Shag Harbour UFO Incident

Canada’s best-documented and most intriguing UFO sighting

Name	Shag Harbour UFO Incident
Occurred on	October 4, 1967
Seen by	Multiple witnesses, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
Investigated by	The Canadian Government, Chris Styles, and Edward Condon

“It’s changed the identity of our community. For better or worse, we’ve become known as the place where a UFO crashed,” said Laurie Wickens, the Shag Harbour Incident Society’s president and one of the first people to report the Shag Harbour UFO Incident.

Located at the Southwestern tip of Nova Scotia, Shag Harbour is a relatively small fishing community in Canada. With a population of 400 to 450 people, the village is so small that it often gets omitted from most maps—that was until October 4, 1967.

Like other communities, Shag Harbour was home to numerous interesting local folklore about giant sea serpents, man-eating squids, and ghost ships. However, nothing would compare to the newest story which happened that eventful day, because it wouldn’t be some myth passed around but an actual story its witnesses would share.

What Is the Shag Harbour UFO Incident About?

Most UFO incidents can be easily dismissed as misidentifications, but occasionally, some cases appear where credible witnesses give more weight to the story. This is what the Shag Harbour UFO Incident is: a compelling story told by reliable witnesses.

• Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
• Scores of Fishermen
• Airline Pilots

This is also precisely why its intrigue has continued to confound researchers for more than five decades, despite the incident being only a single event that occurred in one night.

What Happened the Night of the Incident?

The first reported call about the event on October 4 came from Laurie Wickens, who, with four other friends, spotted an unidentified flying object near the Shag Harbour at around 11 PM.

We happen to look through the window, and we see a light. Then there were two on, then three on, then four on. It seems to be flying along, like just level, a yellowish orangish color.

The group allegedly pursued the object until it descended toward the waters, where they momentarily lost sight of it. They only saw it again, floating approximately 250 meters offshore, when they drove to the top of a hill.

Wickens’ primary concern was the possibility that it could be a commercial plane, which might then be carrying injured survivors. He rushed to call the RCMP, and the officer who picked up the call was initially skeptical until more calls came in reporting seeing the same thing:

• Strange orange lights flashing in sequence
• A 60-foot object on which the lights are attached
• The object diving at a 45° angle towards the water’s surface

Soon enough, a crowd of about 16 people,² including police officers, gathered by the shore and curiously watched the orange sphere bobbing in the water.

Witness Statements and Corroborations

The crash was the primary reason why the Shag Harbour UFO Incident gained popularity. However, as the case progressed, it would be revealed that more witnesses had seen the object even before 11 PM and across separate areas in Nova Scotia.

Here’s a rundown of the events before the crash:

• 7:15 PM: Air Canada Flight 305 pilots, Captain Pierre Charbonneau and First Officer Robert Ralph, saw a “brilliantly lit, rectangular object with a string of lights trailing it” traveling parallel to their aircraft.
• 8:30 PM: 12-year-old Daryl Dorey, with his sister and mother, saw an “orange ball of light trailed by several smaller lights.”
• 9 PM: MV Nickerson’s Captain Leo Mersey, with his 18-man crew, was 50 km south of Sambro Island Lighthouse when they saw strange lights in the sky. This object also reflected on the ship’s radar.

Credible Witnesses

What made the Shag Harbour UFO Incident more compelling was its list of reputable witnesses. These figures’ experiences prevented it from being easily dismissed.

Ralph Loewinger

A Boeing 707 cargo aircraft was flying at 33,000 feet that same night. One of its pilots, Loewinger, claimed to have observed a row of flashing lights near the Gulf of Maine around the same time the incident was reported.

Constable Ron Pound

RCMP Constable Pound also claimed to have witnessed the lights while he was driving down Highway 3 to Shag Harbour. He described what he saw as having four lights attached to one craft.

Other Witnesses

It was later mentioned that calls about the UFO sighting didn’t only come from around the Shag Harbour, but spanned an expansive area of Nova Scotia. This uncovers the case’s magnitude in terms of the number of witnesses.

