably one of those new jets and it was but it was heading for them in a slight descent and then
00:38:03
Speaker
he thought at one point he was going to be on a collision course with the DC-3. And he basically threw the aircraft into a left-hand banking turn to try and avoid a possible collision. And then the light in response, when they saw it coming towards him, it did its own left-hand turn away from them. So it seemed to be under intelligent control. And that's no meteor. No. It's like one of those, you're either playing chicken in midair with a 100-foot long
00:38:32
Speaker
cigar tube, or it's an extra test, we'll learn a driver, learn a flyer in the end. But it did eventually, it kind of pulled up, well, as they pulled up alongside them, it went past them, and it started circling, you know, this DC-3. This is a civilian aircraft as well, there's passengers on board. And when
00:38:57
Speaker
When Charles and Winted were watching this object circle their plane, it did it for a few moments and then it let out a sheet of flame from the back, turned its nose up and shot up into the sky, well into the atmosphere, around 700,000 miles an hour.
00:39:16
Speaker
Well, obviously you have difficulty estimating things because you don't know size and distance, but yes, it did go off at a tremendous speed. And it did and it sort of pulled up and that seems to be a common kind of departure method by a lot of the things back then when they either pulled alongside or they were near these aircraft when the pilots looked at them and then
00:39:39
Speaker
watched how they sort of disappeared from view, you know, flying upwards and out of sight at a great rate of knots is quite a common occurrence. It's rather strange how they all seem to go the same way. Yeah, and the turbulence that they caused as well when they left. You know, you know, Charles got up off his pilot seat, went into the back to see if anyone else had saw it, and there was only one passenger, a Mr. McKelvie.
00:40:02
Speaker
who had seen the light through one of the windows but you know no one else had seen it or they were asleep that's true yes he was the only person who was awake and saw the trail now you mentioned there but they're being buffered in the wake now the funny thing is in the original reports that the pilots and the pilot the co-pilot mentioned they don't mention that because that seemed that seemed to come along later
00:40:23
Speaker
So that appeared in some of the press reports. So, you know, it's funny how stories change and possibly change in the retelling as well. So, you know, I think that has appeared in the story over the over the kind of, you know, the days and the months afterwards. It's not in the original pilot reports, the statements they give to investigators. They don't mention that. Right. You know, God forbid anyone embellishes a story. Very true. Very true.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the explanations that was given for this, you know, object, the US Navy suggested it was a wayward rocket, right, experimental rocket, you know, when I think you'd be able to tell the difference. Well, you thought so, wouldn't you? I mean, one of the things that we're talking about is possibly what you were saying there is the US Navy, the thought might be the US Navy's high altitude test vehicle.
00:41:14
Speaker
and that was a project that had been considered in 1946 and there was designs by Douglas, Martin, North American, all these different companies, but it was abandoned in 1948 that didn't build it. Some people thought it had a resemblance to the the the Ujin Sanger orbital ramjet bomber from the project from World War II that was never built. I wrote about that for the debrief a few months ago, but it looked like that.
00:41:38
Speaker
So there was worries that the Soviets had captured these plans from Germany in the war and that they were developing their own, which actually they did try because they did get the plans for the ramjet bomber. And Stalin did instruct engineers to try and build one of their own, but they never got anywhere with it. But of course, the Americans didn't know that at the time. So all this was in the minds of the people who were investigating these things.
00:42:04
Speaker
But the poor pilots who were seeing these, they were just seeing these huge lights, or these huge objects with lights along. Now, actually, the funnier side, because they mentioned a torpedo shape of a couple hundred feet long with two banks of lights along it.
UK Pilots' Foo Fighters Encounter
00:42:20
Speaker
A 61 Squadron Lancaster crew in November 1942 had seen one of those over the Italian Alps. So it wasn't the first time one of these had been seen. That's right. Yeah.
00:42:33
Speaker
So there you go. Well, I'd trust you to dig that one up as well. Let's leave the Americas behind for a moment. There's two instances that caught my eye. I was looking at all this from 1944 involving UK pilots.
00:42:56
Speaker
We have pilot officer Simpson and 49 Squadron, which was a Lancaster unit. They saw a red ball leaving a trail of yellow and red flames and black smoke at about a thousand yards away from them at about 20,000 feet. Was that one of the food photo cases? Yeah. I mean, what was your take on that when you were writing your book?
