Flight Lieutenant Gerald Fosberg

At the time of the Kinross Incident, Gerald Fosberg was a flight lieutenant with the 412th Squadron at Rockcliffe Air Force Base near Ottawa, Ontario.

He was the pilot of RCAF C47, VC-912, which is the aircraft which the USAF claimed the F-89 was sent to identify because it had (the USAF claimed) drifted 30 miles from its flight plan over Lake Superior.

The USAF also claimed that this was the "bogie" with which the F-89's radar return had merged with on radar before contact was lost with the F-89.

Gerald Fosberg seemed to have a pretty clear recollection of the incident, and insisted to me that his plane was never off course on that flight. Note that a GCI was able to contact them by radio, so it doesn't make much sense that it would be necessary to send up an F-89 to identify the plane, when it was reachable from radio. It is possible that it was only the Canadian GCI operators who were able to contact the RCAF aircraft, but it is clear from the incident that US GCI stations and Canadian GCI stations must have had some capability to communicate with each other, otherwise, how would they be able to make the inquiry asking if the C47 crew had seen the F-89.

It took me some amount of searching to find the names of the crew on the the RCAF C47 which flown over Lake Superior that night, but it was fairly easy to locate the pilot of the aircraft once I had his last name. In response to a letter of inquiry, Gerald Fosberg wrote back the following letter to me.

 

01 Mar. 2004

Gerald Fosberg
766 Lambton Crt. RR 1
Sarnia, ON  N7S 6B6 

Dear Gord:

I’m your man! I was at the time indeed serving with the 412 Sqn. At Rockcliffe, doing what I loved best – flying aeroplanes. At the time I was a flight Lieutenant, married with our first of three children on the way. Served 28 years and retired in May 1974 as a major. Continued flying Corporate Jets for another twenty years.

 I remember the flight reasonably well, and just checked my log books to confirm the date. It was a night flight. We were probably at 7,000 or 9,000 feet over a solid cloud deck below and absolutely clear sky above.

Somewhere near Sault Ste. Marie, and north of Kinross AFB, I think a ground station (can’t remember whether it was American or Canadian) asked us if we had seen another aircraft’s lights in our area. I do think I recall them saying at that time that the USAF had scrambled an interceptor and they had lost contact with it. We replied that we had not seen anything. A few days later I received a phone call from somebody at Kinross who was carrying out an investigation on a missing aircraft. I could only tell them that we had seen nothing. That was the last I ever heard of the incident.

Sorry! However, if the mystery is ever solved please, would you let me know the answer.

Sincerely,

Jerry F.