• Bear Point
• Cape Sable Island
• Maggie Garens Point

Peter Goreham

Goreham was 13 when he saw a bright light cutting through the trees outside his window that came with a loud, whistling noise. He reported it to his parents and the RCMP, but hid it for years from anybody else, because for him, “When you mention extraterrestrial, people don’t go for that. You become a target, and people label you.”

An Unidentified Woman

Somewhere around the Halifax area, an unknown woman called a local radio station to report what she’s seeing. She described it as “a round object moving from Halifax-Dartmouth ferry landing north to south,” characterizing it as “more vivid than a star with an orange hue like a halo.”

Wilfrid Eisner

Eisner was a photographer who allegedly captured a 5-minute time exposure of the lights in a tilted triangle by Mason’s beach, becoming the only photographic evidence of the case.

Norman Smith

Smith was 18 years old when he saw the Shag Harbour UFO Incident. He was on his way home with a friend through Bear Point woods, stopping alongside the road, where they saw “five lights stopped in mid-air. The lowest light to the ground was like if you were looking at a full moon, and then the next one just kept getting smaller. There was no sound. You couldn’t hear anything.”

David Kendricks

Kendricks was Smith’s friend who drove with him to Shag Harbour from Cape Island. As they were passing by Bear Point, he recalled seeing a bright light in the sky before two more appeared in a row. He described them as pinpoint lights and not flares.

Chris Styles

Styles would be an essential name in the Shag Harbour UFO Incident, as someone who investigated and revived the case. Here is his statement recounting what he saw that night:

I saw a strange orange light that was moving along the shoreline, and it was like nothing I have ever seen. It was dim and hard to discern any detail, so I quickly grabbed my jacket, ran out the front door, and went down the waterfront to get a better look.

When I got to the waterfront, what I saw was a strange orange sphere, perhaps 60 feet through, and it was the color of an iron poker when it first glows in the fireplace if you let it get hot long enough. It was hovering, following the shoreline, perhaps 10 feet over the water, and made no sound.

Ervin Banks

Banks’s account would be a little different from the rest, as he didn’t see the object crash but instead claimed to have picked up debris. He was a lighthouse keeper at that time, and shared that he found a cylinder the day after the crash, describing it as:

• 30 to 40 inches long and 15 to 18 inches in diameter
• Partially burned with wires protruding
• A terrible odor came out of it

He allegedly notified the Canadian Department of Transportation, which instructed him to pack the object and deliver it to an American Naval Officer at Prospect Point Wharf.

Investigations for the Case

Given the multiple witnesses, many immediately rushed to the harbour to check what was happening. From 11:30 to 11:55 PM, the following local agencies and volunteers had already assembled around the area:

• The Rescue Coordination Center (RCC) in Halifax was contacted.
• The Coast Guard Cutter 101 in Clark’s Harbour was also involved.
• Lighthouse keepers around the area were put on alert.
• Two fishing boats with volunteers were dispatched.

They searched for any wreckage, under the assumption that what crashed was an airplane, not that the event was of extraterrestrial origin.

However, what welcomed them was no wreckage but “a swath of glittering yellow foam estimated to be 80 feet wide by a half mile long and three to four inches thick.”

One of the fishermen who responded, Norman Smith, attempted to gather the foam by dipping a net into it, but nothing was gathered.

I’ve been fishing all my life, but I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve been up rivers, lakes, and oceans, but I’ve never seen foam like that on water.

In the following days, the Shag Harbour would be swamped with people scanning its waters for any evidence of the crash. The RCC would be among the primary investigators of this case.

Rescue Coordination Center’s Operations

The center’s initial efforts revolved around sending divers to scour the area until 3 AM on October 5, before it was called off.

While they did resume the search at first light the same day, they also immediately issued a statement ruling out the possibility of a plane crash, with the nearby NORAD radar center verifying that no missing aircraft was recorded that night.

With the possibility of an airplane crash eliminated, the RCC then sent a priority telex to the Royal Canadian Air Force’s “Air Desk,” the branch that allegedly handled civilian and military UFO sightings. The message stated that something crashed in Shag Harbour and labeled it as a “UFO report.”

