Somewhere in the Skies - 1948

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

On episode 48 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan brings us through the turbulent year of 1948, when three major UFO cases sparked the U.S. Air Force to officially investigate the influx of reports being compiled across the country. What made these three cases so special? Why was this the tipping point to creating Project Sign and its follow-up investigations known as Grudge and Blue Book? And where do we stand now in terms of governmental involvement with UFOs? This is 1948. Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Official Store: CLICK HERE Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, Ryan Sprague here. As you all know, the Somewhere in the Sky's podcast is always free to consume, but it isn't free to create. That's why I've started the Somewhere in the Sky's Patreon campaign. On a monthly basis, you give what you think the show is worth. You'll be helping the show continue, grow, and to be something truly communal. And remember, there are rewards for each level of contribution, and the list is only growing. So please, help Somewhere in the Skies now by becoming a page. patron. To contribute and to learn more, visit www.

www. patreon.com backslash Somewhere Skies. Thank you for your support. And now on with the show. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan's bread. It was the night of October 1st, 1948. Lieutenant George F. Gorman was a member of the North Dakota Air National Guard. And upon returning to Hector Airport, from a cross-country flight with his squadron, he decided to keep his F-51 Mustang in the air to log some flight hours. As he prepared to land, the air traffic control tower at Hector Airport advised him that there was another aircraft below him. Specifically, a Piper Cub, Lieutenant Gorman acknowledged and saw the plane about 500 feet below him. Soon after, he saw something else resembling the taillight of another aircraft, quickly passing by him to his right.

alerting the control tower to the second aircraft, the tower radioed back, saying there was no others in the vicinity, except for the Piper Cubb. Wanting to investigate further, Lieutenant Gorman radioed the tower to let them know of his intentions, and he pursued the object. Upon approaching within a thousand yards of the object, Lieutenant Gorman estimated that the lighted object was small, about six to eight inches in diameter. But although small, what happened next is best to be. described by Lieutenant Gorman's own words. Quote, it was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white, and completely round

without fuss at the edges. It was blinking on and off. As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower. I dived after it and brought my manifold pressure up to 60 inches,

but I couldn't catch up with this thing. It started gaining altitude, and again made a left bank. I put my plane into a sharp turn and tried to cut the light off in its turn. Suddenly, it made a sharp right turn and headed straight at me. Just when I thought we were going to collide, I guess I got scared. I went into a dive, and the light passed over my canopy at about 500 feet, end quote. Immediately following this near-Miss, Lieutenant Gorman said he made a sharp turn to continue his pursuit,

at which point the object was again heading straight for him on another collision course. Just when it appeared that they would collide again, Lieutenant Gorman said the object shot straight into a steep climb and disappeared. Wanting to continue his pursuit, Lieutenant Gorman pulled his Mustang into a climb, but it stalled, and so he returned to the airport. He was so disturbed and shaken by what had just happened that despite being a veteran pilot and flight instructor, During World War II, he had difficulty landing his airplane.

Upon reporting the incident, many believed that what Lieutenant Gorman witnessed was either a light balloon or even an optical illusion. But these explanations would be challenged by at least three cooperators, which included the chief of the air traffic control tower at Hector Airport, as well as two men in the Piper Cup. They all saw most of this so-called dogfight through their first. binoculars. For 27 hair-raising minutes, Lieutenant Gorman pursued the light through a series of intricate maneuvers. And with that, the case of Lieutenant Gorman came to a screeching halt.

On July 24, 1948, pilots Clarence S. Childs and John B. Witted took off from Houston, Texas in an Eastern Airline's DC-3 around 8 p.m. with 20 passengers on board. Both pilots had a wealth of flying experience from wartime military flying duty to commercial flight experience for Eastern Airlines. At around 2.45 a.m., roughly 20 miles outside of Montgomery, Alabama, and at an altitude of about 5,000 feet, both pilots witnessed an object ahead of them that they first believed was a jet. It was heading toward them rapidly at about the same altitude and passed by their starboard wing at a distance of at least 1,000 feet. Although the pilots gave differing distances at which the object passed,

both agreed that whatever it was, it was definitely some sort of aircraft. They described it as cylindrical, having no appendage or wings, and featured two rows of brightly lit windows, or some other kind of portals that one pilot described as looking like burning magnesium. The pilots also described the supposed nose of the aircraft, which was pointed and along the underside of the craft. It emitted some sort of bluish glow. Childs turned the DC3 sharply to the left before the craft passed them. And as it did, their plane allegedly experienced a bit of turbulence, as though the craft produced some sort of wake.

