The Kinross Incident: The Disappearance of Lt. Felix Moncla and Lt. Robert Wilson

Kinross Air Force Base sat near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. In November 1953, crews of the 433rd Fighter Interceptor Squadron were there on temporary duty from Truax Field in Madison, Wisconsin. One of them was 1st Lt. Felix Eugene "Gene" Moncla Jr., 27, from Mansura, Louisiana. His radar observer was 2nd Lt. Robert L. Wilson of Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Monday, November 23, 1953. It was night, and the weather was stormy. At 6:17 PM radar picked up a return crossing northern Lake Superior from west to east. The ground controller, 2nd Lt. Douglas A. Stuart, classified it as unknown because it "was off the flight plan course by about 30 miles."

At 6:22 PM Moncla and Wilson scrambled in F-89C 51-5853A, call sign "Avenger Red." Radio reception was poor, so Calumet Air Force Station on the Keweenaw Peninsula, code name Pillow, took over the intercept. The vectors came in. Heading 270, descend to 7,000 feet. Turn right, heading 20. At 6:52 PM the target was "at 11 o'clock, 10 miles."

6:55 PM. The two blips merged. The accident report records what came next: "The radar return from the other aircraft indicated it was continuing on its original flight path, while the return from the F-89 disappeared from the GCI station's radar scope." The IFF signal was gone.

Around 7:35 PM other pilots heard a possible transmission lasting about 5 seconds. Lt. William Mingenbach thought it was Moncla's voice saying "we had better..." At 8:07 PM the jet was declared overdue, its fuel exhausted. The USAF, the Coast Guard, the RCAF and the Civil Air Patrol searched until November 28. Nothing was found.

The first Air Force release said the jet "was followed by radar until it merged with an object 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper Michigan." The Chicago Tribune ran it in an early edition. Then the story changed. The operator had "misread the scope." The unknown was RCAF Dakota VC-912, flying from Winnipeg at 7,000 feet. The accident board concluded that the F-89 presumably crashed into Lake Superior. It raised vertigo as a possibility, but vertigo is not among its formal findings.

Canada confirmed its plane was flying but said it was on its flight plan over Canadian territory. Its pilot, F/L Gerald Fosberg, recalled that a ground station "asked us if we had seen another aircraft's lights in our area." They had seen nothing. ATIC stated there was "no record in the Air Force files of sighting at Kinross AFB on 23 November 1953." Dr. Donald Menzel suggested a phantom echo caused by stormy atmospheric conditions.

Donald Keyhoe brought the case into UFO literature with The Flying Saucer Conspiracy in 1955. In his version the merged blip also left the scope. He later cited an Air Force document that read: "It seems incredible, but the blip apparently just swallowed our F-89." In 1968 prospectors found a tail section at Alona Bay, Ontario, but a link to the F-89 later looked unlikely. In 2006 a Great Lakes Dive Company claimed to have found the jet on the lakebed. Nobody could confirm the company existed, and the claim is now treated as a fraud.

A memorial to Moncla stands in Sacred Heart Cemetery, Moreauville, Louisiana. Researcher Gord Heath has kept an archive on the case since 2001. The old Calumet radar site now belongs to the Open Skies Project. "We still have a lot of research to do," says its president, Kyle Kary. Two men and a jet vanished over Lake Superior. No trace of them has ever been found.