By evening, the Shag Harbour UFO Incident became a military matter. The Air Desk head, Squadron Leader William Bain, sent a message to the Department of National Defence (DND), recommending an underwater search and prompting the Maritime Command to dispatch seven navy divers to search the area until sundown of October 8.

Unfortunately, nothing was found, and a memo from DND was released indicating that, “two days of underwater search by divers of the probability area under good conditions has produced nil results.”

Civilians’ Reaction to the Results

Civilians, especially those who responded on the scene, didn’t believe that nothing was discovered. They thought that the government was hiding something.

Throughout the search operations, with no information coming from the authorities, rumors quickly spread like wildfire, and people became increasingly fearful.

The Chronicle Herald’s Participation

When the case first broke into the public eye, a Canadian broadcasting corporation filmed the operations, and this led to Canada’s major newspaper’s participation. The Chronicle Herald was the first paper to react, sending its staff writer, Ray Macleod, to cover the case.

I started following up on what we got from the RCMP and what we got from search and rescue, and that was they had no idea what had gone down. They had nothing missing. They had seen nothing drop off the radar screen anywhere in the area, and they were puzzled.

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This lack of information further raised Macleod’s curiosity, which pushed him to contact his military sources to get insider information about the case.

By the end of his mini-investigation, he was able to piece together the first extensive coverage of the Shag Harbour UFO Incident, headlined, “Could Be Something Concrete in Shag Harbour UFO—RCAF,” quoting what Air Desk Squadron Leader William Bain mentioned in their interview:

We get hundreds of reports every week, but the Shag Harbour incident is one of the few where we may get something concrete on it.

The Media’s Possible Downplay

Days after the headline was published, Macleod was handed a note. It stated that the Shag Harbour UFO Incident would be covered by someone else: David Bentley.

How Bentley painted the story was referred to as a “downplay” by Macleod, as the journalist conferred with known skeptics and scientists. To Macleod, Bentley “pursued people who basically ‘poo-pooed’ the story and told everybody there was nothing to it.”

One of Bentley’s sources was Canada’s most outspoken UFO debunker, Jesuit priest and astronomer, Father Burke-Gaffney. Weeks later, the priest attempted to alleviate lingering concerns about the probability of the Shag Harbour being extraterrestrial by arguing that natural phenomena can explain 94% of sightings.

Later, the Chronicle Herald would publish another headline about the Shag Harbour UFO Incident. This time, it covered the case through a different angle, “Secret War Machines from U.S.—Scientist.”

Chris Styles’s Extensive Research

The noise surrounding the Shag Harbour UFO incident subsided when the RCC concluded its search operations on October 9, 1967.

However, the story and investigations were revived in 1993, when Chris Styles, who was a MUFON investigator, and also witnessed the incident, decided to look into it again.

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.

Using Canada’s Access to Information Act, Styles launched his own investigation, which spanned years of reviewing documents from the DND and the National Archives, as well as interviewing former military insiders and members of the diving unit to piece together the entire incident.

His investigation uncovered and highlighted two significant points about the incident:

• The military was comfortable with the possibility that the case was of extraterrestrial origin, acknowledging the UFO reality.
• The divers did discover something when they were dispatched to search underwater after the initial operations failed.

The Divers’ Side of the Story

In an interview on April 9, 1993, one of the divers Styles managed to contact shared a few interesting revelations about what happened after the UFO sank underwater.

While the RCC announced that the operations found “nil results,” Styles’s source shared a contradicting story. Apparently, the craft not only sank, but traveled toward a small U.S. Navy facility 70 km northeast of the harbor, where the divers saw a second object “lending assistance” to the first.

This wasn’t the only information the Canadian government suppressed, as the diver also shared that a flotilla of Canadian ships, accompanied by the U.S. Navy, had anchored over these objects to monitor their activity.

A week into this, a Russian submarine entering Canadian waters disrupted the inspection. When the U.S. Navy made its move to intercept it, the two objects also made theirs. They drove to the Gulf of Maine before breaking the surface and shooting away.

These events were verified by many witnesses, but were “off the record” because military personnel feared losing their pensions or being ridiculed for making the claim.

However, another UFO case, the Lachlan Cameron sighting, in which two sets of lights were seen leaving Shag Harbour, would have corroborated this story.

