I talked with one of the people who had been in on the Mantell
investigation. The possibility of a balloon's causing the sighting
had been mentioned but hadn't been followed up for two reasons.
Number one was that everybody at ATIC was convinced that the object
Mantell was after was a spaceship and that this was the only course
they had pursued. When the sighting grew older and no spaceship proof
could be found, everybody jumped on the Venus band wagon, as this
theory had "already been established." It was an easy way out. The
second reason was that a quick check had been made on weather
balloons and none were in the area. The big skyhook balloon project
was highly classified at that time, and since they were all convinced
that the object was of interplanetary origin (a minority wanted to
give the Russians credit), they didn't want to bother to buck the red
tape of security to get data on skyhook flights.

The group who supervise the contracts for all the skyhook research
flights for the Air Force are located at Wright Field, so I called
them. They had no records on flights in 1948 but they did think that
the big balloons were being launched from Clinton County AFB in
southern Ohio at that time. They offered to get the records of the
winds on January 7 and see what flight path a balloon launched in
southwestern Ohio would have taken. In a few days they had the data
for me.

Unfortunately the times of the first sightings, from the towns
outside Louisville, were not exact but it was possible to partially
reconstruct the sequence of events. The winds were such that a
skyhook balloon launched from Clinton County AFB could be seen from
the town east of Godman AFB, the town from which the first UFO was