I
have said it before and I’ll say it again. Ed Ruppelt did us no favors. And as you
all know, I have been reexamining the Mantell case and found a few problems in
the way it has been reported in the past. I don’t think there is anything
nefarious in those mistakes, it’s just that I have access to information that
they might not have had. Donald Keyhoe didn’t have the case file or the
accident report, but I do. Ed Ruppelt didn’t have access to information about
the Skyhooks, and I don’t know how good his weather data were, but I have
information for both of those.
Ruppelt
thought that the Navy Skyhook might solve the mystery of what Thomas Mantell
had chased back in January 1948. He thought that a balloon launched from the
Clinton County Air Force Base (Wilmington, Ohio) on the morning of January 7
might have drifted far enough south to be the culprit. He wrote:
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…
He
also admitted that he couldn’t prove it, but thought it was a good explanation for
the Mantell case. He also wrote:
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, on January 7, 1948. I never could find those
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.
 |
| Sightings reported on January 7, 1948 through the center of Kentucky. None of these sightings were made or verified by the Godman AAF tower crew. |
When
you line up the sightings in central Kentucky with the launch site in south
central Ohio, it certainly does suggest a Skyhook launched from there could
have easily been over central Kentucky at the right time. Sure, the times are a
little problematic, but there are reasonable explanations for that. It seems to
work out and a large number of people bought the solution, even if the precise
evidence wasn’t there.
The
trouble is that we now know that the Skyhooks weren’t being launched from
Clinton County AFB until a couple of years later. And we have the winds data
from that location as well. Though Ruppelt seemed to believe that the wind was
blowing from the northeast, the weather data shows that it was coming from the
west. Ruppelt’s explanation fails on those two points. Besides, the tower crew
at Godman Army Air Field all reported the object was to the southwest of them. Although
alerted to a possible object to the east, over Lexington, Kentucky, they never
saw anything in that direction. Other law enforcement agencies told them of the
object to the southwest of them, the one they tracked.
 |
| Weather data in Lexington, Kentucky on January 7, 1948 showing that the winds were from the southwest and the west southwest, suggesting a balloon in that area would have been moving in a direction opposite of what Ruppelt had predicted. |
For
those paying attention, this simply means that Mantell did not chase a Skyhook launched
from Clinton County. The source of the balloon was actually in Minnesota, but
we’ll deal with that in another post.
