The Toronto Star, Aug. 4, 2001
Are UFO denials all wet? N.S. town has its doubts
Shag Harbour residents recall 1967 downing that has never been explained
Alison Auld
CANADIAN PRESS
SHAG HARBOUR, N.S. – LAWRENCE SMITH stares through a thick, milky fog hanging heavily over this sleepy town's quiet bay.
There, he points, only a kilometre or so out from this rocky shore, is the spot.
"Something came down there, there's no doubt about it," he says, his eyes squinting with intensity.
Smith and many of his fellow residents believe this is the site of what has been called one of the most important UFO sightings ever.
"I'm not sure what it was," Smith says. "It's made me wonder, you know, way out there in space, if there's some other type of life besides us. Whatever that object was, it come from somewhere and our authorities don't know anything about it, so they're saying."
Smith, 68, was a 34-year-old fisherman on Oct. 4, 1967, when the RCMP called him at around 11 p.m. to ask him to take his boat out in the sound. There were reports that what looked to be a plane might have gone down in the harbour.
Smith jumped in his truck and raced to the wharf, where dozens of people had already gathered and were buzzing about a mysterious object that glowed a dull orange.
Cars lined the shoreline near the old moss plant, their headlights trained on the spot where they said something had plunged into the water.
"God, it was quite a fiery looking site with all those lights," says Smith, one of the few surviving fishermen who were on the scene.
"It was a lovely night, no moon or anything and no stars. It was just a dark calm night."
Smith, a couple of buddies and an RCMP officer jumped in his boat and raced to where they thought the plane had crashed. The men had laid out lines and hooks to retrieve debris and help survivors into the vessel, but there was nothing there.
"All we found was a patch of yellowish brown foam on the water — the colour looked like burnt pancakes to me, you know, when they're good and brown," Smith says. "It was a strip of foam that looked like a runway to me, where something came down on the water and sunk or the lights went out and it lifted off again."
By this point, the RCMP, a Halifax newspaper and other agencies were receiving a flurry of calls from people along the coast, including fishing captains, motorists and an Air Canada captain. All said they had seen an unusual object that had several lights and looked nothing like a conventional aircraft.
The Air Canada captain, flying a DC-8 over southeastern Quebec, reported seeing a large rectangular object, followed by a string of lights at about 7:20 p.m. Seconds later, he said, there were several huge explosions near the object, while small lights flickered around it.
Chris Styles witnessed the object from his bedroom that overlooked Halifax harbour. Just 12 years old, he ran from his home in Dartmouth, N.S., down to the waterfront to figure out what was hovering over the ocean.
"What I saw was an orange sphere that was probably 60 feet in diameter, slightly above the water, not making a sound, just tracing the shoreline," says Styles, co-author of Dark Object, a recently released book about the Shag Harbour incident. "It just gave me a cold feeling inside, like this is the other, this is what you're not supposed to see."
As he and the fewer than 700 residents of Shag Harbour puzzled over the object, the Royal Canadian Air Force moved in to investigate and the navy dispatched a team of divers to search the wreckage.
They could find nothing, although Styles' book reports that some fishermen said they saw divers bringing up shiny pieces of debris.
By now, speculation was growing that the orange object that some say floated noiselessly in the skies over the south shore was not an airplane. Could be something concrete in Shag Harbour UFO — RCAF, a Halifax Chronicle-Herald headline read days after the incident.
"By 10:20 a.m., the Rescue Command Centre in Halifax was referring to the object as a UFO, having eliminated the possibility that it was a crashed airplane," Styles writes of the incident that was being called Dark Object.
Despite that, the Canadian Forces Maritime Command called off the official search on Oct. 9, concluding in its report there was "not a trace ... not a clue ... not a bit of anything."
There was never an official explanation, but theories swirled, particularly since the event occurred at the height of the Cold War and near CFB Shelburne, a top-secret submarine detection base.
For years, that's how the incident was treated — an unexplained phenomenon that most in the community gladly let drift into obscurity. Some, like Smith's brother, still won't talk about it.
But that quiet lifted earlier this year when Styles' book was released and the local post office issued a commemorative stamp depicting a flying saucer hovering over water with a lighthouse and boat beneath it.
The ensuing buzz stretched around the world.
TV crews from the United States and Canada showed up to interview witnesses. Enthusiasts stopped by to have their pictures taken. The National Enquirer wanted to do interviews. People from Roswell, N.M., were visiting to compare notes about their infamous alien crash incident.
Now, there is talk of a company taking tourists out to the site to collect bottles of water. Postmaster Cindy Nickerson, who came up with the idea for the stamp two years ago and has had 370 requests for it since May, says the attention has aroused a fond interest in her town.
"So many people stop in from all over wanting to take pictures of the post office," she says from the small building on Shag Harbour's main street. "At the moss plant, where people went that night, there's always people up there taking photos. It's kind of neat."
But a bother for Smith, who says he wishes he had never gone out on his boat that night.
"If I saw something today, I'd just forget it," he says, sporting a cap from the Space Channel, which interviewed him about the crash, and a T-shirt with a picture of a flying saucer and a logo that reads Shag Harbour – Home Of The '67 UFO Visit.
"It caused too much trouble," he insists, "too many interviews." |
