Mantell incident — Kentucky, January 7, 1948
On January 7, 1948, Captain Thomas F. Mantell observed a circular, metallic object over a U.S. Air Force base in Kentucky. He and two other fighter pilots pursued the object, but Mantell continued to climb to a higher altitude. He ultimately crashed,
Background
On January 7, 1948, in Kentucky, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
On January 7, 1948, Captain Thomas F. Mantell observed a circular, metallic object over a U.S. Air Force base in Kentucky. He and two other fighter pilots pursued the object, but Mantell continued to climb to a higher altitude. He ultimately crashed, and investigators believe he may have reached 30,000 feet.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“A circular object, metallic in appearance, was seen over a U. S. Air Force base on Jan. 7, 1948.”. “Captain Mantell kept going. He radioed that he would go to 25,000 feet and abandon the search if he got no closer.”. “His plane crashed, and the instruments found in the wreckage indicated it might have risen to 30,000 feet.”
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.