Good morning, everyone – Coach Carroll here checking in. I’ve just returned from a fact-finding mission from our northern neighbours, and I dunno if it’s the red-eye flight or the mescaline talking right now, but damn, is this week’s entry into the log a strange one. Let’s take a look and see what I managed to record in my wanderings…

THE SHAG HARBOUR UFO INCIDENT

Location: Shag Harbour, Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, Canada

Date: October 4th, 1967

The Story: On a clear fall night off the coast of southern Nova Scotia, numerous sightings of a UFO were reported by a variety of sources, including both civilian and military. The following is a chronological order of events:

Beginning at 7:15 PM Atlantic time, an Air Canada flight from Halifax to Toronto noted while flying over Sherbrooke, Quebec that there was a strange object in the sky on the left side of the plane, flying westward. The pilot described the object as rectangular in shape and brightly lit, with some smaller lights trailing immediately behind. At 7:19, Captain Pierre Charbounneau reported seeing a large silent explosion by the object, which was followed by a second smaller one a couple minutes afterward that faded to a blue cloud.

At about 10:00 PM, reports began to come in from various residents on Nova Scotia’s South Shore region that strange objects were seen in the sky. These reports came from communities several hundred kilometres apart, including in Halifax (Nova Scotia’s largest city), Mahone Bay and Lunenburg (about 60 miles southwest of Halifax), and on the MV Nickerson, which was many miles offshore from Lunenburg.

Finally, at 11:20 PM, a report came in from the tiny community of Shag Harbour that an object had crashed into the water. At least eleven people corroborated viewing this object as it came whistling down before a loud bang occurred. Within about 15 minutes of the incident, civilian fishing boats, the Canadian Coast Guard, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were all on the scene, assuming that an airplane had gone down in the water. A single white light appeared on the surface of the water for a short time, while boats travelled out through thick, glittering yellow foam to reach the scene and investigate.

What’s Weird: Despite their best efforts to search the area, including the Royal Canadian Navy conducting a sweep of the sea bed looking for crash debris, no evidence of the object – debris, bodies – nothing whatsoever – was found to corroborate that this incident even happened. All the same, the Canadian authorities took the incident very seriously.

• The RCMP received numerous calls from people who had seen the object – all of whom had roughly the same story to share. Curiously, all of the police reports of these incidents have since vanished – and nobody has a clue about where they are.
• The Royal Canadian Air Force Greenwood Base, located inland on the province, in conjunction with the RCMP and the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, put a call out to determine the whereabouts of all military, commercial and personal aircraft in Atlantic Canada and the Eastern Seaboard. Not a single one was reported missing in any of the days leading up to the incident.
• The yellow foam is absolutely inexplicable, though multiple people who were there at the scene corroborated that it was indeed present on the surface of the water.
• Top military brass in Ottawa all signed off on a memo that the incident in question was indeed a UFO – indicating that the Department of National Defence had literally no clue what was going on… at least initially. The search in the ocean was abruptly called off after just three days, with zero physical evidence to show for it.
• The Condon Committee, a USAF-funded project based out of the University of Colorado, took great interest in these events, and the Shag Harbour Incident was included in the Condon Report about UFO sightings in North America which was delivered to the Air Force in November 1968. For those well-versed in UFO history, the Condon Report was controversial from the get-go; many people praised the work contained within, while others dismissed it as shoddy and unsubstantiated; at any rate, there is the potential that the United States government wanted to cover up evidence of UFOs and thus discredit the Condon Report.

What might have happened?

There is a theory out there, mentioned in Canada’s National Post, that due to the timing of this incident, occurring in arguably the height of the Cold War and Space Race raging between the United States and Soviet Union, that perhaps the UFO in question was in fact some secret military equipment belonging to either country. Due to the constant threat of spying and extreme secrecy maintained by both countries’ military and space programs, the UFO could perhaps be something as mundane as a rocket or satellite that fell to Earth, although it’s curious to see both the mentions of the yellow foam on the water and the fact absolutely no debris was found whatsoever. Others have theorized that perhaps it really was a UFO, and due to the sensitive nature of this discovery that governments conspired to shield this truth from the public.

At any rate, the official report with the Canadian Department of National Defence has the matter listed as “unsolved”, and the debate rages on over fifty years later; the tiny fishing village is now the host of an annual UFO festival, where people come from all over to get together and discuss the incident and UFOs as a whole.

Coach Carroll’s Hypothesis: I called the staff together to think about this one; everyone was on board with the idea that there really were aliens out there. Except for Bevell and Cable. So of course I had to fire those assholes. Nobody’s questioning my strategizing here.

Information on this incident was taken from here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

Banner image courtesy of Low Commander of the Super Soldiers.