The Shag Harbour UFO Event

Shag Harbour is a small fishing community on the southern end of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Apart from its memorable name, it has one other claim to fame: being the site of the only government-recognized UFO sighting in Canada and, perhaps, the world.

The Events as Reported in 1967

For this story we have to go back to the 4th of October, 1967. The Box Tops were riding at the top of the Billboard 100 with their song “The Letter,” and folks around the normally sleepy area of Shag Harbour had a more exciting night than usual.

Teenager Laurie Wickens was driving a carload of his friends back to Shag Harbour late on the 4th when they spotted some strange lights in the sky. In a Canadian Press story on the National Post website, he’s quoted as saying: “There were four in a row, and they were going on and off(…)One would come on, then two, three and four — and they’d all be off for a second and come back on again.” They had the impression that the lights were part of one object, which seemed to be heading down at about a 45 degree angle towards the water.

They couldn’t see exactly what happened next as the curves on the road they were driving on meant the object went out of view for a short time, but Wickens and other passengers reported hearing a whooshing or whistling noise. When they could see it again, or where they thought the trajectory of the object was headed, there was a large yellow light floating on the water. Sure that they had witnessed a plane ditching into the sea, the teens drove to find a phone box and called the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police service.

At about the same time, another car with a couple of teens in it also spotted 4 or 5 glowing lights, headed down at the same 45 degree angle. One of these teens, Norm Smith, also later reported hearing the whistling sound. He could still see the lights by the time he got home and, also fearing that there was an aircraft in distress, Smith, his dad and his uncle rushed down to Shag Harbour to see if they could help.

The RCMP officer who took Laurie Wickens’ call was initially skeptical about the teen’s report of a possible plane crash, but as more calls started coming in from at least 7 other people also speaking of the whistling noise and the yellow or orange lights, he decided to start taking it seriously. He and two other RCMP officers headed for Shag Harbour and arrived to find a group of other people including Norm Smith and Laurie Wickens. The crowd started to grow as people got curious about what all the commotion was, and they all witnessed a yellow light floating about 200 metres off the shore which seemed to be part of an object about 60 feet or 18 metres across. The light then seemed to dim and slip under the water at about 11.20pm and disappear.

Shortly after the light vanished, a search and rescue attempt was made. The RCMP officers, the Smith family and other volunteers headed out to the apparent crash site in two fishing boats, trying to see if there were any survivors.

They didn’t find debris, bodies or any other evidence of a crashed plane. What they did find, however, was a large swath of thick yellow foam on the surface of the water, judged to cover an area of about 80 feet by half a mile or about 25 by 800 metres. It was thick, glistening and smelled of sulphur. None of the fishermen had ever seen anything like it and it was not oil or fuel.

A couple more local boats joined the search, with the coastguard arriving at about half past midnight. The initial search was called off at 4am on the 5th of October.

During this time, the RCC or Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax had been contacted for any information on missing aircraft in the area. As the hours went by, it was confirmed that there were no missing commercial, domestic or military aircraft, and the RCMP officers were also pretty sure there hadn’t been a plane crash as the area was not very deep and they were sure to have found some debris after hours of searching. By 10.30am on the 5th of October, the mystery object was being referred to as a UFO by the Rescue Coordination Center.

The search resumed on the 6th of October, bolstered by a team of divers. By the process of elimination, RCMP, RCC, and the Air Desk in Ottawa were all now tagging the object as a UFO. As it was the authorities and government departments that first started bandying the “UFO” label around and not the people who saw it from their homes, cars or boats, this added an extra layer of credibility to the event.

A memo between departments said: “A preliminary investigation has been carried out by the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax. It has been determined that this UFO sighting was not caused by a flare, float, aircraft or in fact any known object.”

On the 7th of October, the Chronicle Herald ran a front page piece with the headline saying: “Could be Something Concrete in Shag Harbour UFO - RCAF Continue Search Today”. The RCAF is the Royal Canadian Air Force. Other news articles soon followed with titles such as “There is Something Down There.”

The search was eventually halted on the 9th of October 1967, with the navy being quoted in the Chronicle Herald as having found: “Not a trace… not a clue… not a bit of anything.”

As Don Ledger, co-author of “Dark Object” puts it: “Something came out of the sky and went into the water at Shag Harbour and nobody knew what it was.”

Other Corroborating Events

It wasn’t just those handful of people around Shag Harbour that witnessed these lights. Calls and reports to various organizations around Nova Scotia that night and in the days that followed created a fuller timeline of the events.

