<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The following is an excerpt from Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers. It relates to The Mantell Incident, in which a military pilot lost his life in pursuit of a UFO. The book is in the public domain, and this excerpt was taken from the OPUS website e-text of the book.

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The Mantell UFO Case has been hashed and rehashed many times, but never once had anybody come near a remotely plausible solution as to what happened to Mantell and his plane. All reports agreed that on January 7, 1948, an unidentified object was sighted over Godman Air Force base, Fort Knox, Kentucky, by both military and civilian observers. Four national guardsmen in F 51's, flying in the vicinity, were requested by the Godman control tower operator to investigate the foreign object. Three of the planes closed in and reported that it was metallic and of tremendous size. One pilot described it as "round like a teardrop and fluid." Captain Mantell contacted Godman tower and reported the object was traveling at half his speed at 12 o'clock high. "I'm closing in now to take a good look," he said. "It's directly ahead of me and still moving at about half my speed. The thing looks metallic and of tremendous size…It's going up now and forward as fast as I am. That's 360 m.p.h…I'm going up to 20,000 feet and if I'm no closer, I'll abandon chase." The time was 3:15 P.M. January 7, 1948. That was the last radio contact by Mantell with the Godman Tower. Five minutes after Mantell's disappearance from the formation the two remaining planes returned to Godman Field. One of them refueled and equipped himself with oxygen. He covered the territory for 100 miles and climbed as high as 30,000 feet, but found nothing. Later that day Mantell's body was found in the wreckage of his plane near Fort Knox. Much of the magic, the scientist explained, which has baffled both trained and untrained observers, is not magic at all. A good deal of what is claimed to have happened to ships in the air, such as disintegration, suspension for a period of time, immobilization of their instrument boards, and such can be duplicated in the laboratory. Mantell's plane and every portion of his plane from the motor to the tips of the wings hung together by reason of magnetic frequency. This was true of even Mantell himself. Therefore all that a flying saucer had to do to disintegrate Mantell's plane, the lecturer revealed, was to demagnetize it. No two lines have ever been known to cross each other naturally. If forced to do so, or if crossed by "accident" you get disintegration and fire. Anybody who could create such a magnetic disturbance could wipe out every living thing on this earth in a second. This, then was the magnetic research scientist's explanation as to what happened to Captain Mantell and his ship. The captain was proving a source of annoyance in his pursuit of a magnetically controlled flying saucer. A button was pushed and Mantel] and his plane were no more.

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