The Shag Harbour Incident

Late on the evening of October 4th, 1967, the residents of a small fishing village called Shag Harbor in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada would witness something very strange, a large, unknown object that crashed into the waters just outside the village. This event is considered one of the most intriguing UFO sightings and crashes ever reported in Canada. So let's take a look at the Shag Harbor incident.

The village of Shag Harbor is a rather ordinary place, it's a small fishing community on the south shore of Nova Scotia, with a population of roughly 400 to 450 residents. The village would probably not catch anyone's attention if it wasn't for the events of 1967. 19 pm on October 4th, a pilot of an Air Canada plane reported seeing a strange object in the sky.

The plane was en route to Toronto and was flying over Sherbrooke and St. Jean Quebec at around 3,658 meters or about 12,000 feet. First officer Robert Ralph is the one who first spotted the object.

15 pm he would tell Captain Pierre Chabonot on flight 305 that there was something strange on the left side of the aircraft. This object was reportedly tracking along on a parallel course a few miles away from the aircraft. Whatever this object was, it was a brilliantly lit rectangular object with a string of smaller light trailing it.

19 pm both men would notice a sizable explosion near this large object. 21, there was a second explosion which faded to a blue cloud around this object. This sighting by the two pilots wouldn't be the only one.

This craft or object would be seen by many people living in Shag Harbor. One witness was Darryl Dory who was sitting with his sister Annette and his mother on their front porch in Mahon Bay on the evening of October 4th. The group noticed a large object moving above the southwestern horizon.

Dory would write a letter to the Royal Canadian Air Force Greenwood base commander the next day and in the letter he asked the commander about this strange craft that he saw flying over the water the previous evening. He was curious to know what this craft could have been because he had never seen anything like it and he assumed that it was some kind of new military aircraft and he was curious. It's unclear if he received a reply or not.

Another witness who saw this strange craft was Captain Leo Howard Mercy who was standing at the wheelhouse of his vessel when he spotted four blips on his deca radar which were stationary. Standing up about 28 kilometers or 17 miles from the vessel's windows he was able to see these four bright blips or objects situated in a roughly rectangular formation. And Mercy wasn't the only one who saw this object, nearly 20 fishermen were standing on the deck and watching this object in the sky to the northeast.

Seeing just what the hell he was looking at Mercy would radio the rescue coordination center as well as the harbor master in Halifax to ask for an explanation. He also filed a report with the Lunenberg Royal Canadian Mountain Police. Like I said there were multiple witnesses seeing this.

Some residents would report seeing strange orange lights in the sky, for instance five teenagers would see these orange lights flash in sequence before they suddenly dived at a 45 degree angle towards the water surface. The witnesses kept watching these lights and said that they seemed to float on the water approximately one half mile from the shore. Some people called the local newspaper and local radio stations to report these strange lights that they had seen and many people would report witnessing strange glowing objects flying around Halifax at around 10 pm.

Then at around 11 20 pm at least 11 people would report seeing a low flying lit object head towards the harbor. Multiple witnesses would report hearing a whistling sound like a bomb then a whoosh that was followed by a loud bang. These noises in combination with what they had seen made most of the witnesses believe that they had seen an airplane crash so they quickly reported it to the Royal Canadian Mountain Police at Barrington Passage.

The initial report was made by a local resident named Laurie Wiccans and four of his friends. According to Wiccans they had been driving through Shag Harbor on Highway 3 when they spotted a large object descending into the waters off the harbor. The group would then move to a better vantage point to observe this object and they claimed to have seen a strange object floating about 250 to 300 meters or 820 to 980 feet offshore in the waters of Shag Harbor.

Like I said before Wiccans would then contact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detachment in Barrington Passage and report that he had seen a large airplane or a small airliner crash into the waters of Shag Harbor. This was the most commonly held belief by many people, whatever this was it was clearly an airplane that had crashed but the story would get stranger. Some of the RCMP officers were already aware of this strange event.

For instance Constable Ron Pound had already witnessed the strange lights himself as he drove down Highway 3 and route to Shag Harbor. Pound reported seeing four lights which all seemed to be attached to one flying craft which he estimated to be about 18 meters or 60 feet long. When the reports started coming in about the strange sight Constable Pound was already on his way to the shore to get a better look at whatever these lights were and the craft that they were supposedly attached to.

Accompanying him was Police Corporal Victor Verbiecki, Constable Ronald Bryan and some other local residents. As they got closer they saw a yellow light that was slowly moving on the water which left a yellowish greenish foam in its wake. The RCMP detachment would then contact the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax to advise them on the situation and ask if any aircraft were missing.