At 7.15pm on the 4th, Air Canada Flight 305 was flying from Halifax to Toronto through clear skies. Captain Pierre Charbonneau and co-pilot Robert Ralph both saw a well-lit rectangular object flying on a parallel course to them, with what looked like a string of smaller lights trailing behind it. They then saw an apparent explosion, followed by another, with one glowing cloud heading east while the smaller lights seemed to act independently around the area of the first explosion. Both pilots allegedly provided full written reports of this incident.

At around 9pm, fishermen on the MV Nickerson contacted the Halifax harbour master to enquire about some weird objects that had shown up on their radar. They reported red flashing lights in the shape of a large box that would flash so brightly as to leave an afterimage. Eventually, only one light remained that flew straight up in the air, went over the fishing boat and headed in the direction of Shag Harbour. There were apparently no naval exercises going on at this time.

At 10pm in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, 12 year old Chris Styles saw a large round glowing object heading along the harbour. He rushed out of his house with some binoculars to investigate further and saw that it was about 50 to 60 feet or 15 to 18 metres in diameter. It came to within about 100 feet or 30 metres of the shoreline before Chris got really scared and ran home. His grandfather called him the next day to tell him about the incident at Shag Harbour which was about 150 miles away, and Chris realized he might have seen the same phenomenon.

At about 10.30pm in Mason’s Beach, Nova Scotia, Will Eisner spotted three lights in a triangle formation. As they didn’t move for a while and he was a photographer, he managed to take a 5 minute exposure of the lights before they eventually disappeared. It shows some streaks of red light and some static lights: a large purple one with a blueish outline, a medium sized red one and a smaller, clearer bright orange one.

The red streaks are explained as stars, due to the movement of the planet during the exposure time. The static lights couldn’t have been planes or helicopters, for example, as they wouldn’t have been able to remain stationary for the amount of time the camera took without appearing far more blurry. This photo was taken about an hour before the reported crash at Shag Harbour.

While some people, such as “Dark Object” co-author Don Ledger, don’t necessarily believe it was the object witnessed falling towards the water later that night, it does prove, to him at least, that there were also other unexplained lights in the sky that night.

Exactly a week later, another strange sight was witnessed not far from the Shag Harbour area by the Cameron family. Here’s the report that was submitted to the RCMP at the time:

Light in straight line in southeast direction and 45 degree angle, no form seen, estimated spread of light to be 50 to 60 feet. On four occasions the lights which were bright red and as bright as local buoy lights went off in sequence from back to front and there were lit in sequence from front to back. The first time there were six lights and the last time four. Lights hovering and shifting from side to side.

Red lights watched for 7 - 8 minutes and were extinguished and yellow-orange light appeared and disappeared over the horizon to the northwest. This light observed for approx 10 minutes, all persons sober and appear to be sincere. Sighting also reported to RAF Baccaro. Understand Baccaro radar - negative.

No known operations in area. Suggest government personnel interview persons concerned above and those in sighting on 4 October 67.

This sighting garnered another flurry of press attention, with an article titled “Canadian Defense Department Investigates UFO that Dived into Nova Scotia Bay” appearing shortly after. But as nothing was found, the interest in the Shag Harbour UFO soon died away and was more or less forgotten — until one day 25 years later when one of the original witnesses was all grown up and decided to do some digging.

Later Revelations

Remember Chris Styles? He was the 12 year old who rushed out of his house late at night to see an orange light hovering near the harbour. In the early 90s he happened to watch a programme about Roswell and his memory of the lights at Shag Harbour came flooding back. According to the documentary “The Shag Harbour UFO Incident”: “from that moment, Shag Harbour became an obsession with him.” Chris himself states:

The Shag Harbour incident is unique in that it’s one of the cases that the more data you learn, the more witnesses, the more documentation, this case does not evaporate. The more you learn, the stronger it gets in terms of its unconventional reality.

Once his investigations had got underway, Styles was joined by Don Ledger who was also interested in the case, although in a slightly more pragmatic way. Styles went to the Canadian National Archives to search old military records and found a cache of UFO sightings on microfilm dating back to the 1940s. He also found old telex communications between Ottawa and Nova Scotia — telex basically being text messages sent over an exchange and printed out at the other end.

There were plenty regarding the Shag Harbour incident, most marked with a “Priority” stamp and littered with references to lights, “dark objects” and “flying objects” as well as using the acronym “UFO” in these messages. Some print-outs also had margin notes, such as someone hand writing “UFO” on the top of one report and underlining it three times. Styles says: “I’ve often said, I don’t know if what’s responsible here is extraterrestrial, extratemporal or extradimensional but it was certainly unconventional and I think they ran with that premise in Ottawa and I think that the priority and the tone of these documents speaks loudly that they were dealing with something potentially extraterrestrial.”

