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October 4, 1967: Shag Harbour UFO Incident

On the night of Wednesday, October 4, 1967, an extraordinary event occurred that put the small fishing village of Shag Harbour on the map. Located at the southern tip of Nova Scotia (Canada), this rural community would be host to one of the best-documented UFO events in history. Named for the “shag,” a bird of the cormorant family, the little settlement wasn’t even indicated on most maps of the time, but it is now.



The tiny fishing community had always had its stories ... tales of giant sea serpents, man-eating squid and ghost ships and on that October day, 46 years ago, the story of a visit by a mysterious flying craft of unknown origin was added to the list. The first indication something was amiss came when local residents saw strange lights in the sky. Most witnesses agreed there were four orange lights that evening. Five teenagers watched these lights flash in sequence and then suddenly dive at a 45-degree angle toward the ocean. Oddly, the lights did not enter the water, but seemed to float on the surface, approximately a half-mile from shore.



Initially, people thought they were seeing an airplane crash and quickly reported such to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Barrington Passage. Coincidentally, RCMP Constable Ron Pound had seen the strange lights himself as he drove along Highway 3 en route to Shag Harbour. Pound described a craft approximately 60 feet in length with four lights. As he made his way to the shore, Pound was able to get a closer look. He was accompanied by Police Corporal Victor Werbieki, Contable Ron O’Brien and other locals. As he watched, Pound clearly saw a yellow light slowly moving on the water, leaving a yellowish foam in its wake. Everyone was watching as the light either moved too far away to be seen, or dipped beneath the icy waters.



Coast Guard Cutter No. 101 and other vessels rushed to the location of the sighting, but by the time they arrived, the light was gone. However, crew members could still see the yellow foam, indicating something had been there. Nothing else was found that night and the search was called off at 3 a.m. The RCMP ran a traffic check with the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax and NORAD radar at Baccaro, Nova Scotia. There were no missing aircraft reported that evening, either civilian or military.



The following day, the Rescue Coordination Center filed a report with Canadian Forces Headquarters in Ottawa, indicating an object of “unknown origin” had hit the water at Shag Harbour. HMCS Granby was ordered to the location and divers searched the for several days, but without results.



The story of the mysterious crash at Shag Harbour died down as quickly as it had begun – until 1993. As the original story faded from newspapers and newscasts, several theories were introduced. One explanation was that a Russian spacecraft had crashed, which would explain the presence of a Russian submarine in the area. There were also rumors of American involvement in the follow-up investigation, but there was no official statement from the United States.



The Shag Harbour case intrigued MUFON investigator Chris Styles to the point that he decided to search for additional details. Styles discovered the names of many of the original witnesses through newspaper clippings and was able to interview several of them. Assisted by Doug Ledger, another MUFON investigator, Styles uncovered some intriguing information. For example, the two learned that when Granby divers completed their work, the case was not over after all. The divers, along with other witnesses, related the following: The object that fell, or dived, into the waters of the harbor soon left the Shag area, traveling underwater for approximately 25 miles to a place called Government Point, which was near a submarine detection base. There, the object was spotted on sonar and naval vessels were positioned over it.

After a couple of days, the military was planning a salvage operation when a second UFO joined the first. Common belief at the time was that the second craft had arrived to render aid to the first. At this point, the navy decided to wait and watch. After about a week of monitoring the two UFOs, some of the vessels were called to investigate a Russian submarine, which had entered Canadian waters. When this happened, the two underwater craft made their move. They made their way to the Gulf of Maine and placing distance between themselves and the navy vessels chasing them, broke the surface and shot away into the sky.

These extraordinary events were corroborated by many witnesses, both civilian and military. Unfortunately, the reports were given “off the record.” Ex-military personnel feared the loss of their pensions and civilian witnesses feared ridicule and invasion of privacy. The unusual incident at Shag Harbour commands an important place in the study of UFOs for there is little doubt something “unknown” crashed into the waters off Nova Scotia 46 years ago.