00:43:23
Speaker
it was one of many stories like that, because, you know, at the time, I mean, that story doesn't appear in the in the squadrons official sort of history, which was written, you know, long after the war. So you've it's one of these things where there's nothing in the official records either in terms of the operational record book. So you only have the pilots were all you know, the pilots word for it. He's called john john Simpson, john Simpson. So yeah,
00:43:50
Speaker
there's very little else to go on apart from what they say, but it's indicative of quite a lot of reports back then. His actual memo, his sighting rather, the details were forwarded in the memo, it says a red ball leading a trail of yellow red flames and black smoke upon a thousand feet away. I dive to starboard, the object followed
00:44:13
Speaker
you know so that was a kind of intelligent control thing again so you've got that same kind of thing but a lot earlier so you've got these um and that's a story that you hear a few times during the war of these rockets that appear to be able to zigzag or change course now that's not a meteor because they don't do that but something that's under some kind of control could but not something that was german because as i've
00:44:37
Speaker
said on countless other podcasts before now, the Germans weren't in a position to be able to feel stuff like that. Before we finish up with the final encounter from 1948, we need to talk about this alleged photo which Winston Churchill was supposed to have seen taken by the crew of an RAF Mosquito in August 1944 along the east coast of England.
00:45:05
Speaker
I mean we have no hard evidence of this but it's still a very interesting rumor of a metallic object going down the east coast. You can hear from my tone here that I'm not entirely convinced about this.
00:45:22
Speaker
I do have a, I mean, in the Foo Fighter book that I wrote last year, I do have a complete chapter devoted to this story. It appeared because in the notes in the official MOD files, there is reference to a letter that a scientist didn't want to give his name. It's also been redacted from the official records.
00:45:42
Speaker
He wrote to the Ministry of Defence telling them about a story that his grandfather had given his mother and that his mother had passed on to him. So it's got a third-hand story about an alleged meeting that involved Churchill and Eisenhower sometime in 1944. Again, you know, there's no dates, no locations, just apparently a bunker.
00:46:03
Speaker
And the upshot was that this mosquito crew had seen this object that was following them or alongside them. Apparently a photograph had been taken, the information had got to Churchill, and he'd been so impressed that he wanted the whole thing to be covered up that it was going to be this huge story that people were going to just go nuts over, yada, yada, yada.
00:46:24
Speaker
The things I'm sort of a bit kind of unimpressed with this story is that yes, the letter is there. You can read the letters and the official files. I've got them quoted in my book. But the guy who involved never came forward afterwards.
00:46:39
Speaker
There was never a follow-up to the letters that he sent. He did actually send one follow-up letter to confirm some details that they were asking him about, but nothing further. He's never come forward publicly, and there's been nothing else to corroborate your story.
Lieutenant Gorman's UFO Chase
00:46:56
Speaker
So because you've got nothing else to go on, you've got no dates, you've got no names, you've got nothing.
00:47:01
Speaker
And also, I've looked through some of the Mosquito Squadron records for about the time period when it's supposed to have happened, 1944. And I can't find anything either. And the stories I can find don't measure up to this. But the last thing that I'll mention is the thing that really seals it for me.
00:47:19
Speaker
is that there have been plenty of other stories before this one and much better ones in terms of things being shot at and nothing happening, you know, an invulnerable weapon system. That would have got Churchill kind of, you know, you know, sort of really stoked up, whereas this was just a run of the mill story, which probably the last of a lot of other ones that had happened beforehand. So why was this one special? Why did this one sort of, you know, tip the balance in terms of making him react?
00:47:48
Speaker
And I don't believe it did. Now, I'm not one to try and dismiss things out of hand, but looking at it in the round and looking at in the sort of context of all the other cases that had happened beforehand, some of which had actually been passed up the chain of command, possibly as far as Churchill. Why did this one resonate? Why did this particular case
00:48:10
Speaker
make him say allegedly what happened. I don't quite believe it I'm afraid and that's coming from somebody who knows there's something to the Foo Fighters sightings and actually wrote a book about it, a 500 page book about it. This one I don't quite believe. Yeah but like you said before you know when you were looking at 49 Squadron the official history you know these kind of things don't get entered into so
00:48:32
Speaker
And we know that the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Defence destroyed a lot of the early files, UFO files from the 40s, 50s and 60s, because they were taking up too much room, and nobody could be bothered to look at it. This is true. However, when the Americans did investigate Foo Fighter activity in early 1945,
00:48:53
Speaker
the records where the Air Ministry did reply to them on this subject are available. So there are records from back then from the British side. So it's, whilst there are, it's true, UFO files from the 50s and 60s and 70s etc were destroyed.
