The Shag Harbour Incident

On the night of Wednesday, 4 October 1967, five young people were driving near the shore at Shag Harbour, in Shelburne County, a fishing village of 220 people at the 1956 count. A little after 11 pm they saw lights in a row going down toward the water.

A small hill hid the lights for about ten seconds. When they could see the water again there was one white light on it. They watched it as they drove on about a quarter of a mile (0.4 km), then reported it to the RCMP.

One of the five was Laurie Wickens, 17, who was driving. The rest is as he and his family told it in later years. He drove to a phone booth and called the RCMP detachment at Barrington Passage, and was asked if he had been drinking. Then the payphone rang. The RCMP were calling back, because more calls had come in.

The first official report went to Ottawa at 10:20 the next morning, by telex from the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax. It gives the account of the RCMP corporal and six other witnesses: a dark object, more than 60 ft (18 m) long, with four white lights about 15 ft (4.6 m) apart, moving east, low. It came down fast with a high whistling sound. Then, in the telex's own capitals: "BRIGHT FLASH ON HITTING WATER. SINGLE LIGHT FLOATING ON SURFACE".

Later that month the University of Colorado's UFO project telephoned an RCMP corporal who had been at the shore. Its notes of the call have a line the telex does not:

Apparently no one actually saw anything enter the water.

Both are papers of 1967, and both rest on what the police reported. They do not agree. This page shows the two and does not choose.

Rescue Co-ordination Centre Halifax, telex RCC 076, 5 October 1967 (Library and Archives Canada, RG 77, vol. 310); the Condon Committee, Case 34; CBC News (2026) and the Canadian Press (2017) for the phone call. The village: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Place-Names and Places of Nova Scotia (1967).

A corporal and two constables were at the shore within 15 to 20 minutes, in time to see the light. Constable Ron O'Brien told the Herald it was about a half mile off shore and was being carried out to sea by the tide. It was gone before a boat could reach it.

The RCMP called out Coast Guard lifeboat 101 from Clark's Harbour, and the local fishing boats joined it: six in one paper, eight in another. They found a wide patch of yellowish foam, 30 to 40 yd (27 to 37 m) across by one account and at least 80 ft (24 m) by another. They found nothing else. The other leads were checked that night, aircraft and flares among them, with no result.

The telex to Ottawa the next morning gave a position for the last sighting: 43°30.5′N, 65°45′W, "outside Lower Woods Harbour". That evening Canadian Forces Headquarters asked Maritime Command to investigate, and to consider an underwater search as soon as possible. A diving officer and three men were ordered to Clark's Harbour. The object, their orders said, was about 300 yards (270 m) off shore.

On 6 October Col. W.W. Turner, Director of Operations, put it in a memo. The Rescue Co-ordination Centre, he wrote, had "discounted the possibilities that the sighting was produced by an aircraft, flares, floats, or any other known objects". The divers started at noon that day. Three more came by helicopter on the 7th. By that evening the seven had searched an area half a mile by a mile and a half (0.9 by 2.8 km), in good conditions, and found nothing.

Maritime Command ended the search at 6:30 pm on Sunday, 8 October. A handwritten note in the file says it in four words: "terminated 08 Oct, NIL results". On 19 December headquarters wrote to two universities that the investigation "was terminated without conclusive findings". It was one of nine reports that year, of about 190, that headquarters had judged worth investigating.

All of this is from the papers themselves, in scans from Library and Archives Canada. The RCMP's own report is not among them.

Library and Archives Canada, RG 77, vols. 310 and 311: the Rescue Co-ordination Centre's telex (5 October 1967), Col. Turner's memo (6 October), Maritime Command's messages (5 to 8 October), a clipping of the Chronicle-Herald (7 October), headquarters' letters (19 December). The Condon Committee, Case 34, for the six boats and the 30 to 40 yd.

The story told today has a second half. After Shag Harbour, it says, the object moved under water about 25 miles (40 km) up the coast to Government Point, at the mouth of Shelburne Harbour. A second object joined it, naval ships watched for about a week, and then both left.

One part of that is on the record. There was a naval station at Government Point. HMCS Shelburne began work there on 1 April 1955, described as an oceanographic station. Its real work was listening for submarines, and that was made public in 1991.

The rest has no record of 1967 behind it that was read for this page. It comes from divers and former servicemen who are not named, as told to Chris Styles and Don Ledger, whose book Dark Object came out in 2001. The Canadian Press wrote in 2017 that there is "no hard evidence" for it. Maritime Command's own messages of that week, read for this page, show one search in one place, off Lower Woods Harbour, ended on 8 October with nil results. They name the station at Shelburne once: it was asked to give the divers logistic help if they needed it.

The distance is told three ways: about 25 miles, about 25 kilometres and about 50 kilometres. In a straight line between the province's official name points for the two places it is 41.4 km (25.7 miles).

The Municipality of Barrington's account; the Canadian Press (2017); The Coast (2008); Radio Canada International (2017) for 25 kilometres; Maritime Command's messages of 5 to 8 October 1967 (Library and Archives Canada); Wikipedia, "CFS Shelburne", for the station (one source; the Canadian Press says its purpose came out in the 1980s). The distance: GeoNAMES points.

Shag Harbour keeps the story itself. The Shag Harbour Incident Society formed in the fall of 2006, by its own account, and opened a museum in a donated barn on 16 June 2007. Today it is the Shag Harbour UFO Centre at 5615 Highway 3. In 2026 it was open from 15 June to 4 October, 10 am to 5 pm. A gazebo and picnic site about three minutes up the road looks out over the water.

In 2017 the village marked the 50th anniversary with a three-day festival, and some events moved to Woods Harbour for the room. On 1 October 2019 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a coin of the incident that glows in the dark (section 09). The post office has had its own postmark for the incident.

Laurie Wickens, who made the call at 17, was deeply involved in his later years with the Society that runs the museum. He died in the summer of 2026, aged 76.

The 60th anniversary is 4 October 2027.

The Society's own pages, including its visitor information checked 13 October 2026; CBC News (2017, 2026); the Royal Canadian Mint and the Canadian Press (2019). The coin's design belongs to the Mint and is not shown.

On 1 October 2019 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a coin of the incident: Canada's Unexplained Phenomena: The Shag Harbour Incident. It is a rectangular $20 coin of 1 oz (31.1 g) of 99.99 per cent pure silver, in a limited mintage of 4,000, at $129.95 each. By the end of its first day on sale, the Mint's website said 95 per cent had been sold. It was the second coin in the Mint's Unexplained Phenomena series, after a coin of the Falcon Lake encounter in Manitoba in April 2018.

The design is by the Canadian artist Pandora Young, who said she began by reading the eyewitness accounts. It shows three fishermen on a boat at night, looking up as a craft seems to plunge into the dark water near Shag Harbour. A black-light flashlight comes with the coin. Under its light the craft disappears, and four orange lights stay in the sky.

Laurie Wickens had contacted the Mint to say it needed a Shag Harbour coin. The Mint's page for the coin quotes him as an eyewitness and the president of the Society, and the Mint set aside a limited number to sell at the village's UFO festival that week.

The Mint tells it as a crash, and its picture has a flying saucer. The papers of 1967 give no shape. The table sets the coin beside them.

The Royal Canadian Mint: news release and the coin's own page, 1 October 2019. The Canadian Press, in CBC News, 1 October 2019. CBC News, 2 August 2026, for the call to the Mint (one source). The pictures are the Mint's own, shown with its credit.