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, Ohio, on January 7, 1948. I never could find
these 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.

The Mantell Incident is the same old UFO jigsaw puzzle. By assuming
the shape of one piece, a balloon launched from southwestern Ohio,
the whole picture neatly falls together. It shows a huge balloon that
Captain Thomas Mantell died trying to reach. He didn't know that he
was chasing a balloon because he had never heard of a huge, 100-foot-
diameter skyhook balloon, let alone seen one. Leave out the one piece
of the jigsaw puzzle and the picture is a UFO, "metallic and
tremendous in size."

It _could_ have been a balloon. This is the answer I phoned back to
the Pentagon.

During January and February of 1948 the reports of "ghost rockets"
continued to come from air attaches in foreign countries near the
Baltic Sea. People in North Jutland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and
Germany reported "balls of fire traveling slowly across the sky." The
reports were very sketchy and incomplete, most of them accounts from
newspapers. In a few days the UFO's were being seen all over Europe
and South America. Foreign reports hit a peak in the latter part of
February and U.S. newspapers began to pick up the stories.

The Swedish Defense Staff supposedly conducted a comprehensive study