Sources: UFO Casebook; The Other Side of Truth by Paul Kimball; Ray MacLeod, "Could Be Something Concrete in Shag Harbour UFO - RCAF: Continue Search Today," The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, October 7, 1967; and Tourism Nova Scotia.



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Folklore Student Researches Incident at Shag Harbour



ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland, Canada – A student working on his PhD. in folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland is digging into the mystery surrounding an unidentified flying object that crashed into Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, 49 years ago. Noah Morritt isn’t like the many UFO enthusiasts who travel to the small fishing village, he’s less interested in the object itself and more in the effect the story has had on the town.



On Wednesday, October 4, 1967, people in Shag Harbour saw a light drop from the sky, hover over the water then disappear into the harbour. Many eyewitnesses who saw the light assumed a plane had gone down. RCMP officers on the scene also reported a plane had gone in the water, Morritt says. No wreckage was ever found and no planes were reported missing. Divers sent into the harbour came up with nothing. “How did we get from plane crash to UFO? What does it mean for the people in Shag Harbour? What does it mean to live in a community where there was a UFO crash?” he asks. “I think there’s more to Shag Harbour than just a UFO.”



The incident has led to changes in Shag Harbour – there is a volunteer group called the Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society focused on promoting and preserving materials connected to the crash. A small museum dedicated to the incident and an annual UFO symposium is held in the community. There’s also a stream of tourists who want to get a closer look at the alleged crash site.



Research almost complete. Morritt has spent five weeks in Shag Harbour researching both the incident and how residents responded to it. He says most people accept the incident as a part of their town’s history, but would still like answers about what happened. “The object itself, the thing that crashed into the harbour always remains elusive, so I really think there’s a desire for closure,” he explains.



Laurie Wickens, one of those who would like some answers, was an eyewitness to what happened in 1967. “We always thought it was an airplane, but when you stop and think about it now ... there’s nothing conventional that could fly that slow ... whatever it was, I ain’t got no idea,” he admits.



Bus tour offered. The UFO symposium in Shag Harbour just finished for this year; it included for the first time a bus tour that traced the route Wickens followed after spotting the UFO’s lights back in 1967. The tour ended on the harbour’s shoreline where Wickens stopped and watched the lights hover above the water.



Wickens helped organize the event and 28 people took part in the tour. “If you do the tour, people can really get an understanding of really what happened and really where everything was seen,” he says. He wanted to run the tour as a test for next year, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the incident in Shag Harbour and will be accompanied by an even bigger celebration.



Noah Morritt hopes to be back for the event with a rough draft of his doctoral thesis.



Source: David Burke, CBC, October 2, 2016.





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50 Years Ago, 'Something' Crashed into the Sea at Shag Harbour



The first time I heard about Nova Scotia’s Shag Harbour UFO incident was about six years ago when a Celtic guitarist with long white hair and a glass eyeball was telling me about it at a house party in Halifax. As he regaled the fateful day back in 1967 that plagued a sleepy fishing village in rural Nova Scotia with a mystery still unsolved, I became more and more entranced (it didn’t help that, at the time, Ancient Aliens was my televised Bible). My interest grew and my research continued as the years went on and I found out there was an annual festival held at the location of the incident, and that 2017 would mark its 50-year anniversary.



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 kilometers (186 miles) southwest from Halifax, hoping the truth would be out there.



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



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. I went straight to the day’s main event – a witness panel at the local community center, which was decorated with streamers, balloons and dozens of old 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-ceilinged, 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 merchandise table at the back and made myself comfortable for what would be a two-hour witness testimonial session.



The panel featured firsthand accounts from several people involved in the infamous incident – including eyewitness testimonies from Shag Harbour locals, as well as one from a commercial pilot who was flying at the time of the incident.



As the story goes, on the night of October 4, 1967, a handful of local residents saw a low-flying, brightly-lit object head toward Shag Harbour before it quickly crashed into the sea, where it sank before anyone could get to it. It was first reported to authorities as a plane crash by Laurie Wickens – who would become one of the event’s key witnesses. “We went right to the phone booth and called the police and reported a plane crash and the officer 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.”