Styles and Ledger then went to visit the National Department of Defense station at Barrington, about 13 miles away from Shag Harbour. It was operating with radar detection at the time so presumably would have picked up anything flying around in the area. The official word, however, was that nothing at all was picked up. Would the military really give out any information of an alien nature, though?

Surely they would want to keep any information about potential extraterrestrial technology out of the hands of mere mortals.

Saying that, it does seem odd that absolutely nothing was picked up, as plenty of people saw the lights in the sky heading downward, then saw them in the water afterwards. There was a large, public search with members of the RCMP stating that they thought it was an alien UFO when asked by members of the public if anything had been found. That something was there doesn’t appear to be in doubt — they just didn’t find anything afterwards. Or said they didn’t find anything.

Checking into the story 25 years on, Styles found an apparent whistleblower from Barrington who said that the radar had picked up something that night but they had all been sworn to secrecy. Apparently whatever the object was had entered the airspace in Northwestern Canada and “wobbled through the atmosphere” before eventually crash landing in Shag Harbour. Then, the source stated that there was a second object following it and that after the incident at Shag Harbour, both objects had then moved. This theory of 2 UFOs ties back in with the later witness sighting by the Cameron family of an unidentified string of lights a week after the original crash. An article from the Chronicle Herald on the 12 of October 1967 about this sighting states: “2nd UFO Reported Seen In Shelburne.”

After talking to more retired military personnel, Styles uncovered that one UFO crashed or submerged under the water and then moved up the coast to Shelburne while the original dive team were still combing Shag Harbour. A second UFO joined it and they eventually moved further along the coast or out to sea before they both then flew out of the water and disappeared. Is it a coincidence that the direction they were supposed to be traveling in under the water led them into the vicinity of what was at the time a secret military base about 30 miles away?

Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Shelburne was a joint Canadian-American military base that at the time of the Shag Harbour event was ostensibly an oceanographic research base but in reality was acting as a secret Soviet submarine tracking station. This means that there was a magnetic grid laid out in the area that would detect heavy metal vessels, and the base was also constantly monitoring a network of underwater microphones that were laid out all over the Atlantic. Basically, if these UFOs traveled anywhere in its vicinity, it should have some record of them.

And according to Styles it did. It allegedly picked up this object resting a few miles away near the seafloor and a fleet of ships and aircraft was dispatched to check it out. Divers made many visits around the object over the course of the next week, saying that it looked like the first object was being assisted by the second.

According to Styles, one of the phrases he remembers being told by a diver is: “There was still activity going on down there.” He was also told that there were “things” seen that “weren’t from here”. This particular source felt uneasy giving away any more information as he wasn’t supposed to talk about it.

Don Ledger said that they had talked to other people involved who also said they did not wish to be filmed or identified as they were also wary of some sort of reprisal. Some of the military personnel involved were under the impression that they were monitoring a Soviet submarine but others were adamant that it was nothing that they’d ever seen before.

At the end of the week-long vigil, a real Soviet sub entered the picture, causing the ships to reconfigure. The UFOs apparently used this window to move off under the water before eventually breaking the surface and taking to the skies once more.

Possible Explanations

We’ve heard the story with the whole extraterrestrial angle — let’s try and see if we can work any rationality into it. The biggest point against the whole alien UFO thing is that there is no physical evidence. If something did go into the water at Shag Harbour, there is no trace of it. People, including perceived trustworthy witnesses such as police, saw lights in the sky acting in such a way that many thought a plane was coming down, but could there be another explanation?

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid offers some clear observations that cut through most of the noise. He mentions that while there were other UFO sightings before and after this one, all these put together may just confuse the whole matter, with witnesses tying events together erroneously or changing their stories to match what other people had already said, and just the general passage of time changing their stories in some way. There weren’t many matching stories at the time, either.

In newspaper articles published right after the event we have various numbers and colours of lights, flashing or not flashing, noises or no noises. As Dunning puts it:

A pair of teens reported three reddish-orange lights descending, each appearing in order, forming a line declining at about 45 degrees, but then their car drove out of view. Four other teens saw the same thing, but got the number at four instead of three, and called them yellow or white, and watched them descend gracefully all the way down to the water. One of these said he remembered them turn off and back on, but the others did not.

One person said he heard them make a whistling noise, the others did not; another person said she heard a loud noise when they hit the water, but nobody else reported this either. So, all we can say from taking the witness accounts as a whole is that a small number of bright lights were seen to descend toward the water, where one remained floating for a short time.

