Five Famous Kentucky UFO Encounters
Article by Emma Austin June 21, 2021 (courier-journal.com)
• In 2020, more than 80 Kentucky cases were reported to and investigated by the Mutual UFO Network or ‘MUFON’. “Most people walk around the world careened from one spot to another and don’t take the time to look up,” says Barry Gaunt, director of Kentucky’s MUFON chapter. “If you look up, you may see things.” The Louisville KY newspaper, The Courier Journal, looked back at five well-known UFO reports in Kentucky spanning decades.
• Fort Knox, KY 1948 – On January 7, 1948, Fort Knox received a report from the Kentucky Highway Patrol of a gleaming saucer-shaped UFO near Maysville, KY on the Ohio River. Reports also came in from Irvington, KY more than 240 miles away. Fort Knox radioed to four planes flying overhead to intercept the flying disk. The pilots responded that the UFO was at 20,000 feet “and going too fast for them to catch.” Capt. Thomas F. Mantell, a 25-year-old Kentucky National Guard pilot, was among the pilots chasing the UFO. Three of the pilots called off their pursuit at 22,500 feet, but Mantell continued to climb. Once he passed 25,000 feet, he blacked out from lack of oxygen. Hlane began spiraling toward the ground and crashed at a farm south of Franklin, KY. A university astronomer said that the pilots had likely been chasing the planet Venus.
• Hopkinsville, KY 1955 – On August 21, 1955, a group of eight adults and four children reported seeing a lit object glide onto a field outside one of their homes in Kelly, KY near Hopkinsville. They said it looked like an egg-shaped washtub. About 40 minutes later, they noticed “shiny little men” walking toward their house, and soon 15 of them were “all over the place.” Seeing the chrome-like creatures converge on the house, Billy Ray Taylor stepped out the front door and one of them grabbed at him from the roof. Elmer Sutton grabbed his shotgun, stepped outside and shot one of the silver creatures. The bullets didn’t seem to have an effect. His brother, John Sutton, fired four boxes of .22 cartridges from his pistol, but they ricocheted off. The creatures, who were described as having faces that looked like “skin stretched over a skull,” returned to the house five times in the course of about three hours, with the men running them off with their firearms each time. After the sixth visit, shortly before 11:00 pm, all 12 of the witnesses loaded into two cars and sped toward Hopkinsville to tell police. The police found no physical evidence to back up the story. Word spread the next day as newspapers and wire services picked up the story. Today, the Kelly community commemorates the event every August with the Kelly Little Green Men Days Festival.
• Casey County, KY 1976 – In January 1976, Elaine Thomas, Louise Smith and Mona Stafford from Casey County were driving home from a restaurant together when they saw a bright object in the sky about half an hour before midnight. The women watched it fall toward the ground, believing it was a plane about to crash. But before oval-shaped craft with revolving yellow lights hit the ground, it stopped, hovering above their car. Blue light filled their car, which began to shake back and forth. Then they felt the car being pulled backward before all three lost consciousness. They woke up in Hustonville, about eight miles from where they first saw the UFO — an hour and a half later. All three women had headaches and what appeared to be burn marks on the backs of their necks. The women underwent hypnosis to recall what happened during their missing time. In separate sessions, they all told the same story: They were taken aboard the spacecraft and closely examined by scaly, blue-eyed, telepathic creatures. They also were given lie detector tests, which they passed. But the three women became outcasts in Casey County, where they were ridiculed after sharing their story. “I tried to talk about it to people. They wouldn’t listen,” said Mona Stafford. “I say if you don’t want to face the truth, that’s like living in fairyland.”
• Prospect, KY 1977 – About 1:00 am on January 27, 1977, 19-year-old Lee Parrish was driving home from his girlfriend’s house in Prospect, KY when Parrish saw a bright orange rectangular object, about 10 feet tall and 40 feet long, hovering just above the treeline about 100 feet from the road. Parrish became frightened and wanted to leave the area but was unable. The car seemed to be driving itself. Parrish’s car radio failed and he continued watching the UFO until he was directly underneath it. Then it sped away. It never made a sound. Parrish realized that he had lost about 35 minutes of time. His eyes were bloodshot and painful. He enlisted the help of UFO researcher Carla L. Rueckert who hypnotized Parrish. Under hypnosis, Parrish described not being able to see anything after he first spotted the UFO. When he could see again, his Jeep was gone, and he was in a circular, white room with “self-luminous” walls. “Before him stood three objects which he instinctively felt or sensed were sentient beings, although they were definitely not human: a ‘black one,’ a ‘red one,’ and a ‘white one’. The black one was the tallest, “jug-shaped, with a relatively small head.” It had one single limb: a handless, one-jointed appendage. Parrish said the black one moved toward him slowly and used its arm to touch him on his left side and back, causing a painful feeling that was both cold and burning. He felt like he was vibrating. The shorter red one also had one handless and unjointed arm. He felt like the red one was scared and reluctant to touch him, but it touched him on the shoulder and above his right ear. “This felt like a needle and stung briefly, but did not terrify Lee and did not hurt long,” Rueckert wrote in her report. “During this time, (Parrish) felt quite cold. The whole ship seems to be rocking like ‘a boat on the water,’ back and forth.” The white one was about 6 feet tall, had two appendages and ‘glowed brightly’. However, it did not move and just watched Parrish. Parrish sensed that it was the ‘ruler’ of the other two.” The white one began making a rhythmic scraping sound. Then the black one backed up slowly, and the other two either merged with it or disappeared behind it. Parrish felt that the creatures were checking out his ‘chemical make-up’ and doing a physical check-up.”
