by Ryan Sprague
In the small fishing village of Shag Harbor, Nova Scotia, things were pretty simple and quiet for this
modest Canadian province. But on October 4th of 1967, the village would host one of the most well
documented UFO incidents of all time.
Residents of the town would report seeing four orange lights in tight formation flashing in rapid
sequence across the night sky. A group of teens that were out fishing noticed that the lights were
making a brisk descent towards the water. But instead of disappearing in to the murky depths, the lights
seemed to float effortlessly on the surface before disappearing in to the water. Because of this, the teens
believed it to be an airplane that had crashed about one-half mile from the shore. Another young man
who had been fishing quickly phoned the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to report the crash
of an aircraft. The police dispatcher brushed off the young man, believing him to have been inebriated,
but soon, over a dozen other calls flooded the station. Police immediately went out to investigate.
Unbeknownst to the RCMP, Constable Ron Pound was patrolling an area near the alleged incident. He
witnessed the four orange lights moving at tremendous speed. As he sped up his vehicle, he believed
the four lights to all be connected to a single aircraft, and estimated it to be about sixty feet in length.
He reached the shoreline where he was soon joined by fellow officers, Police Corporal Victor Werbieki,
and Constable Ron O’Brien. Along with over thirty other witnesses, they all watched as the orange
lights slowly changed to a yellowish tint, and it moved eerily slow across the surface of the water,
leaving a similar yellowish colored foam in it’s wake. Some witnesses claimed to have seen the actual
structure of the object, reporting it as “dome-shaped.”
The object then began to sink in to the ice-cold waters, a loud “whooshing” sound being heard by
several witnesses. The Canadian Coast Guard was called to the scene, but before they could arrive, two
RCMP officers has already secured local fishermen’s boats and headed towards the area for a possible
search and rescue mission. The lights were no longer visible, but the yellow foam remained. The
officers and fisherman who assisted, all said that the foam was like no sea foam they had ever seen,
much thicker than anything that could be caused naturally. They had to cut their way through it just to
look for survivors of the supposed crash. After several hours of searching, nothing could be found. The
RCMP, along with The Coast Guard, contacted their local NORAD station and the Rescue
Coordination Center, asking if there had been any reports that evening of a missing aircraft either
civilian or military. They had nothing.
The following morning of October 5th, the Canadian Forces Headquarters sent out specially trained
divers from the Navy and RCMP to systematically search the seabed in the alleged area where the
crash had occurred. They searched for several days, and found absolutely nothing. Local newspaper
began to circulate speculative theories of a Russian spacecraft, submarine, or spy satellite being the
enigmatic culprit. There were also rumors that the United States had launched their own investigation
in to the incident. Slowly, the headlines made their way to the back of the newspapers, and soon faded
in to obscurity as most UFO cases do. But in a similar fashion to previous cases, the nail in the coffin is
twisted upward, and new information soon came to light on the Shag Harbor incident in 1993.
Due to the exhaustive dedication by MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) investigators, Chris Styles and
Don Ledger were able to compile a list of first hand witnesses, and individuals involved with the search
and recovery efforts. It soon became clear that this case wasn’t as cut and dry as first thought. RCMP
was told that no aircraft had been reported missing, which may have been true. But the object itself was
indeed tracked. And where it submerged in to the water, the radar’s were able to follow the object
another twenty five miles to an area known as Government Point. In the early 1960s, the United States
maintained a small military base there, and were using a highly technical tracking radar known as a
MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detection) grid, for the sole purpose of tracking submarines in the North
Atlantic sea. It was with this grid that the U.S. tracked the Shag Harbor object and dispatched NAVY
vessels to surround it. For three days, the object showed no signs of function or activity. And then
another object appeared under the water to accompany the first. The NAVY stood by for nearly a week
and held position over the two objects, not exactly sure how to proceed in terms of possible threat or
the scary possibility that more objects would appear. It was in this highly tense week that a Russian
submarine had breached Canadian waters, and several NAVY vessels from the UFO incident were sent
to investigate. This is when the UFOs made their move towards the Gulf of Maine. The NAVY vessels
pursued the objects, but simply could not keep up with the tremendous speed. In complete shock and
awe, the objects ascending to the surface, and shot skyward, disappearing completely out of sight.
It should be said that these accounts came from highly credible individuals involved with the incident,
but their names were protected by both MUFON investigators, Styles and Ledger, to protect them from
possible threat or security oaths, therefore the aforementioned information, just like most witness
testimony, was given “off the record”. No matter the case, something extremely strange occurred in
Shag Harbor on that dark, cold night, and even stretched southward towards the United States. It could
perhaps be best summarized with a quote from the an October 14th editorial from The Chronicle-
Herald : “Imagination and or natural phenomena seem to be the weakest, of explanations. It has been a
tough week for skeptics.”
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Ryan Sprague is an investigative journalist, focusing on the topic of UFOs. He is the author of the ‘Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to the UFO Phenomenon’, and ‘Stories From Somewhere in the Skies‘ published by Beyond the Fray Publishing. You can catch him on his weekly podcast, Somewhere in the Skies. And, visit him on his WEBSITE.
