Season 08 Episode 35: Screwball Scramble

but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to Crimewave Atsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your fan coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to see you on board. It was late one evening in November nineteen fifty three, and a storm was brewing in the skies of a northern Michigan, USA. Brutal winds whistled across the chilly surfaces of the Great Lakes. But inside the Kinross Air Force Base, just a few miles from

the Canadian border, all was quiet. With the long Thanksgiving weekend just a couple of days away, the base was emptier than usual, with some officers already on leave for the week. The sound of the radar ping caught everybody off guard. In the ground control suite, Second Lieutenant Douglas Stuart leaned forward in his chair, squinting hard at the unexpected intruder, an unidentified object in US air space about one hundred and sixty miles to the northwest of the base.

It was heading east, but right then Douglas was more concerned about its origin than its destination. It seemed to be coming from a restricted air space over the Sioux Locks, consisting of two canals and four parallel locks. The two locks are a vital part of America's global trade infrastructure. They allow cargo ships to travel from the Great Lakes region all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Any threat

in their vicinity was taken extremely seriously. The ground control staff double checked their records, but they already knew what they would find. No unscheduled aircraft had permission to fly in this area, nor had any new requests come in. Whatever this object in the sky was, it was not playing by the rules. Since nineteen forty seven and the events in Roswell, New Mexico, speculation and conspiracy theories about

UFOs had gripped the United States. But the people employed at Kinross Air Force Base were not prone to such fantasizing. Their job was to approach every situation from a rational and scientific perspective. This often meant applying the principle of Ockham's razor, all else being equal, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one, and so it was with that in mind that Douglas Stewart and his colleagues came up with a working theory for what was going on.

The base was less than thirty miles from the northern border, and there was a Canadian Air Force base not far away on the other side. Clearly, the object was a Royal Canadian Air Force transport plane that had clumsily diverged from its route. Its intended flight path was probably within Canada, from the base near Winnipeg to another in Ontario, but thanks to the high winds and poor visibility, it had veered off course just enough to veer into US airspace.

In other words, this was all probably a false alarm. You're listening to unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Radar can tell you a lot about an aircraft its position in the sky, its speed of travel, and its vicinity to other aircraft. But it can't provide much of a visual and it definitely can't differentiate friend from foe. For that back in the nineteen fifties, only human eyes will do.

Many air force bases have one or two Alert five aircraft, that is, fighter jets that are on standby, ready to be airborne within five minutes if they are needed. On that night of November twenty third, nineteen fifty three, kin Ross had two. The unidentified object was first spotted at six seventeen p m and by six twenty p m a fighter jet was ready to take off. Despite the likelihood that the situation was a false alarm, it was

still a daunting mission. Conditions were terrible, with scattered snow storms and a thick layer of cloud impacting visibility. The US Air Force needed a steady hand, somebody who could fly using only their instruments and keeper calm head no matter what this thing turned out to be. Twenty seven year old First Lieutenant Felix Montcla Junior was the man for the job. Although still relatively early in his career, Moncla was an experienced pilot who was no stranger to conflict.

He'd served in the military during World War II, then re enlisted in the Air Force when the American Korean War began in nineteen fifty. He'd clocked more than eight hundred flying hours. At six twenty two, Moncla climbed into the cockpit of an F eighty nine C fighter jet. Behind him was his navigator, Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson, who was in charge of radar observation, while montlor piloted the jet.

Designed by famed aircraft industrialist Jack Northrop, the F eighty nine C was one of the best and fastest aircrafts the Air Force had at its disposal. Its nickname the Scorpion, referred to its distinctive lifted tail, but also to its deadly capabilities. It was specifically designed to chase and intercept hostile enemy aircraft. For the purposes of this mission, the Scorpion was given the equally dramatic call sign Avenger. Red.

