Kentucky Air National Guard

A September 30 news photograph of Forrestal congratulating Dr. Vannevar Bush after the latter has been sworn in as the new chairman of the Research and Development Board, shows the secretary looking particularly grim.

Less than four months later, on January 7th, 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas Mantell is killed when his plane explodes in an uncontrolled ascent as he is closing on a UFO, quote, "of tremendous size" in the skies near Fort Knox, Kentucky.

We can reasonably assume and conclude the Secretary of Defense is kept carefully appraised of the particulars of this and of all other significant UFO sightings and events occurring during his time at the Pentagon.

That June, the Soviet arms blockades West Berlin, setting in motion the Berlin Airlift and a major Cold War crisis.

Now let's explore one of the most fascinating mysteries in UFO history.

Thomas Mantell was a twenty-five-year-old captain in the Kentucky Air National Guard, already known as an ambitious test pilot flying the same P-51 Mustang that had taken down enemy fighters over Europe during World War.

By January nineteen forty-eight, he had accumulated nearly three hundred flight hours, most of them in high-altitude trials that pushed the limits of piston engine performance and airframe stability.

The Mustang's Allison engine could keep spinning up to about twenty thousand feet, but beyond that, the thin air throttles power and reduces lift, a reality pilots were taught to respect before any flight.

Um, so yeah, that was definitely one of the enjoys items.

Um, the US Air Force were back again with a Kentucky Air Guard C-130J.

Um, which-

It's...

Really, re-

I don't, I don't know whether, um, there's someone in...

I don't know who on the South Ayrshire, Ayrshire Council is in charge of booking the displays or whether they're outsourcing it to somebody else or something like that, but someone's obviously Having a good think about it, so the Kentucky Air Guard C-130Js at that time of year go for deployment in Ramstein.

Um, and there was about, I think there was three or four airframes out there.

Because the popular image of guard forces as a part time emergency response element does not capture what units like the one sixty-fifth actually represent.

The Kentucky Air National Guard has been flying the C-130 platform for decades.

They have deployed to combat theaters.

They have executed humanitarian airlift operations.

That kind of genuine interoperability does not happen through policy documents or memoranda of understanding.

It happens through exercises, real crews, real aircraft, real scenarios worked in real weather.

The Kentucky Air National Guard flying to Scotland to train alongside the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force is one piece of that larger, expensive, time-consuming project.

Multiply it across the dozens of similar exercises happening at various levels across the alliance throughout any given year, and you begin to see what operational interoperability actually costs in terms of flight hours, fuel, maintenance, and the sustained organizational will to keep doing it even when budgets are tight and schedules are complicated.

Talk about Mantell in general.

Captain Thomas Francis Mantell was a 25-year-old pilot with the Kentucky Air National Guard's 165th Fighter Squadron.

Despite his young age, he was hardly an inexperienced flyer.

He had served during World War II with the 440th Troop Carrier Group and had received the Distinguished Flying Cross, an air medal with three oak leaf clusters.

Let's

back up.

OK, so at roughly 2.30 p.m., a flight of four P-51D Mustangs from the Kentucky Air National Guard happened to be passing Godman Field while returning toward Louisville from a training flight in Marietta, Georgia.

Mantell was the one leading the flight.