As Childs was turning the plane, Witted was the only one still able to observe the craft as it passed on their right side. He looked behind them in time to see the mysterious craft make a sharp ascent and then disappear out of sight. This encounter drew considerable attention, both public and military, and sparked much debate about the validity of their claims. The morning after the incident, Childs and Witted reported their observations to local reporters, as well as the United States Air Force. While the news reported the pilot's encounter in local newspapers, the Air Force prepared an estimate. of the situation, which despite being classified as top secret, allegedly reported the UFO in the child's-witted case as being interplanetary. Nonetheless, the very fact that this encounter was taken so seriously by military intelligence

leads one to believe that this case was in fact a very significant one that received considerable attention from the Air Force. Perhaps the most dramatic UFO event of 1948 was that of Captain Thomas Mentel, an experienced pilot with a flight history that consisted of 2,167 hours in the air, and numerous honors for his part in the Battle of Normandy during World War II. On January 7, Godman Field at Fort Knox, Kentucky received a report from the Kentucky Highway Patrol of an unusual aerial object. near Maysville, Kentucky. At about 145 p.m., Sergeant Quinton Blackwell saw an object from his position in the control tower at Fort Knox. The other witnesses in the tower also reported a white object in the distance.

Base commander Colonel Guy Hicks reported an object, as he described as very white, in about one-fourth the size of the full moon. Through binoculars, it appeared to have a red border at the bottom. It remained stationary seemingly for one and a half hours. Observers at Clinton County Army Airfield in Ohio described the object as having the appearance of a flaming red cone, trailing a gaseous green mist, and observed the object for about 35 minutes.

Four P-51 Mustangs of Sea Flight, the 165th Fighter Squadron Kentucky Air National Guard, were already in the air. One pilot by Mantell, they were asked to investigate this object. Blackwell was in constant radio communication with the pilots, throughout the entire event. One pilot's Mustang was low on fuel, and he quickly abandoned his efforts.

The other two pilots accompanied Mantel in steep pursuit of the object. They later reported what they saw, but described it as so small and indistinct that they cannot identify it. Mantel ignored suggestions that the pilot should level their altitude and tried to get a more clear observation of the object.

Only one of Mantel's companions, Lieutenant Albert Clemens, had an oxygen mask, and his oxygen was in low supply. Clemens and Lieutenant Hammond called off their pursuit at 22,500 feet. Mantell continued to climb, however. As he neared the object, he reported to Blackwell back on the ground, that the object looked metallic and was tremendous in size. As Mantel began to round the object to get a better look,

it was reported that he told Blackwell he'd seen people inside the object. But before any clear identification or clarification on this transmission could be made, Mantel's communication when completely dead. It is thought that around an altitude of 25,000 feet, Mantel had blacked out from a lack of oxygen, and his plane began spiraling back towards the ground. A witness later reported Mantel's Mustang in a circling descent. His plane crashed at a farm south of Franklin, Kentucky,

on the Tennessee-Kentucky border state line. Firemen were later able to pull Mantel's body from the Mustang's wreckage. His wristwatch had stopped at 3.18 p.m., the time of the crash. Meanwhile, by 350 p.m., the UFO was no longer visible to observers at Godman Field. The Mantel incident was reported by newspapers around the nation and received significant news media attention. With UFO reports coming in at an alarming rate, it was clear that something had to be done. These just weren't lights in the sky being observed from civilians in remote areas.

These were experienced aviators who witnessed objects that defied all known technology at the time and were threatening their aircraft in the most sensitive of ways. And the Air Force wasn't going to let this go lightly. Something had to be done. the American public needed to know that their skies were safe. But were they truly? If there was anything the Air Force was good at, it was protecting our skies. But as we'd soon learn, they were also very good at keeping secrets.

