Fort Knox and the Death of Captain Mantell
On 7 January 1948 a large bright object was reported over Kentucky and a flight of fighters was scrambled. Captain Thomas Mantell climbed after it, radioed that he could see something "metallic and of tremendous size", and kept climbing without an oxygen mask. His aircraft came down south of Franklin; Mantell was killed. The military first said Venus. It was later established that the object was a classified high-altitude Skyhook balloon the pilots had no way of knowing about: from the ground such a balloon looks exactly as Mantell described it. It is the first death connected with the pursuit of an unidentified object, and it set the tone of the subject for years.
Off San Diego and the Tic Tac
On 14 November 2004 the Nimitz carrier group, a hundred-odd kilometres south-west of San Diego, spent several days tracking returns that dropped from twenty-five kilometres to sea level in seconds. A pair of F/A-18s was sent to look; the squadron commander, David Fravor, reported a white object with no wings and no exhaust, shaped like a breath mint, moving over the water in sharp jumps. The second aircraft filmed it on an infrared camera. That recording, known as FLIR1, was published in 2017 and confirmed by the Pentagon in 2020 as genuine and unidentified. It is the first case on this map where the defence ministry itself vouched for the document.
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