et 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
reported to the Kentucky State Police. It is not unusual to be able
to see a large balloon for 50 to 60 miles. The balloon could have
traveled west for a while, climbing as it moved with the strong east
winds that were blowing that day and picking up speed as the winds
got stronger at altitude. In twenty minutes it could have been in a
position where it could be seen from Owensboro and Irvington,
Kentucky, the two towns west of Godman. The second reports to the
state police had come from these two towns. Still climbing, the
balloon would have reached a level where a strong wind was blowing in
a southerly direction. The jet-stream winds were not being plotted in
1948 but the weather chart shows strong indications of a southerly
bend in the jet stream for this day. Jet stream or not, the balloon
would have moved rapidly south, still climbing. At a point somewhere
south or southwest of Godman it would have climbed through the
southerly-moving winds to a calm belt at about 60,000 feet. At this
level it would slowly drift south or southeast. A skyhook balloon can
be seen at 60,000.

When first seen by the people in Godman Tower, the UFO was south of
the air base. It was relatively close and looked "like a parachute,"
which a balloon does. During the two hours that it was in sight, the
observers reported that it seemed to hover, yet each observer
estimated the time he looked at the object through the binoculars and
timewise the descriptions ran "huge," "small," "one fourth the size
of a full moon," "one tenth the size of a full moon." Whatever the
UFO was, it was slowly moving away. As the balloon conti