“It’s still above me, making my speed or better. I’m going up to twenty thousand feet. If I’m no closer, I’ll abandon chase.”
It was his last report.
Minutes later, his fighter disintegrated with terrific force. The falling wreckage was scattered for thousands of feet.
When Mantell failed to answer the tower, one of his pilots began a search. Climbing to 33,000 feet, he flew a hundred miles to the south.
But the thing that lured Mantell to his death had vanished from the sky.
Ten days after Mantell was killed, I learned of a curious sequel to the Godman affair.
An A.P. account in the New York Times had caught my attention. The story, released at Fort Knox, admitted Mantell had died while chasing a flying saucer. Colonel Hix was quoted as having watched the object, which was still unidentified. But there was no mention of Mantell’s radio messages—no hint of the thing’s tremendous size.
Though I knew the lid was probably on, I went to the Pentagon. When the scare had first broken, in the summer of ’47, I had talked with Captain Tom Brown, who was handling saucer inquiries. But by now Brown had been shifted, and no one in the Press Branch would admit knowing the details of the Mantell saucer chase.
“We just don’t know the answer,” a security officer told me.
“There’s a rumor,” I said, “it’s a secret Air Force missile that sometimes goes out of control.”