Lt. Col. Harry Shoup

Lt. Col. Harry W. Shoup was the base commander at Truax Field in Madison at the time of the Kinross Incident. Gene Moncla's widow told me that she was visited by Lt. Col. Harry Shoup and the base chaplain the night of Gene's disappearance.

It was Lt. Col. Shoup who conducted the press briefing on the disappearance of the F-89 over Lake Superior, the day after the incident. It was his theory that the pilot had banked steeply during the intercept and had lost control and altitude, crashing into the lake.

In Donald Keyhoe's book, "The Flying Saucer Conspiracy", radio commentator, Frank Edwards, told Donald Keyhoe that someone at Truax Field might be in trouble for violating AFR 200. This was apparently the first time that Keyhoe had heard of the Air Force order which required genuine UFO reports to be withheld from the public. My guess is that Shoup was the one who would have gotten in trouble for providing information in the press conference about the targets merging on radar before the F-89 disappeared. My interpretation of the incident is that Lt. Col. Shoup didn't know anything about the UFO angle to the incident at the time of the press briefing and therefore was totally innocent of any potential transgression on official Air Force policies to withhold information from the public about real UFO incidents.

Lt. Col. Shoup was a survivor of a tragic flight on Jan 31, 1953, when four F-86 Sabre jets from Truax Field, crashed during a snowstorm. Shoup was a pilot of one of two planes which was able to land safely. Two pilots survived after parachuting from their stricken jets. Another two pilots perished.

I believe that Lt. Col. Shoup was later made a full colonel and transferred to Ent. Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, which is the location of NORAD's main command centre.

Some readers may be aware that NORAD has tracked Santa Claus on Christmas eve for more than 50 years. Col. Shoup was a key part in originating this program while he was serving at CONAD headquarters in 1955. That year, Sears Department Store in Colorado Springs ran an ad with a number for children to call Santa Claus. Through some mysterious error, the number which was printed turned out to be a connection to the red phone at CONAD (Continental Air Defense Command) operations center. When Shoup picked up the red phone with a child asking for Santa, Shoup asked the child where he got the number. As then commander-in-chief of CONAD, he was quite "in the know" on the whereabouts of "Santa Claus", and was able to give the child an update on Santa's present whereabouts, which were tracked on CONAD's radar.

The tradition of CONAD's "Santa tracking" was born, and was continued when the USA and Canada formed NORAD in 1958.

Col. Harry Shoup
CONAD's Commander in Chief in 1955
was able to track "Santa Claus" on radar

I believe that one of my "memories as Moncla" involved Lt. Col. Shoup. One memory I had was of painting the prototype version of the Blue Streak paint job in a hanger at Truax Field. Part of this memory was a senior officer at the base coming in to review the work. If any of this is right, it was possibly Harry Shoup I remember who came in to look at the finished effort. I recall it was him who had come up with the idea to call the painted bird "Blue Streak", which was by some coincidence, the name of the early edition of the Wisconsin State Journal, published in Madison.