Monkler and Wilson ran through their usual pre flight checks, making sure that the Scorpion systems were all functioning correctly, and then First Lieutenant Moncla taxied the plane over to its assigned runway at the base as thick flakes of snow drifted down onto the cockpit window. Clare and Wilson rattled about inside the cockpit as the jet eased upwards through a thick blanket of low hanging cloud. Moments later and they'd burst through and leveled off under the soft

blue light of a bright, waning gibbus. Beneath them was only cloud, while above twinkled all the stars of the known universe. Moncla flicked on the radio and reported his position back to base, but every time he tried, the signal kept cutting out due to the tumultuous weather below behind him. Second Lieutenant Wilson was also struggling to track their position on radar. He stared at the green blip

of the unidentified object on the screen with frustration. Just as he seemed to have its trajectory locked in, the mysterious aircraft suddenly changed direction. It was as though it knew it was being chased, but whatever it was, it

was no match for the scorpion. After a few more minutes of flying, Montless radio settled down, and with Wilson finally getting a handle on the object's location, he deftly began to direct Moncla to the necessary position, with Avenger red zipping through the sky at five hundred miles per hour. Twenty minutes later they'd caught up with it. It was

six fifty p m when they began closing in. At Wilson's instruction, Moncla angled the nose of the scorpion downwards toward the heavy cloud below and prepared to intercept the unidentified object at around seven thousand feet. Back at ground control, at six fifty two p m, Second Lieutenant Douglas Stuart radioed Moncla to confirm they were ten miles out from their target, which was roughly towards eleven o'clock from their position. A burst of static came back, followed by Montler's voice

copy that he said a moment later. Stuart told Montcla to be aware that the target would be coming up on his left side but moving across to his right. If he didn't see it on the first try, they would redirect him to attempt a second pass. But this time they heard nothing back from the cockpit. Second Lieutenant Douglas Stewart wasn't too concerned about Monkler's lack of response.

The reception had been a problem all night, and it was most likely that Moncla simply hadn't received his last message, and even if they had, they were at a critical moment in their flight, probably absorbed in other tasks. So Stuart and his colleagues turned their attention to the radar screens and watched in silent as the two green blips moved closer and closer to each other. It was six fifty five PM when the Scorpion's radar icon converged with

the unidentified object. For that brief moment, they became a single blip, flashing together in unison on the screen. Typically, this indicates that one aircraft has pulled in directly alongside the other and the two are flying in formation. This is standard procedure for an air Force intercept. Nonetheless, Stuart and the rest of the team held their breath as they continued to stare at the merged dots, waiting for

them to separate. It was strange. It seemed to be taking longer than it should, until finally one of the blips began to move again, but the other had completely disappeared from the radar screen. Stewart and his team scrambled to get a hold on the situation. They hurriedly radioed the cockpit, but again they had trouble reaching the pilot. For whatever reason, it looked as though First Lieutenant Monkla had been forced to shoot the unidentified object out of

the sky. They radioed the cockpit again, but still there was no answer. Then they noticed something. It wasn't the unidentified object that had vanished. It was the scorpion. Stewart watched on with amusement as the unidentified object continued along its original east to west flight path as though nothing had happened, and then after a few more seconds that blip disappeared from the screen to It had to be some kind of malfunction, a fault either in the plains, mechanics,

or something on the ground. Stuart grabbed the nearest headset and made an urgent radio transmission to Avenge of Red, Trying to keep his voice calm and steady. He ordered Montla and Wilson to respond and confirmed their location, but there was nothing but static. As he tried again and again, an uneasy silence settled over the ground control room. As the minutes ticked past, the knot of dread in his stomach began to tighten as the unthinkable truth sank in.

A US Air Force Fighter jet had just dropped off the face of the earth, possibly downed. After several frantic moments of unanswered calls to the cockpit, Second Lieutenant Stuart requested reinforcements. Although the base had a second fighter jet ready to be scrambled at short notice, it was currently out on a patrol flight. Stuart radioed its pilot, firstly Lieutenant William Mingenback. Keeping his words as simple and dispassionate as he could, he tried to explain what had happened.

