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Kinross, 1953: two radar returns merged, and the jet vanished over Lake Superior

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On the evening of November 23, 1953, a US Air Force F-89 took off from Michigan to identify an unknown aircraft over Lake Superior. At 6:55 p.m., the two radar returns merged, and the jet and its two-man crew disappeared without a trace. The Air Force said the target was a Canadian transport plane. The Canadians never confirmed it.

When: November 23, 1953
Where: Kinross, United States
Witnesses: radar controllers at the Calumet and Sault Ste. Marie stations, including 2nd Lt. Douglas Stuart. The jet’s crew were 1st Lt. Felix E. Moncla Jr. and 2nd Lt. Robert L. Wilson.
Official position: the US Air Force accident investigation recorded the jet as missing and identified the target as Canadian C-47 VC-912. The RCAF found no record of an intercept, and the board’s findings were never released.

A Monday evening over Lake Superior

November 23, 1953, was a Monday. At Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan, crews of the 433rd Fighter-Interceptor Squadron from Truax Field, Wisconsin, were standing alert. The base’s own personnel were away at gunnery training in Yuma, Arizona.

That afternoon, another of the squadron’s F-89Cs crashed in Madison, on the shore of Lake Wingra. 1st Lt. John W. Schmidt and Capt. Glen E. Collins were killed. According to Madison’s The Capital Times, officials suspected a sudden mechanical failure. Air Force officials in Chicago said the type would not be grounded.

That evening, 1st Lt. Felix E. Moncla Jr. and 2nd Lt. Robert L. Wilson were on alert. Moncla, 27, was born in Mansura, Louisiana. He was married with two young children and had been a medical student at Louisiana State University before joining the Air Force. According to the accident report, he had 811 flying hours, 121 of them in the F-89. Wilson, the 22-year-old radar observer, had about 207.

The Northrop F-89 Scorpion was a two-seat, all-weather interceptor. According to the Open Skies Project, six F-89s broke up in flight in 1952. The whole fleet was grounded on September 22 that year for wing modifications.

Thirty-three minutes

At 6:17 p.m., the radar station at Calumet, call sign “Pillow,” picked up an aircraft over Lake Superior. According to ground controller 2nd Lt. Douglas Stuart, it was believed to be Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) C-47 VC-912. Because it was about 48 km (30 miles) off its flight plan course, it was classified as “unknown.”

Moncla and Wilson took off from Kinross at 6:22 p.m. under the control of the Sault Ste. Marie radar, “Naples.” Radio reception was poor, and the crew asked whether to continue. They were told to proceed at their discretion.

At 6:41 p.m., Pillow took over the intercept, with the jet at about 9,100 m. At 6:47 p.m., it was sent down to 2,130 m (7,000 ft) over northern Lake Superior. At 6:51 p.m., it was given a new heading, with the target reported at 11 o’clock, 16 km away.

According to the report, the two returns then merged on Pillow’s scope. The other aircraft’s return continued on its original course, while the F-89’s return disappeared. Radio and radar contact were lost at 6:55 p.m.

The 33 minutes and what followed. Graphic: Sky Glitch

Where did the jet go?

The report’s search summary puts the point of lost contact at 48°00′N, 86°49′W. The missing aircraft message gives 45°00′N for the same point, which would fall in Lake Michigan. Another passage places the jet about 240 km northeast of Kinross. The coordinates, however, lie to the northwest. Madison newspapers at the time placed the site about 113 km from Keweenaw Point and 64 km from the Ontario shore.

The last known position, the radar sites and two versions of the C-47’s route. Graphic: Sky Glitch; base map: Natural Earth

The weather was poor. At departure, the overcast was at 1,200 m with 13 km visibility. Near the last position, the ceiling was down to 150 m, with 1.6 km visibility in light snow. The weather summary noted moderate to heavy icing in the clouds.

The jet carried about 1 hour 45 minutes of fuel. Each crew member had a one-man dinghy.

