I got a telephone call on ATIC's direct line to the
Pentagon. It was a colonel in the Director of Intelligence's office.
The Office of Public Information had been getting a number of queries
about all of the confusion over the Mantell Incident. What was the
answer?

I dug out the file. In 1949 all of the original material on the
incident had been microfilmed, but something had been spilled on the
film. Many sections were so badly faded they were illegible. As I had
to do with many of the older sightings that were now history, I
collected what I could from the file, filling in the blanks by
talking to people who had been at ATIC during the early UFO era. Many
of these people were still around, "Red" Honnacker, George Towles, Al
Deyarmond, Nick Post, and many others. Most of them were civilians,
the military had been transferred out by this time.

Some of the press clippings in the file mentioned the Pentagon major
and his concrete proof of Venus. I couldn't find this concrete proof
in the file so I asked around about the major. The major, I found,
was an officer in the Pentagon who had at one time written a short
intelligence summary about UFO's. He had never been stationed at
ATIC, nor was he especially well versed on the UFO problem. When the
word of the press conference regarding the Mantell Incident came
down, a UFO expert was needed. The major, because of his short
intelligence summary on UFO's, became the "expert." He had evidently
conjured up "they" and "their later report" to support his Venus
answer because the writers at the press conference had him in a
corner. I looked farther.

Fortunately the man who had done the most extensive work on the
incident, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, head of the Ohio State University
Astronomy Department, could be contacted. I called Dr. Hynek and
arranged to meet him the next day.

Dr. Hynek was one of the most impressive scientists I met while
working on the UFO project, and I met a good many. He didn't do two
things that some of them did: give you the answer before he knew the
question; or immediately begin to expound on his accomplishments in
the field of science. I arrived at Ohio State just before lunch, and
Dr. Hynek invited me to eat with him at the faculty club. He wanted
to refer to some notes he had on the Mantell Incident and they were
in his office, so we discussed UFO's in general during lunch.

Back in his office he started to review the Mantell Incident. He had
bee