Then he directed mingen Back to fly towards Avenger Red's last known location. Stuart and his colleagues still held out hope that there could be a rational explanation for it all. Patchy radio reception wasn't unusual, and it was highly possible that the bad weather had simply damaged some element of the aircraft, leading to a total loss of radar and radio contact with the ground. If another aircraft could get physically close enough to the lost jet, they might be

able to get through to it. After thirty minutes of flying, the Lieutenant Mingenback's jet approached the last known location of Avenger Red. A crackling sound squawked out at the radio. Through the chaos of white noise, he heard a short transmission. The words were impossible to make out. It was like snatches of a conversation somebody for ever in the middle of a sentence, but the voice was unmistakable to Mingenbach and his navigator. It was Felix Montler Junior. Then a

few seconds later the transmission cut out. Utterly convinced of what they'd heard, Mingenbach frantically tried to re establish contact with a Venger Red, but after five more failed attempts, they gave up. A disappointed Lieutenant Mingenbach contacted ground control to give them the update. They agreed to move to Plan B, conducting a visual search of the area to look for any signs of the lost aircraft. This was

easier said than done given the weather conditions. Asign from the scattered snow storms, the cloud was unusually thick and low in the sky, meaning the only way to conduct a visual search was to fly at a low altitude, which, in turn but the jet at high risk of icing up. So a third plane was sent up to assist, one that was better equipped to fly in low icy conditions For close to an hour, the two jets circled the area, searching for any visual signs of Avenger Red, while making

periodic attempts to reach the aircraft via radio. But by eight thirty p m. The whole thing was beginning to feel like a doomed mission. Even based on the most conservative calculations, Monkler's jet would be out of fuel by now, and as the snow grew heavier and the conditions more treacherous, the search crews were stood down. For the rest of the night. US Air Force staff and their Canadian counterparts

worked tirelessly to locate the missing plane. Crews on the ground searched for debris, while numerous aircraft continued to patrol from above as much as weather permitted, but by the morning they'd found nothing. There was no debris, no signs of a crash, and no trace of either the plane nor its two occupants. Air Force officers are trained to be ready for anything, but nobody was prepared for this scenario.

There was no protocol for a disappearing plane, and certainly no rule book on how to explain it to the public. The search continued for the best part of a week, but was called off on November twenty eighth. Then two days later, a glimmer of hope was offered by a group of railway workers stationed about a hundred miles north of the Kinross Air Force Base. They claimed to have heard what sounded like a strange, loud crash on land

on the night in question. The search resumed for a short time, only for rescuers to come up empty handed once more. An initial report was filed on the night of November twenty third, offering a brief and barebones version of events. That report was summarized in an official news release, which stated that the missing jet was followed by radar until it merged with an object and then vanished. The Chicago Tribune published a front page story under the headline

jet to aboard vanishes over Lake Superior. Within hours, the story was making news nationwide. It's possible that the US Air Force had simply underestimated the growing fascination with UFOs. Either way. Seemingly stunned by the fevered attention surrounding the disappearance of one of their planes, they quickly tried to backtrack. They attracted their initial news statement and instead released a new one, offering a more complete and pointedly more rational

version of events. First Lieutenant Felix Montler Junior and Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson had been assigned to intercept an unidentified aircraft. The mission had been a success, and the aircraft had been intercepted and identified as a Royal Canadian air Force plane. Radar contact had been lost shortly after the jet turned round to head back to base, and soon after that

the plane had presumably crashed into Lake Superior. As to why a capable pilot would have lost control of his aircraft, the statement suggested that Montla had likely been overcome by sudden vertigo, a rare but dangerous condition where a pilot become spatially disorientated, potentially resulting in fatal mistakes. The plane disappearing from radar was blamed on unusual atmospheric conditions in the area, and the lack of wreckage was no surprise.

Lake Superior is the second largest lake in the world in terms of surface area, with an average depth of thirteen hundred feet. An object that landed inside it could quite easily disappear and remain unfound to this day. On the face of it, it all seemed plausible enough, but the holes in the narrative were obvious to anyone who was paying attention, and it didn't help that the authorities couldn't seem to agree with each other about what had happened.

