Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainCold War radar installation where on November 23, 1953, an Air National Guard F-89 Scorpion scrambled to intercept an unidentified object over Lake Superior and vanished — no wreckage, no crew, no explanation ever recovered.
Mount Horace Greeley Road, Calumet, MI 49913
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
No admission fee; public land. The station site is abandoned — accessible as a drive-by exterior only.
Access
Limited Access
Abandoned road and clearing at higher elevation. Unpaved access; terrain is uneven. No maintained facilities.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1950 · Cold War Radar Installation · 1953 Kinross Incident — Undocumented Military Disappearance · F-89 Scorpion and Crew Lost Over Lake Superior · Air Defense Command Northern Network
The Calumet Air Force Station was built as part of the Air Defense Command's network of radar installations that ringed the northern United States during the early Cold War. Its job was to track aircraft over Lake Superior — the open-water corridor between the U.S. and Canada that represented a potential route for Soviet long-range bombers. The station monitored traffic along this corridor continuously.
On the night of November 23, 1953, radar operators at Kinross Air Force Base near Sault Ste. Marie tracked an unidentified object over the Soo Locks. An F-89C Scorpion jet interceptor was scrambled with pilot First Lieutenant Felix Moncla Jr. and radar operator Second Lieutenant Robert L. Wilson aboard. Controllers tracked both the F-89 and the unknown object as the interceptor approached. On radar, the two returns merged into one. The merged return flew on for a moment, then disappeared. Neither the F-89, the crew, nor any wreckage was ever found.
The incident — known as the Kinross Incident — remains one of the most documented unexplained military aviation disappearances in American history. The Air Force initially attributed it to the intercept of a Royal Canadian Air Force transport, but Canadian records showed no such aircraft in the area. The two men — Moncla and Wilson — are officially listed as missing in action. The Calumet station's radar records from that night are not publicly available. The site itself has been abandoned since the Cold War-era radar network was modernized.
Sources
The Kinross Incident sits at the intersection of Cold War paranoia, military secrecy, and unexplained aviation mystery. Felix Moncla Jr. and Robert Wilson were real men — their families received no bodies, no wreckage, no explanation from the Air Force beyond a series of evolving and contradictory official statements. The Canadian transport explanation was publicly contradicted by Canadian records. The radar merge — two objects becoming one — has no consensus explanation in aviation terms.
UFO researchers have included the Kinross Incident in the canonical literature since the 1950s, pointing to the radar merge as evidence of a mid-air docking or collision with a non-human craft. Military aviation historians have proposed mechanical failure followed by lake impact and rapid sinking — Lake Superior's cold water and depth preserve wreckage almost indefinitely, making its absence significant. No search recovered anything.
The Calumet station site itself holds no ghost stories in the traditional sense. What it holds is absence: two men who flew north and never came back, a radar record that stopped mid-intercept, and a Cold War classification system that ensured any documentation of that night stayed out of public hands for decades. Visit Keweenaw documents the site as part of the peninsula's dark history.
Notable Entities
The abandoned Calumet Air Force Station was the radar installation that tracked the F-89 Scorpion on the night it disappeared over Lake Superior on November 23, 1953. The site is a drive-by exterior visit with no on-site interpretation, suitable for those researching the Kinross Incident or Cold War radar history in the UP.
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