At the height of Cold War tensions, a large radar contact mysteriously appeared over the Canadian/American border, and slowly made its way north. Fearing this to be a Soviet airplane attack, Kinross AFB in Michigan dispatched an F-89 Scorpion interceptor to investigate. The airplane was crewed by Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson, who would never be seen again.

Eager radar operators watched the small dot of the F-89 close on the mysterious contact. When the crew was over Lake Superior, the two dots merged and suddenly vanished. Search parties launched immediately and combed the Lake to try to find the airplane, with no luck.

Immediately, the US Air Force issued statements. At first, they said the fighter had been chasing a misidentified Canadian airplane and crashed for unknown reasons during the intercept. But wouldn't the Canadian airplane have filed their flight plan? The USAF later retracted that statement, now claiming that Moncla had experienced vertigo and crashed into Lake Superior. That still didn't explain why searchers couldn't find the airplane, especially since Lake Superior was covered in ice. An airplane-shaped hole in the ice should have been easy to spot.

None of the official explanations stuck — to this day, nobody knows exactly what happened that night.