DETROIT – As with most things, Michigan has had its hand in the UFO cookie jar a few times.
Related: ‘I’ll believe this to the day I die’: The Michigan UFO craze of 1966
An Unidentified Flying Object is defined as any aerial object or optical phenomenon not readily identifiable to the observer. Feds now refer to them as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs.
On Nov. 23, 1953, radar operators stationed at Sault Ste. Marie were reportedly alerted to an unknown object flying in restricted airspace over Lake Superior, near the Soo Locks. An interceptor aircraft took off from the nearby Kincheloe Air Force Base to investigate. It was piloted by Felix Moncla and had Robert L. Wilson as a radar operator.
For whatever reason, the radar on the F-89C was having problems tracking the object, which allegedly kept changing course, so Ground Control gave Moncla directions.
Moncla pursued the object for a half hour at speeds of up to 500 miles per hour.
Ground Control watched the two blips on the radar screen -- representing the F89-C jet and the unknown object -- get closer until they became one blip, roughly 70 miles off the Keweenaw Peninsula. The single blip continued on the course it was flying before vanishing from the radar screen.
Attempts made to contact the jet were unsuccessful. A search and rescue operation by the United States and Canadian Air Forces failed to find any trace of the aircraft or its occupants.
The disappearance is known as the Kinross Incident.
The U.S. Air Force reported that the jet crashed while pursuing a Canadian aircraft that was off course as it was flying to Sudbury, Ontario. The Royal Canadian Air Force has denied this. Subury’s airport was under construction at the time and didn’t open until the next year.
The Open Skies Project, a nonprofit that is working to restore the Calumet Air Force Station, has a breakdown of theories, as well as an in-depth and well-researched version of what likely happened -- it crashed during a snowstorm pursuing an aircraft that went off course.
That being said, Moncla’s gravestone states he disappeared “intercepting a UFO over Canadian Border.”
I want that on my gravestone regardless of how I go.