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Doug Moe: UFO mystery now a film

Doug Moe  —  5/01/2007 4:02 pm

LAST SUMMER I was contacted by a Canadian computer systems engineer named Gord Heath.

Heath had read a column I had written about the mysterious disappearance, in 1953, of an F-89 Scorpion jet over Lake Superior. The jet had been dispatched from the Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan to track an unidentified craft spotted on the Kinross radar.

The F-89 was at Kinross on temporary assignment. Both the jet and its two-member crew, pilot Gene Moncla and radar observer Robert Wilson, were based in Madison at Truax Field. They were at Kinross as temporary replacements for personnel engaged in gunnery maneuvers in Arizona.

News accounts from 1953, including a report in The Capital Times, said that Kinross radar tracked both the F-89 and the unidentified craft as they flew over Lake Superior. From the cockpit, Moncla said, "I'm going in for a closer look." Moments later, the two radar blips merged on the screen.

What happened next, nobody knows, though there are abundant theories. In any case, the Truax F-89 and its two crew members were never seen again. Some in the UFO community have theorized that a the jet was gobbled up by an extraterrestrial ship. U.S. officials at first insisted that the unidentified radar blip was an off-course Canadian airliner, a version consistently denied by the Canadians.

After my column last August -- which had been prompted by a Canadian newspaper story on the incident -- I heard from Heath, who, it was immediately clear, had done a great deal of research about the Kinross disappearance. He'd even made several visits to Madison.

His purpose in contacting me was to impart startling news: A dive company, on its Web site, was claiming to have located what looked to be an F-89 Scorpion jet on the bottom of Lake Superior. If true, it would almost certainly have been the Truax jet that disappeared in 1953.

As it turned out, the dive company's "find" appears to have been a hoax, although that is not certain. This much is: The Web site has disappeared.

Over a few weeks late last summer, as the story unfolded, Heath and I spoke on the phone and exchanged numerous e-mails. He told me his last visit to Madison had been quite recent, just last July. A Canadian documentary film crew had accompanied him, Heath said.

Heath was friendly, articulate, and impressively well-versed in the lore of the Kinross incident. But at some point during our communication it dawned on me that for Heath, something more was at work than finding the truth behind a mysterious event in U.S. Air Force history. Heath, I came to realize, believed that in some complex way he possessed memories that could only be the memories of Gene Moncla, the F-89 pilot. And he believed that the F-89 had indeed been abducted by a UFO in 1953.

I am not a big believer in either reincarnation or extraterrestrials, so I didn't pursue that line of inquiry with Heath last year. I'd enjoyed our communication and left it at that.

Now, though, the documentary film that was partly shot here last summer is not only finished, it aired twice in the last few weeks on Canadian television.

The film is titled "The Moncla Memories," and this week I spoke with its creator, Canadian filmmaker David Cherniack.

Cherniack said he was working on a two-hour documentary on UFOs for the Canadian History Channel when he met Heath and decided Heath was worthy of a film himself. The film crew, traveling by RV, came to Madison last summer and shot film of Heath in Moncla's old Madison residence.

Cherniack said that more than a film about UFOs, this documentary is about "memory, and how we construct our memories." What he liked about Heath, he said, "is that he has never been a true believer in his own recollections. He knows that they are potentially suspect."

Which makes Heath different from many others who insist they have been touched in some way by aliens. In the new film, Heath details the memories and images that led him to the startling conclusion of his relationship with Moncla. One memory includes Heath's parents being present on the alien ship when Moncla was abducted, and Moncla being told he cannot return to his old life but might instead be reborn as another human. Gord Heath was born nine months after Moncla's F-89 disappeared.

In the film, we learn Moncla's family has had a mixed reaction to Heath's memories. Cherniack, the filmmaker, suggested, and Heath agreed, to a DNA test. They would need a member of the Moncla family to participate as well, and an unidentified male agreed to the test.

As it happened, Heath was with Cherniack in the filmmaker's RV last year when the results of the test were sent. Cherniack didn't look at the results himself. He set up his camera and asked Heath to open the e-mail, which would reveal whether or not Heath was genetically related to Gene Moncla.

Heath sits at the computer. "What does it say, Gord?" a voice asks off-camera.

Heath reads from the screen: "The result is consistent with males who do not share a common male lineage."

There was no match. Heath, though, still has his Moncla memories, and questions linger, including what really happened to the Truax F-89 over Lake Superior in 1953. Late in the film someone says, "There are some mysteries out there we can't answer. They just have to stay a mystery."

Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write P.O. Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com

Doug Moe  —  5/01/2007 4:02 pm