00:49:09
Speaker
there are still ones to do with the Foo Fighters. So, and also UFOs weren't really a thing, then it was to do with these, you know, whatever these German city weapons were. And that's probably what this light would have been interpreted as. If that meeting had taken place, nobody would have said, Oh, that's an alien object. Unless of course, it was little green man or something like that, you know, so
00:49:33
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, if we're talking about Wonder Waffa, then we're going to leave that for another episode. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Well, let's go back to Fargo, Minnesota TV program. No, not the TV, the excellent TV program and the excellent film.
00:49:52
Speaker
and it's our old friendly F-51 Mustang gun. It is, yeah, the aircraft of choice for the Air National Guard because a lot of them hadn't converted to jets at that time and there were lots of Mustangs around after the war so they were an obvious choice. Exactly, I mean they were going out of commission and we have second Lieutenant George Gorman who saw a bright light speeding past him on his starboard side and
00:50:20
Speaker
you know, he wondered what it was. Yeah, so I'll set the scene. He was, this is Fargo, so it's next to the border with Minnesota. He was a member of the 178th Fighter Squadron, North Dakota National Guard. He was also the manager of a construction company when he wasn't flying. So this was like a reserve occupation.
00:50:40
Speaker
He just completed a cross-country flight with other members of his unit that were returning to base and it was dark and he realised he still had plenty of fuel in these tanks so he thought he'd get some night flying practice in so he thought he'd do a few circuits of the city of Fargo before he came into land at the airfield there and as you said when he was coming to land about nine o'clock at night in the dark over Hectorfield which was the name of the airfield he saw
00:51:05
Speaker
Well, the tower actually advised him of the presence of a Piper Cub, a light aircraft that was flying into there, if it was going to land there, that there was a doctor on board flying the aircraft and a passenger that were going to attend a ballgame in the city that night and now they were flying in. So the tower advised Gorman that this aircraft was in the circuit, so he was looking out for it.
00:51:25
Speaker
But at the same time, about 500 feet below him, silhouetted against the city lights, he saw another light flying past him, underneath about 500 to 1,000 feet below him. And it was a white light. And that was the one that caught his attention. So he decided, he told the tower, I'm abandoning the landing, I'm going to investigate this light.
00:51:46
Speaker
yeah and he described it as between six and eight inches in diameter now when pilots describe things like that i'm a little bit confused, to be honest, because is this six to eight inches diameter from their view.
00:52:01
Speaker
Or is it six to eight inches diameter in actual real life. It's not clear from the records. Now, when I looked at this a little while ago, I was initially confused. But looking at some other reports, what they usually did was they would put their arms length. Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:20
Speaker
in the cockpit and then they would look at like a finger or a couple of fingers and work out what the size of it was in relation to that. So what I'm guessing is, and it's only a guess, it's what it looked like from his cockpit in terms of the kind of relative size from his view. Not that it was six to eight inches of light because something that size, you might as well be a firefly. So you're not going to chase after something like that. It was something that was big.
00:52:50
Speaker
Yeah, but how big? Because it's one of these things where you don't light at night, you can't tell the size, therefore you can't tell the distance, and vice versa. Yeah, and like the Charles Whittard case, you know, the object banks and as Montel, Gorman tries to pursue it, can't get close to it at all, goes up to 7000 feet altitude again.
00:53:12
Speaker
He's trying to cut it off, but this object suddenly comes straight at him. This kind of freaks him out a little bit, so Gorman dives, and the object goes over him, well, within 500 feet, I believe. Yeah, that's right. So that's the first of three passes, finally.
00:53:28
Speaker
And this is almost reminiscent of a kind of precursor to the 2004 Nimitz encounters dogfight, where you've got a mystery object, in this case a light, and an aircraft, the pilot's intent on trying to intersect whatever this thing is and work out what it is. You've got no idea what Gorman actually thought it was at the time. He was just something he wanted to investigate. Now he got within a thousand yards of it before it reacted, apparently.
