The Shag Harbour UFO incident was the reported impact of an unknown large object into waters near Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, a tiny fishing village on the Atlantic coast, on 4 October 1967. The reports were investigated by various Canadian civilian (RCMP and Canadian Coast Guard) and military (Canadian Forces navy and air force) agencies as well as the U.S. Condon Committee.
Pre-incident aerial phenomenon
Air Canada flight 305
En route to Toronto while flying over Sherbrooke and Saint-Jean, Quebec at , from the Halifax International airport, Air Canada First Officer Robert Ralph pointed out to Captain Pierre Charbonneau on Flight 305 that there was something strange out the left side of the aircraft at 7:15 pm. In his report, the captain reported an object tracking along on a parallel course a few miles away. He describes it as a brilliantly lit, rectangular object with a string of smaller lights trailing it. At 7:19 pm, the pilots noticed a sizeable silent explosion near the large object. Two minutes later, a second explosion occurred which faded to a blue cloud around the object.
Yellow object
Darrel Dorey, his sister Annette, and his mother were sitting on their front porch in Mahone Bay, when they noticed a large object manoeuvring above the southwestern horizon. The next day he wrote a letter to RCAF Greenwood Base Commander asking what was flying over the water that evening, as he had never seen anything like it.
MV Nickerson of Sambro, Nova Scotia
While standing at the wheelhouse of his vessel, Captain Leo Howard Mersey was looking at four blips on his Decca radar that were stationary. When he looked up about from the vessel's windows he could see the four bright objects situated in a roughly rectangular formation. The entire crew of nearly twenty fishermen stood on deck and watched the object in the northeastern sky. Mersey radioed the rescue coordination centre and the harbour master in Halifax asking for an explanation and filed a report with the Lunenburg RCMP outlining his sighting when they returned to port.
Halifax Harbour sightings
The Chronicle-Herald and local radio stations reported a glowing object that was seen by many people who called their newsroom. They reported witnessing strange glowing objects flying around Halifax at around 10:00 pm.
Initial events
On the night of 4 October 1967, at about 11:20 pm Atlantic Daylight Time, it was reported that something had crashed into the waters of Shag Harbour. At least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head towards the harbour. Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound "like a bomb," then a "whoosh," and finally a loud bang. The object was never officially identified, and was therefore referred to as an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Government of Canada documents. The Canadian military became involved in a subsequent rescue/recovery effort. The initial report was made by local resident Laurie Wickens and four of his friends. Driving through Shag Harbour, on Highway 3, they spotted a large object descending into the waters off the harbour. Attaining a better vantage point, Wickens and his friends saw an object floating offshore in the waters of Shag Harbour. Wickens contacted the RCMP detachment in Barrington Passage and reported he had seen a large airplane or small airliner crash into the waters off Shag Harbour.
Search and rescue efforts
Assuming an aircraft had crashed, within about 15 minutes, two RCMP officers arrived at the scene. Concerned for survivors, the RCMP detachment contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC) in Halifax to advise them of the situation and ask if any aircraft were missing. Before any attempt at rescue could be made, the flying object, with lights still showing, started to sink and disappeared from view.
A rescue mission was quickly assembled. Within half an hour of the crash, local fishing boats went out to the crash site in the waters of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbour to look for survivors. No survivors, bodies or debris were taken, either by the fishermen or by a Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue cutter, which arrived about an hour later from nearby Clark's Harbour.
By the next morning, RCC Halifax had determined that no aircraft were missing. While still tasked with the search, 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.