Ralph Loewinger was co-piloting a cargo plane from New York to London that same night and saw the event unfold from a different perspective. “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,” he continued. “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 into a fishing boat on an immediate rescue mission. “We were looking for people and debris,” he said during the witness panel. “And we went up to the vicinity of where it was and we didn’t find anything, no piece of material or anything in the water, except for a long streak of foam – yellowish orange foam – which was four to six inches thick, on the water. We searched that all night, then the Coast Guard came and all we did was go back and forth all night long. I was out again the next day, the divers were there [and] we stayed there for the better part of the day, then gave up and went home. We didn’t find anything and the divers didn’t find anything that we could see, so we went home. I can’t tell you what came down or what landed in the water – if it was a plane or if it was a UFO, I don’t know – but there definitely was something that came down out of the sky and landed in the water. I can still see it. I’d like to see it again, I really, really would. [But] I don’t know what it was and I probably never will,” Smith concluded.



For days following the incident, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Coast Guard, Royal Canadian Navy and local fishing boats all scoured the area for survivors or debris, but no trace of anything was ever found.



Captain Ronnie Newell, skipper aboard the Coast Guard Cutter 101, said they mobilized within 10 minutes of receiving a call from the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax that a plane had gone down. “We searched that night on the ocean, pretty much the whole rest of the night [but] we didn’t see anything,” he recalled as he addressed the crowd. “We were back the next morning – we brought divers down for two days at that time and they didn’t bring up anything that we [saw]. So I can’t tell you anything more than that. I’m not saying that it wasn’t, but it’s just that we didn’t see anything. Other than the foam that was on the water – but that’s all we did see.”



On October 9, five days after the mysterious object sank off the shoreline into the abyss, the UFO search was called off after extensive efforts turned up nothing. Of course, some will argue that evidence could have been found and concealed from the public eye – which is somewhat plausible, especially when one considers the fact there was a secret U.S. military base monitoring subterranean and underwater frequencies for Russian submarine activity just 30 minutes from the crash site. One of the panelists at the 50th anniversary festival was Bill Boudreau – who worked at this secret base – which was disguised as an oceanographic institute – for 25 years. “They picked up the crash here in the harbor almost as soon as it happened,” he confirmed during the witness testimonies. It’s no wonder conspiracy theorists have a heyday with this particular UFO event, because, quite frankly, there does seem to be a lot of ammo.



Diver David Cvet – another panel member – has been surveying the ocean floor of the harbour for years and claimed he’s discovered underwater anomalies, or depressions, in the area where the crash is said to have taken place. “The point of these dive expeditions is to figure out what these anomalies are – it may or may not support the Shag Harbour Incident – but that’s not the point,” Cvet told the room. “The fact is that these anomalies do physically exist.” (This is where the USO [unidentified submerged object] theory comes into play.) Cvet described the depression as a dinner plate, with the center being about a foot deep. “It was perfectly round,” he reported. “A perfect circle. And the covering of this depression was comprised of pebbles 2 to 4 centimeters (¾ to 1½ inches) in size. So where are the big rocks? Where are the plants? Where are the scallops, the lobsters, the silt? There was nothing. It was absolutely clear – like someone had swept it the day before.”



Noah Morritt is one of the Shag Harbour UFO Festival event directors. He’s also a PhD. student studying folklore at Memorial University in Newfoundland writing his dissertation on the Shag Harbour Incident. His interest in the event stems from the identity of the community itself and how its people are still grappling with what happened half a century ago. “[It] left this community with the challenge of, ‘so what’s a UFO? So they’ve spent the past 50 years trying to figure out what this is,” he explained. But despite countless hours spent studying the town, the history of the event and immersing himself directly in the culture, Morritt is still stumped as to what exactly it was that so many witnesses reported seeing that night. “There’s lots of interpretation of what it was, from flares to some kind of government satellite, or government aircraft, or extraterrestrial aircraft – there’s been a whole range of stuff. I have not a clue [what it was] – no idea,” he admitted.