00:53:55
Speaker
That was what he measured it as. And that's when he said it was about six to eight inches as viewed for his cockpit. He said it was white in colour and it had clearly defined edges. So there was something kind of physical about it. And it wasn't fuzzy. But here's the thing. When it was moving just normally, as in it wasn't being chased by him, it was blinking on and off.
00:54:17
Speaker
When it started moving in terms of evading him and trying to do these head-on passes, the light was steady. It didn't blink at all.
00:54:29
Speaker
Interesting because you know in the early reports it did say it was blinking on and off. That's right But when it when it started moving, you know with purpose it steadied and it stayed effectively stayed on if you like So yes, the first pass Gorman effectively chickens out as you probably would when you got something coming, you know barreling towards you and you don't know what it is and you don't know what its intentions are and he dived he showed the stick forward dived and the thing went 500 feet over the top of his canopy and
00:54:59
Speaker
He then basically had the aircraft at full power, not full emergency power, just at full power without pushing the throttle through the gate.
Investigation and Dramatization of Gorman's Encounter
00:55:07
Speaker
And he'd start any circle to try and cut it off again. But the object was making a circle as well above him. And after he cut towards it, it made another head-on pass at him. And this time, he didn't bottle out. He just kept his course. And it went upwards.
00:55:26
Speaker
and it started climbing, and it started climbing rapidly. Now he'd put his aircraft into a quite a steep climb to try and sort of keep up with it, but because it was much more manoeuvrable and presumably faster than it had the capability of not stalling, unfortunately he did, and his aircraft was in such a sort of steep climb that at about 14,000 feet the aircraft went into a stall. The engine couldn't produce enough power
00:55:52
Speaker
even at that high kind of boost setting to get the aircraft any you know to keep it going upwards it got the point where Jules hanging in the sky you know hanging off its propeller kind of thing and then just fell away it couldn't deliver enough power to keep it airborne so he basically recovered from the stall at about 11 000 feet or so but here's the thing
00:56:12
Speaker
The object, the light came back down, and this is not necessarily known. This doesn't actually appear in too many of the records. It's in the official records, but you don't often see this in the kind of, you know, the written recounts in the UFO books. It came down and did another head-on pass at him. Wow. So it's three passes. Right. It lasted, the account lasted 27 minutes. Yeah. You know, Edward Ruppel, Project Signee, ordered
00:56:40
Speaker
Gorman, who was obviously shaken by all this going on, you know, he ordered the plane grounded. And when he arrived, he investigated this, you know, the F51 and even took a Geico counter with him just to take radiation readings, just, you know, because there had been reports of radioactivity involved with encounters like this at the time.
00:57:03
Speaker
Yeah, so there was a radioactivity check carried out on the F-51. They'd actually done checks on the other aircraft in the squadron to create a baseline. So they had something to measure it against. It was actually a guy called C.A. Griffiths, who was the chief of the operations section at the technical intelligence division at Wright-Parson. He was a person who actually went to the field and actually did the tests. And funny enough, when he was there, he actually had the chance to talk to Gorman.
00:57:34
Speaker
over the course of about half an hour or so. And he got the following information from the pilot. Gorman told him that the object first detected the approach of the intercepting aircraft about 500 yards away. That's how close he'd managed to get to it. Maneuvering the object was indicative of intelligent control.
00:57:52
Speaker
The object seemed bound by the laws of inertia. So by that, I think it didn't do right hand turns. It sort of did banking turns. And I think that's what I mean about the mean by that. Again, I'm no expert. I might have an expert come in and say, I'm talking rubbish. And the last thing is that the object's flying characteristics far exceeded that of the F-51 Mustang. And that was obvious. Norman was quite shaken, apparently, when he landed. He actually had trouble landing the aircraft for what he said.
00:58:22
Speaker
Now, these radiation checks didn't come up with anything. Excessive radioactivity had to be about 30 or 40 times the figures that were recorded on his aircraft, so there was nothing like that involved. One thing that was sort of suggested, and this was suggested by the doctor who was flying the Piper Cub.