The Condon Report

It would be weeks after that the Shag Harbour Incident would reach Edward Condon and his team. By this time, they were already working on “The Condon Report,” a contract project with the U.S. Air Force to put together a scientific assessment of the UFO phenomenon.

However, according to Chris Styles, Condon’s team didn’t exactly investigate the case.

Instead, it was immediately turned over to Norman Levine, an electrical engineer, who only made calls to the RCMP and the Maritime Command. Levine would then be told that everything had been done, and nothing unusual had been found.

When published as Case #34 in The Condon Report, the Shag Harbour UFO Incident was defended by stating that the lack of initiative in investigating it was unjustifiable.

The Case’s Paper Trails

Canada isn’t particularly new to UFO sightings, but none have come close to how compelling the Shag Harbour UFO Incident is. One of the reasons for this is due to its paper trail.

Over the course of its events, government officials communicated, leaving official documents of them not only acknowledging the case, but also using the term “UFO” throughout. While this doesn’t mean they think it was an extraterrestrial phenomenon, it’s still significant that the Canadian government classified it as a UFO case, without providing any official explanation.

Inter-Department Memo

One of its first official documents was published about 36 hours after the initial sightings. Several defence department officials signed a memo that read:

A preliminary investigation has been carried out by the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax. It has been determined that this UFO sighting was not caused by a flare, float, aircraft, or, in fact, any known object.

Department of National Defence

Another document came from the Department of National Defence, detailing what happened throughout the case’s investigation, and stated:

Lower Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia, on October 4, 1967, at 2345 hours local, RCMP Corporal from Barrington Passage, NS, and six other witnesses sighted a large flying object… This object, in the time interval of approximately 5 minutes, flew down to the water, floated, and sank. The object was described as being an excess of 60 feet in diameter and carried four white lights spaced horizontally at a distance of 15 feet… The Maritime Command was asked on October 5th to investigate the sighting, and at present, one officer and a diving team of three men are on the scene, aided by Coast Guard Cutter 101. 

Signed W.W. Turner, Colonel Director Operations.

Maritime Command W.W. Turner also wrote another statement in response to civilian inquiry after the search operations were terminated on October 9, where he stated:

A search of the area failed to produce any material evidence which would assist in explaining or establishing the identity of the object. An underwater search conducted by divers from the Department of National Defence also failed to locate any tangible evidence which would be used to arrive at an explainable conclusion.

X-File: Ship Captain’s Report

Decades after the investigations were closed, Chris Styles found another report that hadn’t been released. It was one written by the ship’s captain, who claimed to have seen and also mentioned that the ship’s radar detected the object.

Shag Harbour UFO Incident’s Significance in Ufology

Statements and documents from this case all point to one thing: that the Canadian government was adamant in its claims of not knowing what was going on. However, the contradicting statements from Styles’s investigation and sources should also be noted, where extensive military operations were said to have brought evidence and positive results.

Today, the case has become a core part of the village’s economy and identity. With a group of locals forming the Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society in 2006 to preserve this part of the community’s history, people’s interest and fascination with it only grew.

Regardless of whether the government is feigning ignorance or not, the Shag Harbour UFO Incident only further intensifies speculations that the government covers up situations that could lead to potential discussions of extraterrestrial phenomena.

Was it a real UFO or a covert military experiment? Even after 50 years, the Shag Harbour incident remains one of the most puzzling cases in UFO history—challenging what we think we know.

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FAQ

Was any debris ever found?

Yes, one of the lighthouse keepers, Ervin Banks, found a cylinder the day after the crash. He contacted the Canadian Department of Transportation about it, who told him to pack the object and deliver it to an American Naval officer.

Was there an official explanation?

Like most cases, investigations didn’t lead to an official explanation. However, aside from the typical extraterrestrial and scientific discourse, one possible explanation could be related to military activity since the incident happened during a highly charged period in Canada’s history.

Are there similar cases in Canada?

There is another case that’s closely tied to the Shag Harbour UFO Incident. The Lanchlan Cameron Sighting, which happened on October 11, 1967, involved two sets of lights being seen leaving Shag Harbour.