They began to call in members of the military and the astronomical fields to investigate UFOs, compiling a stunning amount of cases that had no simple or prosaic explanations. And in 1948, Project Sign was born. And with that, would come the official investigation of UFOs by the United States Air Force and would ultimately become what we best know as Project Blue Book. I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucers. The Air Force interest in this problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation to identify and analyze to the best of our ability, anything in the air,

that may have the possibility of threat or menace to the United States. In pursuit of this obligation since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and two thousand reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources. Of this great mass of reports, we have been able adequately to explain the great bulk of them, explain them to our own satisfaction. We've been able to explain them as hoaxes,

as erroneously identified friendly aircraft, as meteorological or electronic phenomena, or as light aberration. However, there have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of observations

that we now are attempting to resolve. Our basic difficulty in dealing with these is that there is no measurement of them that makes it possible for us to put them in any pattern that would be profitable for a deliberate custom sort of analysis to take the next step. We have, as a date, come to only one firm conclusion with respect to this remaining percentage, and that is that it does not contain any pattern of purpose or of consistency that we can relate to any conceivable threat to the United States.

We can say that the recent sightings are in no way connected with any secret development by any agency of the United States. Project Blue Book was officially terminated in 1969, compiling over 12,600 UFO reports. These reports were given to the Condon Committee, a group funded by the United States Air Force from 19, 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado to study unidentified flying objects under the direction of physicist Edward Condon. The result of its work, formerly titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, concluded that no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the U.S. Air Force, was ever an indication of threat to our national security.

There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as unidentified represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge. And there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as unidentified were extraterrestrial vehicles. And with that, the United States Air Force, in conjunction with the U.S. government as a whole,

announced that UFOs would no longer officially be investigated. by any military branch or governmental agency. But as we know now, that certainly wasn't true. The Pentagon has been keeping track or trying to of the type of aircraft that don't take off and land from conventional airports. We're talking about unidentified flying objects. UFOs. Correspondent Garrett Tenney is here with more on this program.

Good evening, Garrett. Brett, good evening to you. We may not know if aliens exist, but it turns out our government had a special team of UFO hunters that was trying to find out. The Pentagon now confirms the existence of a secretive UFO program tasked with investigating reports of unidentified flying objects. The advanced aviation threat identification program was created in 2007 at the urging of then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And over the next five years, the program received more than $20 million for its work, which included analyzing a variety of aeronautic threats

ranging from what could be our adversary's next generation aircraft to reports from military pilots of encounters with unknown objects. Now, the Pentagon tells us the program ended in 2012 when officials determined there were other higher priority issues. But the program's former director who resigned in October says it was only the funding that ended in that over the last five years, the program has continued investigating incidents alongside their new responsibilities. Up front now, the former Pentagon military official who ran the covert government program up until this, last November, Luis Elizondo. You know, Ms. Burnett, I have to admit to you, when I ran this program, I was fundamentally looking at my colleagues looking at two things.

What is it and how does it work? We have deliberately stayed away from going down the rabbit hole of who's behind the wheel and what are their intentions because a lot of people have a lot of feelings towards that and are very emotional about that. And what I wanted to do is to allow the data to speak for itself and then use that data to inform leadership, senior DOD leadership, about the potential threat that these type of technologies pose to national security, especially over any type of controlled airspace that we might have.

Look, and I know you think it's important. I know you think that the government didn't take the threat seriously enough. So let me just ask you point blank the question, do you believe that life from somewhere else while you ran this program came here, visited, observed? I will tell you unequivocally that through the observation, scientific methodologies that were applied to look at this phenomena, that these aircraft, we'll call them aircraft,

are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of. So I know you're being clear, but I mean, the answer is yes. My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone. So we now know that the government did indeed continue to invent. investigate UFOs in secret, and those involved believe the technology to certainly defy our own advancements and limits. And now, we stand at a precipice of whether or not we can even trust our

government to tell us the truth about what they know and what they're doing when it comes to the UFO problem. Will we ever know the truth? Probably not, but that hasn't stopped me from searching, and it shouldn't stop you either. Because we all know. know that UFO disclosure happens one witness at a time. And no matter what UFOs may or may not be, we are the ones who will discover the truth on our own, in our own ways, and on our own timetable. We will continue to keep our feet on the ground, but never stop searching somewhere in the skies. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcasts.

com.