00:58:43
Speaker
Forgot about that and all the excitement the the the cup pilot and his you know passenger they saw the light They saw the light. Yeah, I saw the light. Yeah, they saw the light however The and they actually walked up onto the balcony of the tower to watch what was happening
00:59:00
Speaker
Now, the doctor was in the impression that it was a Canadian jet fighter, a vampire, that had come down over the border to play cat and mouse with the National Guard aircraft. And apparently, and this allegedly is true, that some of these jets had actually come over the border and buzz the airfield tower at Fargo Airport. So they thought this was something that had happened again. But again, the project sign that the personnel checked with the Canadians and know nothing like that had happened.
00:59:30
Speaker
No, I mean, you can't blame Canada for everything, can you? Well, no, it's not exactly the obvious go-to kind of person for, oh, what's causing this UFO report? So it's damn Kellogg's again. Yeah, unless you're in South Park. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, the chief of the air traffic, you know, at the air tower, he was watching all this going on through his binoculars. But there were also two other employees of the civilian aviation authority who also saw the light moving over the airfield.
00:59:59
Speaker
that's right yeah so we do have yeah and they all say the same thing now one of the explanations for the air force was that it was a lighted weather balloon yes or
01:00:15
Speaker
um professional debunker Howard Mansell claimed it was Jupiter refracted through the cockpit yeah right whatever because Jupiter they check in with everybody so what Gorman had done was apparently you'd open his canopy to see so you can look at it directly
01:00:31
Speaker
and he'd also moved his head around and you see these reports from other pilots saying that they put their heads in different in different places so they could you know check it wasn't a reflection and in Gordon's case he actually opened the cockpit canopy so he was looking directly at it with no glass plexiglass in the way so that's how they got around that particular explanation inverted commas and also you're not going to chase Jupiter in a circle around a city no over a football field yeah exactly
01:01:01
Speaker
And the other ridiculous explanation was ball lightning that lasted for 20 minutes. Yeah, well, again, ball lightning's been, you know, posited as an explanation for the Foo Fighters and for other things as well, but nobody actually really can explain what it is or recreate it or anything like that. So ball lightning's a kind of thing. Well, yeah, you could put it as an explanation, but can you prove that's what it is? No, you can't.
01:01:25
Speaker
You know, in terms of the balloon you mentioned before about the light, the lighted balloon, yes, they did have kind of balloons that had these little packages suspended below them. But the light wasn't a bright light. It was like a candle effectively in a little box. And there's no way you'd see something like that from about four or five miles away. You know, the human eye just isn't that kind of sort of sensitive.
01:01:50
Speaker
So it was kind of really odd to suggest that. But again, those kind of things to certain people made sense. Oh, yeah, it's a blue. It's got a light in it. Oh, yeah. Well, that seems quite plausible. That's what it is. Or even some people probably thought, yeah, Jupiter. But no.
Significant UFO Events in History
01:02:07
Speaker
And also the thing, the major thing that kind of sort of blew that out of the water was that Gorman had seen the light silhouetted or like below him above the city lights.
01:02:17
Speaker
you're not going to see Jupiter there. And also the balloon, you know, there had been a balloon launched from about that time, but it was actually afterwards. Sorry, it was two hours beforehand, I beg your pardon. So, you know, there was no way it would still be in the area.
01:02:34
Speaker
No. Graham, have you ever seen the program Project Blue Book that was on the Sci-Fi channel? I've seen clips of it because I haven't got whatever kind of network it's on. But people who know about it, it's kind of like the fictional series based on Project Blue Book, funnily enough.
01:02:54
Speaker
the Alan Heineck and the Edward Ruppel years and the very first episode they covered the Gorman sighting and the the Gorman encounter but they called obviously for you know copyright reasons but you know to pay respect to the Gorman family they changed his name so it became the fuller encounter but you know it's a very good dramatization if people want to check it out of this encounter and you see
01:03:24
Speaker
You see this light doing dances around all these planes. I mean, there were a number of aircraft in the sky according to this dramatization. Right. You know, it was it was like a unit. There were three or four of them. You know, the rest went back to the airfield. And as you said before, you know, Gorman followed, wanted to stay and get some extra night hours.