The only tangible thing that the UFO did leave behind was this weird yellow foam, although none was apparently tested or if it was the results were never made public, so we don’t know what it was.

Was this even related to the lights, though? Again, according to Dunning: “the light that a few people had seen floating became connected with the foam reported by a fisherman later that night, and now accounts read that they saw the floating light moving around leaving yellow foam. In fact, nobody reported seeing this at the time.” So time changes everyone’s story and memory of the event.

How about the later stuff relating to two UFOs hanging out near a secret submarine detection base for repairs? While this seems like a great ending to the story, the whole thing seems a bit suspect. Why didn’t anyone do very much if they were observing them for a week?

If the divers were placing microphones and cameras as one said they were, was any footage recovered? Why did the UFOs decide to head there in particular? Is there any proof that this whole bit even happened?

While Chris Styles and Don Ledger present this whole epilogue to the Shag Harbour event in their book “Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash”, there is no actual evidence that any of it happened. They allegedly talked to military personnel that were allegedly there at the time but handily none of these sources wanted to be identified and only spoke around the event, not elaborating on the “things” they’d seen. Is the Canadian government so threatening that even 25 years later, all the people involved were still afraid to speak out about it?

Basically, because of a lack of clarity around these sources and the events at Shelburne, we can’t say for sure if this entire section was just made up or not.

So do we have any ideas for what people might have been seeing that night? One of the obvious candidates would be some kind of military experiment. However, Dunning blasts that theory out of the sky by pointing out: “This has always been a terrible explanation, as it fails at plain logic on at least two points.

First, top secret military aircraft have never been flown in plain view of civilians at low altitude directly over population centers far from test facilities, and there’s every reason to believe this would never be done. Second, flying saucers or rows of lights reported by UFO witnesses have never corresponded to the properties of any military aircraft, so there’s no logic that can support such a match.”

Could it have been some sort of atmospheric event like a meteor exploding or a meteor shower? The lights and angles might match up, but you would have thought that with all the first hand witnesses there, someone would have thought of this possibility, and most people were convinced they were looking at some kind of craft, not a shooting star.

A good candidate might be military flares. Yes, the memo said it was determined that this UFO sighting had not been caused by a flare amongst other things, but it does not say how they determined this. Maybe it wasn’t the military dropping them — maybe it was a mistake, a different country doing it, or just some random group of kids. 1967 was not only the swinging Sixties, it was also right in the middle of the Cold War and the Space Race.

According to the National Post article on the 50th anniversary of the Shag Harbour incident: “Russian submarines were known to frequent the East Coast. And the Americans were testing all manner of devices to spy on their communist foes, including crude spy satellites that ejected film canisters at high altitudes.”

Random earthly things falling from the sky was not outside the realms of possibility, and if it landed in a shallow body of water with a strong current, like Shag Harbour, any debris might be long gone by the time the boats got to where they thought the light had been. And if they didn’t know what they were looking for, that would have made recognizing anything even more difficult.

While flares are often dismissed, some types can last longer and burn brighter than the average civilian realizes. Flares also descend like these Shag Harbour lights and may remain visible on the water for some time. Dunning posits that maybe the flares caused the foam, although he found no evidence of what flares might do after they go out on water. It’s as likely a theory as a UFO causing the foam, if the foam has anything to do with the story at all.

Because no evidence of anything was found and we have no other confirmed UFO sightings or actual alien craft to compare it to, we can’t really say that the lights seen at Shag Harbour were of extraterrestrial origin. Of course, we can’t say with 100% certainty that they were just something like a flare going off, but we should probably try and discount all the boring earthly possibilities first before seeking answers from the stars.

What about the photo that Will Eisner took? It showed some bright lights that were apparently stationary for at least the 5 minutes the camera shutter was open, but these could have been something like a far away meteor shower. The lights don’t really match any of the descriptions given by eyewitnesses, so maybe they are yet another separate event that’s been bundled into the main narrative.

Some people have pointed to a cover-up by the Canadian government, given that a full governmental investigation was never carried out — or it was and was kept under wraps. What has been made public, though, is the report from Dr. Norman Levine who investigated on behalf of what was known as the Condon Committee but was officially called “The University of Colorado UFO Project,” which was funded by the US Air Force from 1966 to 1968, handily bookending the year the Shag Harbour event happened.

He laid out some eyewitness accounts but did inject a note of cynicism regarding the fisherman’s testimony of a light going up into the sky. In the report Levine states:

The ship’s radar showed four objects forming a six mile square; the three lights were associated with one of these objects. At about 11:00 p.m., one of the lights went straight up. The captain had judged that the radar objects were naval vessels and the ascending light a helicopter; he had attached no significance to these observations until he had heard on the radio of the sightings; he then reported the foregoing observations to the RCMP. However, since the position he reported for the objects was about 175 nautical miles from the original site, the two situations do not appear to be related.