According to the Open Skies Project, Lt. William Mingenbach took off in another F-89 at about 7:15 p.m. At about 7:35 p.m., he and his radar operator heard a roughly five-second transmission that broke off mid-sentence. They believed it was Moncla’s voice. Their jet lacked retractable engine screens, so with icing forecast they were only allowed to circle.

The search ran from November 24 to 28. US, Canadian, Coast Guard and civilian aircraft covered about 76,700 km² (29,600 sq mi). Snow and icing hampered the work, and snow ruled out a land search. Two reports considered reliable were checked, without result.

In May 1954, the search was reopened after a resident near Limer, Ontario, reported a low-flying aircraft that night. He later said he may have misjudged the time. The search was closed on May 23.

A family’s questions

In 2003, on the 50th anniversary, The Town Talk of Alexandria, Louisiana, interviewed Moncla’s family. According to the article, the Air Force declared both men dead about a month after the disappearance, and no memorial service was held. Moncla’s widow received an American flag.

Moncla’s sister, Leoni M. Shannon, said the family never got straight answers, and that their mother “was never the same.” A cousin recalled Moncla’s last radio message as “I’m going in for a closer look.” That line does not appear in any public document.

Moncla’s memorial stone stands in Moreauville, Louisiana. Its inscription says he disappeared while intercepting a UFO over the Canadian border.

The Canadian transport

According to the accident report, the intercepted aircraft was RCAF Dakota (C-47) VC-912. It was flying from Winnipeg to Sudbury, crossing northern Lake Superior from west to east at 2,130 m.

The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison reported on November 24 that the jet vanished from radar near a Canadian C-47 that was 48 km off its course. Truax commander Lt. Col. Harry W. Shoup suggested the jet may have overtaken the slower transport. It may then have turned away to avoid a collision, stalled and gone into a spin. He did not believe the men could have survived the night in the icy lake.

The RCAF later answered inquiries in several letters. A 1961 letter said RCAF files showed no report of an incident involving an RCAF aircraft in the Lake Superior area. Another letter said the RCAF had found no information about an intercept of an RCAF C-47. It added that the C-47’s Canadian flight plan alone would make such an intercept seem unlikely.

In 2004, Gerald Fosberg wrote to Canadian researcher Gord Heath that he had flown the C-47 with 412 Squadron at Rockcliffe. He said they flew at night at 2,100–2,700 m, above a solid cloud deck. Near Sault Ste. Marie, a ground station asked whether they had seen another aircraft’s lights. They had not. Later, someone from Kinross phoned him, and he again said they had seen nothing.

Fosberg said his flight went straight from Fort William to Sault Ste. Marie and never left its route. That differs from the Winnipeg–Sudbury route in the report, and it lies far from the F-89’s last known position.

One more detail dates from 1968. The Sault Daily Star in Ontario wrote then that, according to its files, the “UFO alert” had been arranged in advance with the RCAF. The same article said the C-47 crew had seen nothing of the US interceptor. No other source confirms that the alert was an exercise.

How it became a UFO story

The case became widely known through retired Marine Corps Maj. Donald Keyhoe’s 1955 book, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Keyhoe wrote that Truax Field gave the Associated Press an official release. It said the jet was followed by radar until it “merged with an object” 113 km (70 miles) off Keweenaw Point. Keyhoe said the release ran in an early edition of the Chicago Tribune. According to him, Air Force headquarters then withdrew it and said the radar operators had misread the scope.

Keyhoe’s version departs from the report on several points. In his account, the target appeared over the Soo Locks, and the jet chased it at over 800 km/h (500 mph). After the merge, he wrote, the combined return quickly left the scope. The report, by contrast, says the target continued on its course. The Open Skies Project found no mention of the Soo Locks in official records or 1953 newspapers.

Two stories about the same evening. Graphic: Sky Glitch

Keyhoe returned to the case in True magazine in 1967, as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). By then he wrote that the jet followed the target for 257 km (160 miles) and that a two-day search found nothing. The report says the search lasted five days. Keyhoe added that the Canadian air force had written to NICAP that no Canadian aircraft were in the area. He called the object “quite definitely an alien space vehicle.”