• Louisville, KY 1993 – Around midnight on February 27, 1993, two Jefferson County air unit police officers flying in a helicopter reported a glowing, pear-shaped object about the size of a basketball that flew in circles around their helicopter before shooting three baseball-size fireballs out of its middle. Another officer said he saw the object from his squad car below for about a minute and confirmed it shot three fireballs into the air before disappearing. An engineering professor blamed the incident on atmospheric conditions and reflections off the snow on the ground below. Another local claimed that it was a homemade hot-air balloon. But officer Kenny Downs, who was one of the two in the helicopter that night, said “there’s no way” it was tiny hot-air balloon. “I don’t think six candles and a plastic bag can fly at the speeds we flew.”
Most UFO sightings can be explained away.
Unidentified flying objects usually turn out to be airplanes, drones, satellites, stars or even balloons.
But what about the ones that don’t have an explanation?
A highly anticipated federal report on UFOs commissioned by Congress has brought speculation on UFOs back into the limelight. It’s expected to be released this month and reportedly says the government did not find evidence UFOs are alien spacecraft, but the report also does not definitively say they aren’t, according to the The New York Times and CNN.
Barry Gaunt, director of Kentucky’s chapter of the Mutual UFO Network — the “world’s oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization” — has spent more than half his life working in what he considers the “paranormal field,” which includes investigating UFO sightings 
and abduction cases.
“I think it’s very important that we get all the cases into a database because what that does is it allows us to be able to really do deeper research,” Gaunt told The Courier Journal. “The more people that report these incidents, the more we can deal
with it.”
The Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, was created in response to the Air Force’s decision to shut down Project Blue Book, its study of unidentified flying objects from 1952 through 1969.
In 2020 alone, more than 80 Kentucky cases were reported to and investigated by MUFON, according to its online database.
“If you look up, you may see things,” Gaunt said. “Most people walk around the world careened from one spot to another and don’t take the time to look up.”
In anticipation of the government report’s release, The Courier Journal looked back at well-known UFO reports in Kentucky spanning decades. Here are five of those:
Fatal air chase: Fort Knox, 1948
One of the earliest UFO reports happened in Kentucky, and it was among the most publicized because it ended in the death of Capt. Thomas F. Mantell, a 25-year-old Kentucky National Guard pilot.
On Jan. 7, 1948, Fort Knox received a report from the Kentucky Highway Patrol of an unusual aerial object near Maysville, according to a case summary by the Mutual UFO Network. Maysville sits on the Ohio River and is 66 miles northeast of Lexington. But reports that day also came in from Irvington — roughly 180 miles from Maysville — and Owensboro —
more than 240 miles away — of a westbound circular object in the sky, according to the network.
The gleaming object was easily visible from Fort Knox, and officers at the post radioed to three planes flying overhead to see if they could catch the object, which they thought might be a flying disk, according to a Courier Journal report the following day.
“About 20 minutes later they radioed back they were 20,000 feet high and the saucer was still above them,” a colonel told the newspaper. “The pilots said the saucer was too high and going too fast for them to catch.” The pilots said the saucer was traveling west at about 180 mph, though from the observation tower it appeared motionless.
University of Louisville astronomer Walter Lee Moore told The Courier Journal at the time the planet Venus had been near the sun during the reported sightings, and “very exceptional atmospheric conditions” could have made it visible to the naked eye during the day.
“If they chased Venus in airplanes, they certainly had a long way to go,” Moore said.
A report of Mantell’s death was printed on the front page of the Louisville newspaper alongside the article detailing the chase toward the object, but neither stories mentioned Mantell’s involvement in the chase. Airport officials said he was on his way back from a training flight to Atlanta when his plane exploded five miles south of Franklin, Kentucky.
Likewise, the report on pilots chasing the disk did not mention Mantell or any related fatality.
Contrary to what officials said at the time, Fort Knox commanders actually ordered four planes to follow the object, including Mantell’s. One of the four planes was low on fuel, and its pilot quickly abandoned the chase, according to the Mutual UFO Network.
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