Having never been to Shag Harbour before, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to make my inaugural pilgrimage to the village that was going to celebrate the half-century milestone since an inexplicable flying object fell out of the sky and into the ocean on October 4, 1967. So, I hopped in my car and drove 300 kilometres southwest from Halifax, hoping the truth would be out there.

I went straight to the day's main event—a witness panel at the local community centre, which was decorated with streamers, balloons, and dozens of old white people. The woman at the registration desk was knitting. She set it aside for a moment and wrote "PRESS PASS" on a small square piece of paper and handed it to me, smiling. I walked into the stucco-ceiling'd, cement-floored room—where I can only imagine every single wedding reception, cribbage tournament, and Knights of Columbus meeting has taken place for the past 60 years—glanced over the UFO memorabilia merch table at the back, and made myself comfortable for what would be a two-hour witness testimonial session.

As I continued to drive, I began to notice nondescript signs nailed to telephone poles and churches advertising things like "Lobster Supper," "Baked Bean Supper," "Wednesday Night Kitchen Party," and "UFO Crash Site." You know—normal, fishing village stuff. When I arrived in town, it was the second day of the annual UFO festival, and despite the placidity of the sea and the aged state of everything, the air was electric.

Driving into Shag Harbour is not unlike driving into many of the Maritimes' rural fishing towns—its seaside main road peppered with old wooden boats, old wooden docks, and old wooden homes, all of which are slowly decaying in the salt air. It is quiet, quaint, and completely beautiful, albeit a little tragic to anyone coming from away.

"We went right to the phone booth and called the RCMP and reported a plane crash, and he didn't believe me [at first] so I hung up," Wickens, now 67, testified to a crowd of keen onlookers. "But he had gotten the number for the phone booth, so as I made my way back to my car, the phone booth rang, and he wanted to know where [the crash] was, and we told him to meet us. So as we were going back there to meet him, we could see the light drifting in the water, and then me and [my friend] watched the light until it went out."

As the story goes, on the night of October 4, 1967, a handful of local residents saw a low-flying, brightly-lit object head towards Shag Harbour before it quickly crashed into the sea, where it sank before anyone could get to it. It was first reported to the RCMP as a plane crash by Laurie Wickens—who would become one of the event's key witnesses.

"I just happened to be looking in the right direction, and I saw this formation of bluish-white lights, slanted from upper left to lower right, and I said, 'Ooh—watch this guy,'" he told the room. "And the other two [in the cockpit] looked. I remember the captain's hands and my hands both went for the control yoke—because we figured we were going to have to dodge this guy, he's going right at it."

"And it looked like a big airplane at the time, like a B-52 or a 707, with all of its lights on—there were about five lights, I remember—and he was in a position relative to us of a guy making a left-hand turn, and that would have him crossing our bow. So we were waiting, and these lights just hung there—they did not cross our bow. And I remember the three of us were looking at it and we said, what is this? And we couldn't discern what it was. I called Boston and asked if they still had us on radar, and he said, 'yeah' and I said, 'Well, who's this at 11 o'clock?' He watched the sweep on his radar scope, and he says, 'I don't have anybody out there.' And I said, 'Well, I'm looking at somebody.'"

Norman Smith was a teenager in Shag Harbour in 1967. On the night of the incident, he saw the lights in the sky, and then followed them until they crashed into the water before he, his father and his uncle hopped in a fishing boat on an immediate rescue mission.