For a start, Canadian officials publicly refuted the US Air Force's account. According to them, all of their aircraft were accounted for and there had been no flights in the area in question. On the night of November twenty third, one Canadian Air Force plane had been flying near the border, but they denied that it had ever crossed over into

US airspace. Whatever the unidentified object had been, it did not come from Canada, at least according to the Canadians, which left the tricky unanswered question where had it come from. It didn't take long for conspiracy theories to take hold. During the nineteen fifties, roughly a quarter of the American population believed in what's known as the extraterrestrial hypothesis, the idea that many unidentified flying objects are in fact alien

spacecraft from other planets. So once word got out that two U US Air Force pilots and their jet had vanished mysteriously without a trace at the very moment they'd crossed paths with the UFO, many people jumped to what they saw as the obvious conclusion it was an alien abduction. At the time, there were a number of civilian groups conducting research into UFOs. The largest and most well resourced was the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP.

In the years following the incident at Kinross Air Force Base, they repeatedly tried to obtain more information about what exactly had happened. Then, one day, some investigators from NICAP made the unsettling discovery that the event was completely missing from official Air Force records. There was no mention at all of an intercept mission from the night of November twenty third, nineteen fifty three. Despite their best efforts to uncover the truth,

the case went cold for more than a decade. It was in late October nineteen sixty eight when two prospectors were digging about near an area known as Cousin's Cove, roughly seventy miles north of Kinross along the coast of Lake Superior. Wandering around the bush near the shoreline, the pair spotted some unusual metallic debris. On closer inspection, it

was quite clearly the remnants of an aircraft. After a careful inspection from the Ontario Provincial Police, the type of metal was found to be far heavier than would be used in a commercial aircraft, suggesting it was very likely to have been a military plane. Although this discovery reignited interest in the case among UFO believers, it didn't garner

much wider attention. Report on the discovery itself are sketchy, and there is no record of whether the debris was ever proven to be from an F eighty nine, never mind the one that went missing from kin Ross fifteen years before. And so once again, the strange case of First Lieutenant Felix Monkler's missing Scorpion jet went quiet once again. That was until two thousand and six, when UFO researcher

Francis Ridge received a strange email. It was late August in two thousand and six that Francis Ridge was contacted by a man named Preston Miller. The email included an excerpt from an Associated Press story suggesting that the missing F eighty nine had been discovered by an underwater search team while taking scans at the bottom of Lake Superior. There was a link too. When Ridge clicked it, it opened up a website for the Great Lakes Dive Company.

It contained two startling images taken with side scan sonar. Both showed images of what looked to be a completely intact aircraft with the telltale tip tank and upswept tail reminiscent of the F eighty nine Scorpion. Francis Ridge immediately posted the email on the website UFO Updates, and before long the apparent discovery was flooding UFO forums and message

boards all over the world. When a number of reporters attempted to contact the Great Lakes Dive Company, they were directed to a man called Adam Jimenez, who declared himself the group's spokesperson. Jimenez confirmed the images were real with a number of outlets, and even appeared on famed late night talk show Coast to Coast talking to much revered

UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe. What Jimenez then revealed was that something else had also been found at the bottom of the lake close to the F eighty nine, a strange, metallic, tear dropped shaped object of unidentifiable origin. Jimenez suggested this could well be the object that downed Felix Montler's plane. A short time later, apparent sonar images of this object were also posted on the Great Lakes Dive Company website. As the UFO community became increasingly excited by the news,

efforts were made to verify the Great Lakes Dive Company's credentials. However, no further evidence beyond the website could be found for their existence. The so called Adam Jimenez proved equally difficult to pin down, with only the email address and a phone number provided on the website proving that he existed. Two three weeks after Francis Ridge received his mysterious email, the Great Lakes Dive Company website was taken offline and

the mysterious Adam Jimenez stopped replying to inquiries. It was sadly just a hoax. To this day, no trace of Felix Monkler or Robert Wilson has ever been found. No convincing explanation has ever emerged to fill in all of

the bizarre gaps in the official narrative. No official version of events seems to account for the aircraft banishing at the precise moment it intersected with the UFO, Nor do they explain the mysterious five seconds snatch of Felix's voice supposedly heard more than an hour after the supposed crash by the crew of the second Scorpion sent to find them. To quote Donald Keyho, a Marine Corps aviator turned UFO researcher, the Kinross incident, as it became known, remains one of

the strangest cases on record anywhere in the world. This episode was written by Emma Dibden and produced by Richard McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.

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