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Let us help you succeed. Here's al Go to beachbody dot com to claim your free membership and start feeling great. Welcome to Unexplained Extra with Me Richard McClain Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make
it into the previous show. In last week's episode, Ash on the Floor, we traced the extraordinary tale of Stefan mccarlac, who, in late May nineteen sixty seven claimed to observe two unidentified flying objects while prospecting in White Shell Provincial Park in Manitoba, Canada. Mccrlac's incredible claim, which would become known as Canada's best documented UFO case, was investigated by both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Royal Canadian Air Force.
For many it is the involvement of the Air Force that is most intriguing about this particular case. It suggests there was a willingness at quite a high level to at least entertain the notion that mcarlac might well have seen an unusual aircraft of which the Air Force had no record. We might assume this was due in part to the heightened tensions of the Cold War and the paranoia of the Canadian and their allied governments over the
technological capabilities of the Soviet Union. But then again, perhaps given the peculiar events that occurred one night over Lake Superior back in nineteen fifty three, there was good reason for the Royal Canadian Air Force to keep an open mind when it came to tales of mysterious unknown aircraft.
It was early in the evening of November twenty third in nineteen fifty three when US Air Force pilot First Lieutenant Felix la and radar operator Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson received the command to scramble their F ninety eight Scorpion fighter jet to intercept an unidentified flying object. The object was picked up by US Air Defense Command radar operators located in Sue Saint Marie, Michigan, having crossed over at speed from Canadian to US airspace about one hundred and
sixty miles to the northwest over Lake Superior. With the object flying close to a commercial gateway completely unannounced, it was deemed an immediate and obvious threat. Twenty seven year old First Lieutenant Felix Monkler had served during World War Two and later joined the United States Air Force as
an officer pilot trainee. By November of nineteen fifty three, he'd clocked a total of eight hundred and eleven flying hours over his career, including one hundred and twenty one hours in an air aircraft similar to the F ninety eight Scorpion that he was flying that night. As such, there was no reason to suspect anything would go wrong
on what was seemingly a routine investigative mission. However, once in pursuit of the object, moncla and Wilson had great difficulty in tracking it with their onboard radar due to the frequency with which it kept changing course. In the end, it fell to the US Air Defense Command radar team to help direct the pair toward the object from the ground, and before long monclass Scorpion was gradually homing in on it.
Over the course of thirty minutes, the radar operators watched as the green blip of the Scorpion drew nearer to the blip of the UFO, steadily descending from twenty five thousand feet to around eight thousand feet, where the object was situated with the blips almost upon each other. The operation, as then watched, transfixed as the two of them drew closer and closer together, until the Scorpion finally caught up with it. In Upper Michigan, seventy miles off keywan Or Point.
With the ground control team waiting to hear details from Lieutenant Moncla, they could only watch on as the two blips continued on their trajectories toward each other until they
completely merged into one. By the next sweep of the radar, where they expected to see the two blips separate again as if Monclass Scorpion had flown over or under the object, the scorpion completely vanished from the screen or the while the green blip of the mysterious, still unidentified object continued casually along its way until a short time later it
too completely disappeared from the screen. As furious efforts were made to establish communication with Lieutenant Monkler, it was obvious to all those present that the only reasonable explanation for the Scorpion's disappearance was that the plane had crashed somewhere
in Lake Superior. Numerous search and rescue teams from both the US Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force, who had by then been informed at the mystery aircraft, were immediately dispatched to recover the missing plane and, if possible, its two crew, Although it was unlikely there was still some hope that the men had successfully bailed out of their aircraft or had been able to complete an emergency landing on water, but even if that were the case,
neither could be expected to last long in the freezing winter temperature of the lake. The search continued throughout the night as efforts were kept up to try and make
contact with the missing scorpion. However, with it being night time and with visibility low due to an intensifying snowstorm, the search was eventually called off until the morning, and though it continued at first light, it wasn't long before it became clear that they would not be finding first Lieutenant Moncler and second Lieutenant Wilson scorpion any time soon, with it assumed to have either broken up entirely or sunk to the bottom of the lake, taking Moncler and
Wilson with it. Despite one pilot involved in the search and rescue mission claiming to have heard a short transmission from Monkler around forty minutes after he and Wilson went missing,
no one else was able to verify the broadcast. The following morning, the first official statement regarding the incident was published in an early edition of the Chicago Tribune under the headline Jet two aboard vanishes over late Superior, with the US Air Force stating simply that Lieutenant Monkler's plane was followed by radar until it merged with an object
seventy miles off Keywan Or Point in Upper Michigan. No sooner had this statement been made, However, the Air Force promptly retracted it, and that was when things started to get really strange. With the first statement retracted, a new
statement was promptly released by the US Air Force. Monkler's scorpion hadn't merged with the object at all, they said, but had in fact succeeded in its mission to intercept the UFO, which had by then been formally identified as a Dakota or Royal Canadian Air Force C forty seven aircraft, that had innocently veered thirty miles off course, and since it was unaware of its position, it had not informed
the US Air Force. Accordingly, Moncler and Wilson's scorpion had then tragically crashed on their return from completing the mission, with a suspected pilot error being the most likely cause. First Lieutenant Moncler was said to frequently suffer debilitating bouts of vertigo, a little unusual for a professional fighter pilot, to say the least, and it was this that had most likely been the main contributing factor to the presumed crash.
Only no sooner had this explanation been given, Lieutenant Monkler's wife was being given a completely different account of events, being told instead that a husband had crashed into the lake after a mid air collision. Things only became even more murky when the Royal Canadian Air Force weighed in with their own assessment, declaring rather alarmingly that they had no record of a Dakota plane or any other Canadian
Air Force plane in the area at the time. That the wreckage of the Scorpion was never recovered only added to the mystery, and so without a formal conclusion to the tragic event, speculation naturally grew as to what exactly had happened on that cold November evening, and there were no shortage of theories to plug the gap. In nineteen fifty five, former American Marine Corps naval aviator turned UFO investigator Donald Kehoe included an account of his investigation of
the crash in his book The Flying saucer conspiracy. In it, he made the startling claim that on the night of the incident, only hours after it occurred, he received a phone call from an anonymous individual claiming they'd heard a rumor out of Selfridge Field, a National Guard base in Michigan, that an F eighty nine scorpion had just collided with a flying sorcer. Others later claimed that the scorpion hadn't just collided with the UFO, but had in fact been
taken on board it and whisked away into space. Years later, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, of which Donald Kehoe was a member, attempted to access the official records relating to the Lake Superior incident, only to find that all mention of it appeared to have been completely removed.
The US Air Force's own unit for analyzing military intelligence, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, when asked about the incident, stated that there is no record in the Air Force files of a sighting at Kinross Air Force Base, from where the scorpion was dispatched on November twenty third, nineteen fifty three. There is no case in the files which even closely parallels these circumstances. The bodies of First Lieutenant Felix Mongler and Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson, along with
their F eighty nine scorpion, remain missing. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do so via Patreon. To receive access to add free episodes, just go to patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon,
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