The fisherman didn’t think anything weird was afoot with what he saw until it was later put into the context of a possible UFO sighting.

Overall, Levine didn’t seem overly impressed with any of the details, concluding: “No further investigation by the project was considered justifiable, particularly in view of the immediate and thorough search that had been carried out by the RCMP and the Maritime Command.”

The Shag Harbour Event Lives On

The book about the Shag Harbour Event sets its stall out with its full title: “Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash: The Facts Confirm the Crash Happened. Officials Deny it. What Don’t They Want Us to Know?”

There is a Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society, the president of which is none other than Laurie Wickens of “teenager in car who phoned the RCMP” fame. They’re based at the Shag Harbour UFO Interpretive Centre, a yellow building filled with alien bits and bobs and framed newspaper articles of the 1967 event. While some people were trying to turn the place into a Roswell-type tourist trap, it hasn’t really happened, but being in Canada, it’s got a sweet charm all of its own.

Outside the interpretive center there’s a big flashy sign saying “Crash Site of the 1967 Shag Harbour UFO” with a flying saucer on it, although the object was never referred to as a saucer at any time. There’s also a statue of an archetypal green alien wearing a lobster suit. There was even a Shag Harbour Event stamp commissioned in 2001 and a commemorative coin issued in 2019 which has glow-in-the-dark features.

Nova Scotian brewery Boxing Rock also has a Shag Harbour UFO Blonde Ale which is, according to them, “out of this world crisp and refreshing.”

There is an annual Shag Harbour UFO expo in Nova Scotia — a 2 day event featuring various speakers including Chris Styles and even Travis Walton, the man who was allegedly abducted by aliens.

While it is true that the official communications between various departments in Canada were calling the Shag Harbour object a UFO and people like the RCMP officers and some military divers were using this in the extraterrestrial context, whether this was actually an alien vessel is still up for debate — but the likelihood is that it wasn’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Shag Harbour UFO Event?

The Shag Harbour UFO Event refers to a government-recognized UFO sighting that occurred on October 4, 1967, in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada. Witnesses reported seeing strange lights in the sky that appeared to descend into the water, leading to a search and rescue operation that found no debris or evidence of a crashed plane.

What did the witnesses report seeing on October 4, 1967?

Witnesses reported seeing four or five glowing lights in the sky that seemed to be part of one object, descending at a 45-degree angle towards the water. They also reported hearing a whooshing or whistling noise and later saw a large yellow light floating on the water.

What was the initial response from the authorities?

The RCMP initially took the reports seriously after receiving multiple calls from witnesses. They conducted a search and rescue operation but found no debris or evidence of a crashed plane. The search was eventually halted on October 9, 1967.

What was the government’s official stance on the event?

The government departments involved, including the Rescue Coordination Centre and the Air Desk in Ottawa, referred to the object as a UFO after ruling out known objects like flares, aircraft, or other known objects. However, no further investigation was deemed justifiable by the Condon Committee.

What was the yellow foam found on the water?

The yellow foam found on the water was thick, glistening, and smelled of sulphur. None of the fishermen had ever seen anything like it, and it was not oil or fuel. Its origin and connection to the UFO sighting remain unexplained.

What are some possible explanations for the Shag Harbour UFO Event?

Possible explanations include military experiments, atmospheric events like meteors, military flares, or even a cover-up by the Canadian government. However, no definitive evidence supports any of these theories.

What is the Shag Harbour UFO Interpretive Centre?

The Shag Harbour UFO Interpretive Centre is a museum dedicated to the 1967 UFO event. It features exhibits on the incident, including newspaper articles and alien-themed memorabilia. The centre is located in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia.

What is the Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society?

The Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society is an organization dedicated to preserving the history of the 1967 UFO event. The president of the society is Laurie Wickens, one of the original witnesses who reported the sighting to the RCMP.

What is the significance of the Shag Harbour UFO Event?

The Shag Harbour UFO Event is significant because it is the only government-recognized UFO sighting in Canada. The event has garnered attention from UFO enthusiasts and researchers, leading to various theories and investigations over the years.

What is the annual Shag Harbour UFO expo?

The annual Shag Harbour UFO expo is a two-day event featuring speakers and discussions related to the 1967 UFO event. It includes presentations from witnesses and researchers, as well as other UFO-related topics.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Shag Harbour UFO Event
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.