Homestead, Florida: Radar and Hawk unit track eight targets, F-4s scrambled, data seized

At 10:30 p.m., Dennis Force of the USAF 644th Radar Squadron in Homestead, Florida, was on the phone with his cousin Bill Schroeder, on duty with an Army Hawk surface-to-air unit in Key West, when NORAD called Schroeder about a formation of eight radar targets it had tracked from Canada, now closing in on Miami airspace at 1,500 mph. Both men found the targets on their radars; they ran repetitive grid patterns, Force's over the Atlantic from Fort Lauderdale to Biscayne Bay and Schroeder's from Florida Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Three F-4 Phantoms were dispatched from Boca Chica, the blips blinked off, but after the jets turned back the targets reappeared and one broke formation toward Key West. When Schroeder activated an illuminator radar, the system shut down in a power outage, and the launcher sergeant watched a bright object pass overhead, flying horizontally, while Force saw the targets accelerate east and vanish over the Atlantic. The next day Force's radar team was debriefed and told the incident had involved a NORAD exercise, and all radar data was confiscated. The account comes from Schroeder's book Unknown Down (2016). The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.