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This 92-page Project Blue Book file, released through The Black Vault, covers the 7 January 1948 sighting at Godman Field, Fort Knox, Kentucky. It holds control tower witness reports, a record of the P-51 pursuit led by Captain Thomas Mantell, AMC requests for theodolite readings and weather data, and astronomical tables for Venus and the Moon. One analysis concludes the object was not Venus and calls the sighting unexplained. The file also includes a 1964 letter to the Simpson County coroner about Mantell's death.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
STATEMENT OF LT PAUL I. ORNER (cont'd)
NG800 gassed up and got more oxygen and flew a second mission on the same heading of $ 2 1 0^{\circ} $ to a position of about 100 miles south of Godman Field to an altitude of 33 thousand feet and did not sight the object. At about 1645 CST when NG800 reported not seeing the object I left the Control Tower.
At about 1735 CST I returned to the Control Tower and a bright light different than a star at a position of about $ 2 4 0 ^{0} $ azimuth and $ 8 ^{0} $ elevation from the Control Tower. This was a round object. It seemed to have a dark spot in the center and the object moved north and disappeared from the horizon at a point $ 2 5 0 ^{0} $ from the Tower. The unusual fact about this object was the fact that it remained visible and glowed through the haze near the Earth when no other stars were visible and did not disappear until it went below the level of the Earth in a manner similar to the sun or moon setting. This object was viewed and tracked with the Weather Station theodolite from the hangar roof.
DOWNGRADED AT 8 YEAR DECLASSIFIED AFTER 12 YEAR DOD DIR 5200.10 Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 93 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.