01:03:49
Speaker
And the rest of the episode kind of focuses on not only the investigation of the Mustang, but also how it affected Gorman afterwards. So he was in the Air Force Hospital for a while because he was that shaken up. And they kind of think nowadays you'd class it as a PTSD case.
01:04:13
Speaker
That's the thing is that people forget there's a human angle to the people who are involved in these cases. I mean, it's a dramatization. So you have to have a bit of maybe a dramatic license for these things. But, you know, someone who shocked her, it does leave an impression. The thing from what I gather, however, I haven't seen this program, but I gather that they depicted the weather balloon and used that as the explanation. And it was a big white one. Is that right?
01:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, if I remember. Right, so. It's sort of first. Okay, well, I've seen a still of the scene that they used in the show. However, the balloon with the light that they launched from Hectorfield and Fargo was dark, it was black. Right. So it wasn't the same thing. And you know, you wouldn't have seen that at night either. So these explanations don't wash. What it was,
01:05:05
Speaker
again that's the $64,000 question nobody knows but it's an it's what there was definitely these three major cases in 1948. Donald Kehoe who you know wrote The Flying Sauces Are Real and became you know one of the founders of NYCAP
01:05:20
Speaker
You know, these were these kind of three pillars, these major cases that sort of, you know, suggested that there was something real to the phenomenon and that it was something that needed to be investigated and it was something that just couldn't be sort of dismissed out of hand. So the, you know, the Mattel case, the Charles Whitted case and the Gorman case were these three cornerstones of the flying disk issue as it was then known.
01:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, and these are credible witnesses as well.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
01:05:49
Speaker
Definitely. You know, experienced pilots, plenty of time in the air and then not going to make up, you know, something like they're not going to confuse a weather balloon with.
01:06:00
Speaker
a food fighter or something like that are they? Well you'd think they're inconceivable and these are and this is the argument that you use today as well so you use that for the 2004 Nimitz sighting they're using that for the you know for the 2015 sightings off the east coast and the ones that apparently still happening even in 2022 so yes the same things hold experienced pilots well trained
01:06:21
Speaker
well used to atmospheric phenomenon you're sort of looking at seeing stars and comets and meteors and all the rest of it and you'd expect that they wouldn't mistake these things even in situations of maybe high stress or you know mistaking something else and then picking up on something else all this kind of stuff they you think that they wouldn't get into that situation yeah absolutely well i think we'd better leave it there for the first episode we've gone through
01:06:49
Speaker
you know, these cases as best as we are able. And, you know, it's been an incredible conversation with you, Graham, as you know, they always are. Thanks, David. It's been great to listen to what you had to say about this as well. It's funny how, you know, what
01:07:05
Speaker
I think about things and maybe I know a little bit about these cases but little bits that you also you were coming out with as well. This is what makes this conversation really interesting because we've both got things to contribute and I'm really surprised as well and I'm keen to hear what you've got to say on other cases that we're going to cover in subsequent episodes. Yeah I think it's going to be a lot of fun and
01:07:26
Speaker
You know, I'm waiting to have my mind blown and ready to, uh, yeah. Oh, I want to see your jaw drop on my screen. Yeah. Well, um, I'm sure when we get to things like the shave, okay. Um, you know, the, all these, uh, my joys, they're going to drop out. I'm certainly going to be going, Oh, I never knew that. No. Well, yeah. It'd probably be more in disbelief rather than the credibility. Fair enough.
01:07:53
Speaker
But I want to thank, well, we want to thank everybody for tuning in to this very first episode. And, yeah, we look forward to doing a lot more. If you've got any comments or suggestions, you can reach us at unidentified aerial podcast at Gmail dot com.
01:08:09
Speaker
And this has been part of the anomalous podcast network. Give us a follow on Twitter. Graham, where can they find you? They can find me at border 750. That's my Twitter handle. So just have a look there. There's a link tree reference on there. You can just look at everything I've done. You can find my website and you can see other things I've done through that as well.
01:08:29
Speaker
Excellent, and I can be found at shadows magazine on Twitter or shadows magazine.co.uk where you can download all issues absolutely free and PDF form. And that's it for tonight. So I guess we'll see you in a couple of weeks and Graham. I look forward to our next conversation. Yeah, so do I. See you next time. I'm here to discuss the so called flying saucer.
01:08:55
Speaker
In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery
01:09:39
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.