GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) -- Do you believe in aliens? It's a loaded question, to be sure, and one that elicits a strong response in certain people.
Some people couldn't care less. Others gobble up any Area 51 factoid they can find. But one thing seems to be clear -- highlighted by the 2021 report put together by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- there are lots of questions with few answers; countless sightings with no understood explanation.
Saturday marks the 71st anniversary of a major sighting that stirred up national headlines and accusations of a government cover-up. It's often referred to as the Kinross Incident, and it happened here in Michigan.
WATCHING THE SKIES
Some of the remains of the Kincheloe Air Force Base still stand in Kinross Charter Township, about 25 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie.
It was first built during World War II as a refueling stop and to maintain a presence to protect the nearby Soo Locks. After serving as a civilian airport, the Air Force reclaimed the property during the Cold War, operating the base from 1952 until it was decommissioned in 1977.
The now-defunct base served as the backdrop to the story, starting in the early evening hours of Nov. 23, 1953.
Radar technicians on base detected something flying in restricted airspace above the Soo Locks, traveling at more than 500 mph. Commanders ordered a crew into the air to investigate, a job that fell to Lts. Felix Moncla Jr. and Robert Wilson.
Moncla piloted the F-89C Scorpion jet while Wilson served as his navigator. The jet flew to 30,000 feet and set a path to intercept the unidentified object that showed up on radar, which was by then over Lake Superior.
Historical reports of the incident say Wilson was struggling to keep track of the object because it kept changing directions and heavy snow was causing issues with the jet's radar. The solution was to feed the jet coordinates from the base's radar team.
After about 30 minutes, Moncla and Wilson had caught up with the object and were nearing the intercept point about 70 miles off of the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The base's radar crew guided them down to 7,000 feet.
Suddenly, silence. The crew watched as the two signals merged into one on the radar. The blip of the unidentified object "veered in another direction and vanished." Moncla and Wilson's jet was never seen again.
The Air Force searched more than 29,000 square miles over the course of five days, finding no signs of plane wreckage, Moncla or Wilson.
WHAT HAPPENED?
That's the story that Air Force officials told, at least initially. Days later, that statement was retracted and a new one was issued. In it, USAF officials said a ground control radar operator had misread the scope and that Moncla and Wilson had actually completed their mission, identifying the object as a C-47 from the Royal Canadian Air Force that had somehow gotten 30 miles off course. Then, the USAF said, Moncla was most likely stricken with vertigo and crashed into Lake Superior while returning to the base.
There are several problems with that explanation. For one, Canadian military officials said they had no aircraft that flew over Lake Superior that night. Second, it appears it was not the only explanation provided by the Air Force.
According to Donald Keyhoe, a former Marine Corps aviator and UFO researcher, Moncla's widow was given two different stories, both of which were different than the official statement given to the press. According to Keyhoe, Moncla's widow was told the plane crashed while flying too low. Later, she was then told that the jet had exploded at a high altitude.
Keyhoe's organization, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, drew even more skeptics when it claimed that any mention of the mission had been expunged from all official records held by Project Blue Book, the Air Force's UFO investigative team.
The story resurfaced again 15 years later in 1968 when some prospectors more than 200 miles away from the search area came across some aircraft wreckage. Police investigators in Ontario recovered a stabilizer from the wreckage made with a heavy metal that suggested to experts that it came from a military plane -- one designed to withstand heat generated by faster speeds. Air Force officials agreed with that assessments that it was likely a military part but did not believe the stabilizer belonged to an F-89C Scorpion, meaning it wouldn't have come from Moncla's downed plane.
It has been 71 years since that jet took off from Kincheloe Air Force Base and there does not appear to be any single satisfying answer to what happened. But Moncla and Wilson are remembered for their fateful flight and their brush with the unknown.
On a memorial erected near Moncla's hometown of Mansura, Louisiana, a plaque reads that he "disappeared (while) intercepting a UFO over the Canadian border as a pilot of an F-89 jet plane."