The Kinross Incident

On the evening of 23 November 1953, ground radar tracked an unidentified target over Lake Superior, and an F-89 Scorpion interceptor was scrambled from Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan, crewed by pilot Lieutenant Felix Moncla and radar operator Lieutenant Wilson. Guided toward the target, the jet closed on it, and on the radar scope the two returns appeared to merge into one. The F-89 then vanished from the scope. No trace of the aircraft or its crew was ever recovered.

What is on the record

A CIA FOIA record was for a time attached to this case as its anchor. A 2026 full-text audit found the document never mentions Kinross or the intercept, and it has been removed. The archive resolves the case to three claimants, the two crew and the control tower personnel who tracked the intercept, carried across two videos from one channel. One telling places the target as a fast-moving object that the F-89 merged with on radar before vanishing, and notes the case was left out of Project Blue Book's files and treated as merely an aircraft accident. The other describes the object as a spinning, cigar-shaped craft that failed to respond to communication before the interceptor disappeared. The merging of the two returns on the radar scope is the detail that has kept the case prominent.

Why it sits where it does

Kinross grades L3, carried by its claimants: the two crew and the control tower personnel on duty that night. It stood higher while a government record appeared to anchor it; the record turned out to concern something else, and the archive corrects that in the open. What the record firmly holds is that a military jet was scrambled after an unidentified target over Lake Superior, appeared to merge with it on radar, and was lost with its crew without trace. What the target was is not resolved here.