UAPgradeUAPgrade Italiano

Case · C-029

Shag Harbour: a luminous object falls into the sea and the Canadian Navy searches for it

Shag Harbour, Shelburne County (Nova Scotia) · Canada · Oct 4, 1967

Between air and water Mixed witness types

Unexplained

What happened
On the evening of October 4, 1967, several witnesses on the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia, including three officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, saw a row of lights descend toward the sea and a luminous object float about 300 meters from the shore before disappearing underwater, leaving a trail of yellowish foam. Fishing boats and a Coast Guard patrol boat found no wreckage and no missing persons, and Canadian Navy divers searched the seabed for three days without finding anything. In the Canadian government documents, held by Library and Archives Canada, the event is recorded as a UFO sighting; according to the press, a Department of National Defence memo written about 36 hours later ruled out a signal flare, a buoy, an aircraft or any other known object.
Proposed explanation
No official explanation. Brian Dunning (Skeptoid, 2017) indicates marine signal flares or a fireball as the most suitable hypotheses and notes that the Coast Guard telex on the flare leads recorded only the absence of results, not that they had been ruled out. The later theories of an object that moved toward a secret submarine base near Shelburne, reported by the researcher Chris Styles on the basis of anonymous sources, have no documentary support.
Official investigation
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); Halifax Rescue Coordination Centre; Canadian Coast Guard; Canadian Navy (Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic); Department of National Defence

Sources

  1. The Canadian Press (via CFJC Today), “Canada's best-documented UFO sighting still intrigues, 50 years on” (September 21, 2017) (press)
  2. Brian Dunning, Skeptoid #565, “The Shag Harbour UFO Incident” (April 4, 2017) (analysis, skeptical)
  3. The Canadian Encyclopedia, “UFOs in Canada” (other)
  4. Library and Archives Canada, research list “1967 Shag Harbour UFO Sighting and Related Research” (other)

Open in the interactive archive The whole section: Map of UAP and USO cases

UAPgrade's entries are compiled with artificial intelligence (three verifiers with opposing roles) and checked against the sources listed above: how we work. Have a document that changes this entry? Bring it to the Investigations Unit.