True. But back in the day OTH radars were really, really vague. As in “can detect a large formation of bombers pls/minus a couple hundred miles of their true posiiton.” So enough to trigger a red alert and start getting ready to retaliate. But not enough to direct interceptors to the incoming targets. That would have to wait until the intruders got a lot closer.
I know you know this, but other folks might enjoy reading
and some of the references.
If by “vanish” you mean no longer be picked up by radar, then yes, it can happen between one sweep and the next, whether geese are hit or not.
So how fast was the UFO moving? An airplane (RCAF or otherwise) would be moving a lot faster than a flock of birds (Canada geese or otherwise).
I found one online article claiming the UFO was travelling at 500 mph, but with no citations or sources for that claim. Another article claimed the interceptor was travelling at 500 mph.
The official report doesn’t seem to indicate the speed of the UFO. It does indicate altitude, 7000 feet, which is actually within the normal altitude range of migrating geese.
I don’t know anything about the capabilities of radars of that era, so I have no idea if the ground radar involved was even capable of estimating the speed of a contact, much less how accurate that would have been.
Note that I was (I believe) the first to mention geese in this thread, but that wasn’t really meant as a definite hypothesis. I was just pointing out that at this remove from the occurrence, there are a lot of possibilities for what the UFO actually was, and we don’t have any way of really figuring out what it was. Maybe we’ve got enough information to rule out geese; I’ll let someone knowledgeable about the performance capabilities of the kind of radar that was in use at Kinross AFB at the time tackle that, if they want to.
This an interesting story and I did bit of searching through newspaper archives. Quite a few papers covered the Moncla crash, all of them using variations on the same information.
The Traverse City Record Eagle article on Nov 25, 1953 added information an another F89 crash the next day. The pilots were John W Schmidt and Glen E Collins. This article seemed to mix details of the two crashes but it is just poor editing. The Schmidt crash was well observed as it crashed into Lake Wingra.
An article in the Madison Wisconsin State Journal on Nov 24, 1953 has several surprisingly good photos of searchers pulling debris from the swamp. I didn’t find any further articles stating any bodies had been recovered.
As for the Moncla crash, all the article were from the next day, no followup until about 5 years later when sporadic articles appeared in various newspapers, none with any conclusions.