The Shag Harbour Incident
Residents of a Nova Scotia fishing village watched an object with flashing lights descend into the water and float, glowing, before it sank. Police, fishermen and Navy divers searched. Canada's official file lists it as an unidentified object, and it is Canada's best-known case.
- Date
- 4 October 1967
- Place
- Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Witnesses
- Fishermen, RCMP officers and residents of Shag Harbour
- Status
- Unresolved
What happened
At about 11:20 p.m. on 4 October 1967, several people in Shag Harbour, including three RCMP officers, saw an object with four flashing amber lights descend at an angle toward the water, strike the surface with a whistle and a flash, and float about a mile offshore, glowing pale yellow. Fishermen took boats out and found a patch of dense yellow foam and a strong sulphur smell where the object had been. It had sunk. Coast Guard and RCMP boats searched through the night, and a Navy dive team spent three days on the seabed without finding anything.
The object
Estimated at about sixty feet, low and dark, with a row of lights. No occupants were reported. Later accounts from military witnesses, collected in the 1990s, described a second object joining the first underwater and a tracking operation off the coast, but those accounts are unverified.
Aftermath
The Canadian Department of National Defence recorded the event as a UFO, not as a crashed aircraft, after checking that no aircraft was missing. The file is public. In the 1990s researchers Chris Styles and Don Ledger collected witness testimony and the case became the subject of books and a museum in the village.
Explanations
Suggestions include a meteor, a Soviet or American submarine, and flares. The witnesses' description of an object descending, floating, glowing and then sinking, seen by police and fishermen at close range, does not fit any of them well. The Canadian government lists the object as unidentified, and the Atlas does the same.
Sources
- Shag Harbour UFO incident
- Don Ledger and Chris Styles, Dark Object (2001) Find on Amazon
Book links go to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, XenoAtlas earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Every book the Atlas cites is shelved in the Reading Room.