After listening to the eyewitness accounts at the community center that day, I began to make my way out of town, but stopped first at the commemorative crash site just a few minutes up the road. It was here I met Norman Brown, who drove 600 kilometers (372 miles) from Miramichi, New Brunswick, for his first-ever visit to Shag Harbour. When I asked him what drew him to this year’s event, he recounted his own story of a peculiar sighting he encountered when he was 18-years-old off the coast of New Brunswick – just 200 kilometres (124 miles) straight across the Bay of Fundy – that same first week of October 1967. “That same night [on October 4] – or it may have been the night before or two nights before – it sounds very much exactly like the spacecraft or UFO that we saw. I firmly believe it was either the same craft, or if there was more than one, it was one that was with them at the time,” he asserted. “I have no idea what was manning it, or where it was from,” he continued, “but I can tell you that it was no kind of a spacecraft that the Canadian or U.S. Navy or Air Force could have had at that time. There was no sound, [it was] pitch black, glowing a bit – nothing could just hover as steady as that was. It was stationary, you could see it very clear. It was just over the top of the trees, maybe a couple hundred feet in the air, on a little bit of an angle, and then all of a sudden, it just took off with incredible speed and as it got going, you could see the lights getting smaller and smaller and smaller and – gone!”



Brown, who admitted that before his encounter, he did not believe in spaceship sightings – said he hasn’t seen anything like it since. When I heard stories of people seeing stuff like this in the 60s, I thought, no way, you’re crazy, you’re making it up,” he added. “But when I saw it myself, from that point on, I knew that these stories had to be true, because I saw it myself and I knew it wasn’t something from this earth.”



The people and the identity of Shag Harbour have been completely consumed by the events that happened on the night of October 4, 1967. Whether it was from this world or not, whatever fell out of the sky into the water 50 years ago has left this village – and researchers, officials and the public at large – totally stumped – at least that’s the official story. There is no closure, and all the witnesses – and the rest of the world – have are their stories, their unwavering convictions in what they saw and the sliver of hope that maybe someday, it might come back.



As for me – I was happy to have met the people of this beautiful, dying place, but I was also happy to get back on the road. As I drove out of Shag Harbour, I saw those old wooden boats and homes and wondered if they’d still be here in another 50 years, or whether this would just be another Maritime ghost town with a wonderful and weird past.



Source: Hillary Windsor, VICE, October 4, 2017.



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The Shag Harbor Incident Society UFO Interpretative Center was broken into and vandalized some time between Friday evening and Saturday morning, the chairman of the society confirmed Sunday. Laurie Wickens said he left the non-profit center Friday around 5 p.m. and when he returned the following morning, he noticed a smashed window. “There were two cash registers that were upside on the floor and a bunch of pop cans and mugs had been thrown all over the place, so I just went back out and locked the door and called the RCMP,” he recounted.



According to Wickens, when the police arrived, additional broken windows were discovered. It appeared someone had thrown rocks painted like UFOs and aliens, which were discovered outside, through the windows. Someone also sprayed foam from a fire extinguisher. “It looks like a lot of damage,” he added. It isn’t yet known how much money was taken or how much it will cost to repair the damage.



Wickens is convinced vandalism was the primary aim. “I don’t think it was somebody breaking in looking for money,” he explained. “There was some cash there. But they would have just taken the cash and left, they wouldn’t have destroyed the place.” He said in the three to four years he has worked at the center, no one had ever tried to damage the property.



The center is expected to reopen Wednesday, September 12.



About the UFO center. According to its website, the Shag Harbor Incident Society believes the report of a UFO sighting in 1967 should be recognized in the community. The society was formed in 2006 with the goal of setting up a permanent place to “display the accumulating information collected on the mysterious UFO that landed in the harbor,” the website indicates. The center initially opened in a temporary location in 2007 and moved to its permanent home in 2009.



Source: Anjuli Patil, CBC News, September 9, 2018.