In an analysis for NICAP, Willy Smith cites Loren E. Gross’s UFO history series. According to Gross, the pilot asked for a change of altitude, then turned east-northeast and “dived on the unknown.” Smith argued that the case should be classified as “unidentified.”

Wreckage that wasn’t his

On October 29, 1968, two prospectors found part of an aircraft tail section on the Ontario shore near Cozens Cove and Alona Bay. The Ontario Provincial Police said it came from a military aircraft. Maj. J. H. Parker at Kincheloe Air Force Base, as Kinross had been renamed, said it belonged to a high-performance military jet. In its second article, the Sault Daily Star wrote that it could have come from any of seven lost aircraft and that a link to the F-89 seemed unlikely.

Gord Heath later followed up. Transport Canada had no record of the find, and an access-to-information request to the Department of National Defence turned up nothing. The piece’s whereabouts are unknown.

In September 2006, a group calling itself the Great Lakes Dive Company claimed it had found the F-89 on the lake bottom by sonar, with a metal disc nearby. James Carrion, then head of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), checked the claim. No company of that name was registered in Michigan, Great Lakes salvage operators had never heard of it, and the AP story attached to the original email had never been published. Shipwreck researcher Brendon Baillod also found no trace of the company. The website soon disappeared, and the claim is now regarded as a hoax.

The sober take

What is certain

At 6:22 p.m. on November 23, 1953, F-89C 51-5853A took off from Kinross to identify an unknown target over Lake Superior.
At 6:55 p.m., the returns of the jet and the target merged on the Calumet radar. The jet’s return then disappeared, and radio and radar contact were lost.
The weather was poor, with low cloud, snow and icing.
A five-day search found no wreckage and no trace of the crew.
The Air Force identified the target as Canadian C-47 VC-912. The Wisconsin State Journal reported this the next day.

What is not established

That the target really was VC-912. The RCAF found no record of an intercept. The pilot said they never left their route and gave a different route from the one in the report.
That the intercept was a prearranged exercise. Only one sentence in a 1968 Sault Daily Star article says so.
The last position. The report gives two different coordinates, and one passage gives a direction that does not match them.
The cause of the loss. The Air Force withheld the board’s analysis, findings and recommendations even in its Freedom of Information Act release.
Whether the jet was still flying after 6:55 p.m. Mingenbach’s brief transmission may suggest so, but it is not certain the voice was Moncla’s.
Keyhoe’s claims: the original AP release, the Soo Locks and the vanishing return. Only Keyhoe’s writings report them, and they do not fully agree with each other.

Strengths and weaknesses of the explanations

Intercept, then an accident in bad weather: the jet reached the target and then went down. Possible causes are icing, mechanical failure, or the pilot losing orientation in cloud and darkness. The weather, the type’s earlier problems and the target continuing on course support this. Against it, the released documents do not say so, and there is no wreckage.
A collision with the C-47: Lt. Col. Shoup considered this, but the target’s return continued, and the C-47 pilot saw nothing.
The target was not the C-47: the Canadian letters and Fosberg’s route point this way. That does not require an extraordinary explanation. It could have been another aircraft or a misidentified radar return.
The merging returns: according to the Open Skies Project, the Calumet radar could not separate targets less than about 800 m apart. A merge therefore means the two aircraft came close, not that they collided. By their calculation, at that range the radar could not see below about 300 m, so a low-flying jet could have dropped off the scope without any collision.
A collision with, or capture by, a UFO: this comes largely from Keyhoe’s writings and contradicts the report on several points. No independent evidence supports it.

Open question

Two things could settle the case. One is the release of the board’s withheld findings and the ground controller’s full statement. The other is finding the wreckage on the bottom of Lake Superior. Until then, it remains unknown what the target was and what happened to the jet after 6:55 p.m.