(H): I was the chief physical anthropologist for the U. S. Air Force at the aerospace medical research laboratory...Dayton, Ohio...from 1946 t0 1972. Well, the man who spoke to me about it [the Mantell case] had been an engineer [who had been] sent down to Godman Field to investigate all of that whole affair and who had voiced to me his conviction that there had to be something there and that Mantell had been shot down...Mantell had left his flight...following the UFO, and suddenly apparently when he neared it, his airplane utterly disintegrated. Now that was a P-51 and that was a solidly built airplane. The news reports that were put out said that he had gone up into very high altitude, between seventeen and twenty thousand feet, and had probably passed out from lack of oxygen at that elevation, and had then spun in and crashed. Well, my friend, the engineer, who was a very high ranking engineer on the Field [Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio] and who had studied the case very carefully, he simply said he could not believe that Mantell had passed out from lack of oxygen and had just simply crashed into the earth.Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Hertzberg and received a letter back dated 15 May 1991. He wrote of the engineer, "He was sent down to investigate the UFO sighting and the death of Captain Mantell, and he told me some of his conclusions. He later retired from his job and moved to Tucson, Arizona, where I visited him in the mid-'70s...he died several years ago." [Mr. Hertzberg remembered the engineer's name as he wrote the letter. It was Carl O. Horst.](T): Did he say why he couldn't believe that?
(H): Among other things, the fact that [the] airplane almost totally disintegrated... because bits of the wing and bits of the fuselage and of the tail...had gone miles apart. And when an airplane crashes to the earth, that doesn't happen. So he was personally convinced that something had happened that nobody would report. And I personally feel that he was probably right.
In Mr. Hertzberg's opinion, "The top secret Skyhook balloon allegation is baloney. It was a UFO which whirled vertically to high altitude after sitting over the landing strip for a long time, and which was seen by hundreds of Godman Base employees before the Mantell flight wanted to land on the runway. The UFO, to my recollection, was considered to have sat there at about 400 feet for a long time (or maybe even lower)." Attempts to reach relatives of Mr. Horst in Tucson were successful; the investigation continues, although the relatives are not privy to Mr. Horst's work.
