Quirky story that I just now heard about. From the wiki article:
“ On the evening of November 23, 1953, Air Defense Command Ground Intercept radar operators at Sault Ste. Marie identified an unusual target over Lake Superior, near the Soo Locks. An F-89C Scorpion jet was scrambled to investigate the radar return.
[The pilot] had a difficult time tracking the object on the Scorpion’s radar, so ground radar operators gave Moncla directions towards the object as he flew. Moncla eventually closed in on the object at about 8,000 feet in altitude. Ground Control tracked the Scorpion and the unidentified object as two “blips” on the radar screen. The two blips on the radar screen grew closer and closer until the blips merged. Assuming that Moncla had flown either under or over the target, Ground Control anticipated that moments later, the Scorpion and the object would again appear as two separate blips. There was a fear that the two objects had struck one another, but the single blip continued on its previous course.”
Apparently there is confusion about who/what the first blip was. The AF has said it was a Canadian forces jet. Canada denies it.
My question is, if the blip continued why not just follow it and see where it lands?
I can’t find a good cite on exactly how good radar was in the early 50’s, but I’d be surprised if it could track something more than 50-60 miles away. Radar coverage was spotty, covering areas of importance, and was not a comprehensive network that would have spanned not only the entire of Lake Superior, but into Canada itself.
Yeah, I think a lot of us think of radar when a traffic control screen is depicted on TV or in a movie. But those “blips” are actually from transponders.
True. There is primary radar which just puts a raw contact with no information on the screen. Then there is secondary radar that interrogates a transponder in the target and can display information such as the identification, altitude, heading, speed etc. primary radar can use various techniques to work out that information (other than identification) but it won’t be as accurate.
I used to operate an airborne search radar which was just primary. When you got a contact you could tag it and the radar could do some maths for you about speed and heading.
Either way, once the contact is over the horizon, your typical radar won’t see it anymore. If you have a network of radars with overlapping coverage you can cover a very large area, eg the continental USA, but it is still limited eventually.
Line of sight is not the only limitation. Some objects don’t reflect as well as others. A large container ship can be seen much further away than a small wooden boat. A yacht with a radar reflector can paint as well as the container ship despite being a small wooden boat. Similar concepts apply to aircraft.
Canadian author Farley Mowat wrote “The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float”, about his adventures with a leaky Newfoundlander sailboat.
He mentioned that one time, they were approaching a bank of heavy fog and his shipmate insisted on climbing the mast and attaching a bucket, as a radar reflector.
Some time later, Mowat met the skipper of a large commercial ship which had been out in the same fog. The skipper said that his radar guy had picked up a weird reflection. They couldn’t figure out what it was, but they steered clear of it, just in case.
It’s no coincidence that a lot of UFO reports were back in the 50s. RADAR was moving into general use, but the images were just fuzzy blips on a circular screen. It took an expert to differentiate between a flock of seagulls and an approaching aeroplane.
UFO sightings dropped off as RADAR quality improved.
If the original blip was a Canadian aircraft why would we scramble a jet to intercept it? I always considered Canada more or less an ally of the US. If it wasn’t a Canadian aircraft, which is what Canada claims, then who else could it be? Could a Russian jet actually get that far into US or Canadian airspace and not be noticed? There was no stealth technology back then, however, as has been mentioned radar identification was much more primitive than it is today.
And then rise again as new imaging and sensor technology are introduced, and then drop off again. The “Pentagon UFO videos” that have been popping up over the last couple of years have pretty much all from imaging and sensor systems that had only recently been installed when the videos were taken.
As operators learn the quirks of any new system, they inevitably see literal Unidentified Flying Objects - but then as they learn the system’s quirks, they stop seeing UFOs. Because they learn to identify the blips and images and such as known objects or phenomena.
If was unidentified. The USAF at the time didn’t know what it was. So they scrambled an interceptor to take a look see. If it had been a Canadian Forces aircraft, it didn’t have permission to enter U.S. air space, which means the pilot was either lost or violating orders - in either case, making a positive visual ID and contacting the pilot would be a good idea.
As for what it actually was, there’s really no way to know. It could have been a CF aircraft that had gone off course but went unreported to the CF chain of command due to embarrassment. It could have been a weather balloon - or a targeting practice balloon - or part of a highly classified balloon project like MOGUL. It could have been a flock of geese. Or a RADAR malfunction. Or something else entirely.
Given that Lt. Moncia didn’t return, my bet is on the geese. If he had flown into a flock while looking for a UFO, bad things could have happened to the plane. Bad enough to bring it down. But we will never know. Speculating that it was a Canadian AF plane is just USAF making up an excuse to avoid any criticism. Do they think the RCAF plane was involved in a collision and the Canadians didn’t notice they were one short the next day? Sigh. CWA goes a long way back.
Some reports state that once within visual range, he radioed “I’m going in for a closer look” (in fact it was supposedly the last transmission he made). If true, not something an experienced pilot would say about a flock of geese.
Regarding whether the other plane was Canadian, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a pilot could have drifted off course by 30 miles but wouldn’t that be apparent when there was no airport at your destination?
Obviously. They didn’t come half way across the galaxy without knowing how to avoid detection… no matter stage our technology was in.
Why wouldn’t he? Even “an experienced pilot” wouldn’t necessarily have seen every possible configuration of a flock of geese from every possible angle under every possible lighting condition. Even extremely familiar objects can look really weird, even unidentifiable, under unusual circumstances. Also, in the sky, there are no landmarks or reference points. It’s impossible to accurately identify the size, speed, and distance of a flying object just by looking at it. Add in expectation and confirmation bias, and it’s entirely possible he would have failed to identify something totally mundane. If he’s expecting a single object the size and speed of a conventional aircraft, a smaller, slower object, or cluster of objects, is going to be really easy to misidentify.
I can’t tell if you’re joking, so maybe I’m being whooshed, but…why is that obvious? And why would their ability to avoid detection be worse against primitive radars?
Without knowing where the intruder was coming from or going to there’s no way to say what the pilot may have been thinking at the time.
I’d sooner bet that there was no intruder airplane; the ground radar was picking up geese or a temperature inversion or a reflection off the Moon. The US pilot was trying to hard to see something that just wasn’t there that he talked himself into spatial disorientation & split-Sed into the lake. He’d simply disappear from a distant ground radar from one sweep to the next.
Note: “Over the horizon radar” is a thing. It was disfunctional and very rare in the 1950’s: now, it’s only rare. It’s not used where ground stations are possible.