While this was happening the flying object was still visible but then it started to sink and quickly disappeared from view. So the inquiry if any craft was missing quickly turned into a rescue mission. Within half an hour of this crash local fishing boats went out to the crash site in the waters of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbor to look for any survivors but nothing was found.

No survivors, no bodies or even debris could be found either by the fishermen or by the Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue cutter which had arrived about half an hour later from nearby Clark's Harbor. They kept on searching until about 3am when the search was called off because nothing had been found. The captain of the Canadian Coast Guard cutter received a radio message from RCC Halifax that all commercial, private and military aircraft were accounted for along the eastern seaboard in both Atlantic provinces and New England.

In other words no aircraft was missing as far as they could tell. By the next morning RCC Halifax also sent a priority telex to the airdesk at the Air Force headquarters in Ottawa to inform them of the crash and that all conventional explanations such as aircrafts or flares had already been dismissed. This led to the incident actually being labeled as a UFO report.

The search wasn't over though. The head of the airdesk would recommend that they do an underwater search and very quickly after that the Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic would be tasked with carrying out the search. So two days after this incident had been observed by multiple people a detachment of Navy divers from Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic was assembled and for the next three days they would comb the seafloor of the Gulf of Maine of Shag Harbor for any clues but they came up empty.

The final report would state that no trace of an object was found. Divers from a vessel called the HMCS Gramby also did an extensive search on the bottom of the ocean for several days but they also found nothing. No trace of any craft or crash victims or any clue whatsoever to indicate what had happened or the fact that something had happened at all.

Whatever this strange object was, was never officially identified, therefore it would be referred to as an unidentified flying object or UFO in Government of Canada documents. The Halifax Chronicle Herald gave the Shag Harbor Report's extensive front page coverage and ran a headline story on the 7th of October titled Could be Something Concrete in Shag Harbor UFO or CAF. This article would summarize the events and included witness descriptions of the alleged object and crash.

It also included the Air Force search and rescue efforts and wrote that the Navy's search was underway because at the time it was. They would then run another story on October 9th called UFO search called off where it stated that the Navy had ended an intensive undersea search for the mysterious unidentified flying object that disappeared into the ocean Wednesday night. Again it reiterated that nothing had been found, no trace or clue of what this object could have been was found.

The story would then die down and grow cold. It would be sort of reignited a few months later when the story was reported on again but that interest would also quickly die down and grow cold. Cold the case remained until Mufon investigator Chris Stiles began looking into the case.

Chris would begin looking for more details and he was able to find the names of many of the original witnesses through newspaper clippings. He would then go and interview many of them and as he conducted these interviews he would uncover a new twist in the case. For instance he learned that the object that either dove or crashed into the waters of the harbor had been seen leaving the shag harbor area.

Eventually it was traveling underwater for about 25 miles to a place called Government Point. This area was near a submarine detection base and the object would be spotted on the sonar there. As soon as the sonar picked up that there was something underwater naval vessels would be positioned over it and would begin planning a salvage operation.

After a few days an alleged second craft would join the first and it's believed that this craft had arrived to render aid to the first craft. Supposedly the naval wasn't sure what to do so they decided to wait and observe and they would monitor these two crafts for about a week until some of the vessels were called away to investigate a Russian submarine that had entered Canadian waters at that point. Once these vessels had left the area the two crafts decided to make their move and they would also leave the area.

There were still some navy boats remaining and they quickly followed these two crafts. The crafts would allegedly travel to the Gulf of Maine pursued by the remaining navy boats. But the crafts were faster than them and after putting a lot of distance between themselves and pursuing navy boats the two crafts would surface from the water and fly up into the sky, never to be seen again.

This part of the story would be corroborated by many witnesses, both civilian and military. However these reports were all given off the record from both sides. The civilian witnesses were worried about their privacy being violated as well as possibly facing a lot of ridicule and the military personnel were also worried about ridicule but they were mostly worried about the loss of their pensions should it become known that they had spoken about this topic.

While this new revelation of the second craft and the two being chased by the navy may sound unbelievable like a piece of science fiction it is clear that something did crash into the waters of shag harbor though what that was remains a mystery. What makes shag harbor so unique is that this case is one of the few cases where a government agency formally declared an incident as a UFO incident. Now as I've mentioned in previous videos, most notably the cash Landrum incident video, UFO does not always mean aliens, it can mean craft developed here on earth.

For instance a lot of people have a lot of questions about why a Russian submarine was in the area, did they had something to do with these crafts or was it as many people believe an alien craft. Whatever the truth may be, something weird did happen late on the evening on October 4th 1967. What do you think happened?

What do you think these strange lights or strange crafts were? Let me know in the comments and thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.

Bye bye.