If there is a radar operator here, I want to know if it is at all realistic for an attack on an aircraft to result in it simply disappearing from the scope. Wouldn't the falling debris of the plane still show up for several minutes until it fell below what the radar could see? If this is so, doesn't this story imply the larger object had to have "eaten" the smaller one (the plane, I am assuming)?
The radar cross section of any falling debris would not necessarily be big enough for a radar to detect, especially with 1953 tech on a stormy night. Also, two blips "merging" on a radar scope is a common occurrence when two targets are closer together than the pulse length.
This article tries really hard to make this a UFO mystery, but jets fell out of the sky pretty regularly in 1953, especially in storms and at night. Radar technology was also not anywhere near what we have today and even with modern technology we can still just outright lose a plane. MH370 still hasn't been found for example.
(I'm not a radar operator per se but I did study weapons engineering at the NL naval college and spent several years of my military career specifying specs for advanced naval radar systems)
I've mostly just operated marine commercial navigation radars, but having said that, I wouldn't expect the return to be very good. You would still have reflected energy, but it would be much closer to noise, so it would have to be much closer to be automatically detected, or even to be detectable on screen by my own observation. A tracker assigned to it certainly wouldn't maintain itself.
I am not a radar operator. My understanding is that radar reflections are related to the size, shape, and texture of an object. A normal plane will be a large blob on the return, while, for example, a B2 stealth bomber is designed with special materials and angles to appear around the size of a large bird.
So an intact jet fighter will show up as a big dot, while falling debris might look like many small dots, or be too small for the resolution of the radar display.
There's also numerous sources of interference and background noise, including from weather. So on a stormy night it might not be apparent what is debris vs water.
The article is really more of an advertisement for a TV show than journalism and doesn't give a very clear account, but it sound plausible that two dots converging and disappearing from radar could represent an in-air collision. And if over the great lakes during a storm, investigators would be looking underwater for hundreds of pieces of non-magnetic aluminum spread over many square miles.
