The Shag Harbor Incident

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For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. Astonishing Legends Network. Thanks to our sponsors and Patreon supporters, Astonishing Legends is free to listen to. We appreciate your support of them, and us. With Astonishing Legends, we often deal with grainy photos, zoomed-in handheld videos that make you nauseous, and fuzzy memories. But on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, there's a village called Shag Harbor that stands out as a singular anomaly in the world of hard-to-prove events. In many circles, it's known as Canada's Roswell. But unlike Roswell, Shag Harbor left behind a government paper trail that formally recognizes an object of unknown origin, not a weather balloon. At 11.20 p.m. on October 4th, 1967, the air crews of two commercial flights saw a strange craft in the sky, and then 20 fishermen on board a vessel watched as four orange lights flashed in sequence before diving at a 45-degree angle into the water. When responders reached the site, they didn't find wreckage or survivors. Instead, they found a massive patch of yellowish-orange foam, several inches thick, bubbling with the sharp, acrid smell of burnt sulfur. One witness said it seemed like something you could spread with a knife. By the next morning, official checks confirmed that every civilian and military aircraft on the eastern seaboard was accounted for. In other words, according to all available civilian and military sources at the time, no aircraft were missing. What makes this legend a benchmark for critical thinkers like you, listeners, isn't just what the multitude of witnesses saw, it's the bureaucracy that followed. The Royal Canadian Air Force didn't try to explain this away as a meteor. In official priority telexes, they formally categorized the event as a UFO report. This is, as we're fond of saying on the show, an incident disconcerting enough to warrant an official response, and that response acknowledges, we don't know what this was. But for decades, the story had an additional missing chapter buried in the archives. An original eyewitness, nicknamed the Bulldog by Stanton Friedman, spent 30 years chasing a lead that suggested the object had traveled underwater to a top-secret submarine detection base in nearby Shelburne. But was this the same story? That pursuit eventually led him to a single sentence in a naval log. In October 1960, seven years before Shag Harbor, a NATO exercise called Sweep Clear 5 was underway off Shelburne. Divers from that 1960 mission later broke their silence, describing how they descended into shallow waters and came face-to-face with two massive craft on the seabed. By the way, they resembled the craft that controversial figure Bob Lazar refers to as the sport model. Most chillingly, in that case, Stiles unearthed the deck logs of the command ship, the HMCS Cape Scott. They showed that for exactly three minutes during that encounter, the Canadian commander raised the military alert level to DEFCON 1, the highest possible status, signifying that nuclear war is imminent. Historically, we are told the world has never reached DEFCON 1, not during the Cuban Missile Crisis and not on 9-11. Yet here, in the cold waters of Nova Scotia, a commander in the field felt the need to assume that status. The Shag Harbor incident has always been one of those anchoring mysteries that inspired us to start Astonishing Legends because not only is it well documented and officially acknowledged, there's an implication that this was a crash, repair, and extraction operation, all under the management of non-human intelligence. Tonight, we'll take a refreshed look at all of that in the context of our episode on USOs from last week, with the additional benefit of research Chris Stiles has done in the intervening years. Perhaps this will help us determine what may have happened up the coast of Nova Scotia in October of 1967. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. I don't care what you think. I was down there. I don't know whether you're calling me a liar or an idiot, but you came to me, so I'm going to tell you something. I don't know what it was down there, and I don't know where it came from, but it didn't come from this planet. I can tell you that. Now don't call back. Retired Navy diver Harry quoted from Dark Object, the world's only government-documented UFO crash, written by Don Ledger and Chris Stiles. Join us tonight as we pick up on the USO theme we started last week, with an exploration into Canada's Roswell. And we're back. That we are. I don't sound like you at all. Well, we are back, folks. This time it was just one week. See what we did there? There were days in between the last episode? Yeah, not many. Not for us. Oh, I see. Well, this one is the second one of two in a row for January, and boy, did that feel like running a marathon without stretching. But then we'll be back to preparing to come back on February 7th with the first of three shows in a row. Something we used to only do in October. Remember that? Yes, I do remember that. All right. Well, let's once again, using the metaphor correctly, dive into tonight's topic. Well, this one's really been on your particular radar for a long time, hasn't it? Even though there's a story behind that. Maybe 2017, I think, is when we... Well, I think for me, it most likely has to do with the book Dark Object, the world's only government-documented UFO crash. That was published in 2001 by Dell Books. Right. Written by Don Ledger and Chris Stiles, who we quoted in the opening there. Chris Stiles is an original eyewitness to the incident. And also, I was on Amazon today. I was like, I have this book. I've had it forever. I was like, when did I buy it? And it was March 28, 2014, which was before we started the show. Like, the same year we started the show, but several months before. I think we were already talking about it at that point. Yeah. Because we talked about it for, like, 15 years before we launched it. But, like, that's a joke. It wasn't 15. It was a long time. That's another story. But, yeah, so I got this book before we started the show. And I remember, in my mind, I was like, I want to do this at some point. And then, later, some friends of ours, which we'll be talking about here in a minute, did it on another show. So that's what I was referencing, where we first – because I'd heard of it and didn't know – well, that's the genesis of the show. It's a lot of things that you and I have heard of. Like, I'd love to know more about that. Yeah. And so we'll often prepare, like, okay, let's start buying books on this stuff. We won't get to it for a few years. But in this case, yeah, we've been waiting to do this, I think you and I both, because it's so just monumental in so many ways. Yeah. And on top of that, speaking of that book, Whitley Strieber was the editor and did an introduction, right? I think you could see that in a lot of the book jackets. Yeah, and that's probably why I wound up buying it, honestly. I think I was just like, oh, it's anointed. It's blessed by Whitley. And I didn't expect it to be what it was, which is why I think it's going to make a great show for our listeners tonight. Indeed. And before we deep dive here, pun intended, we have to acknowledge the extraordinary, decades-long work of two men who we just mentioned here. Chris Stiles and Don Ledger. And their book, Dark Object, the world's only government-documented UFO crash, isn't just a retelling. They did the work, piecing together government documents, official reports, and firsthand testimony. Yeah, and even though that was first published in 2001, as we just said, Stiles has been relentless in continued research on it, which we'll talk about tonight. Without him, the Shag Harbor incident would be a lot harder to wrap your head around. Yeah, thank goodness for these people that, well, I guess they're really struck by it in a profound, personal, lifelong way to get so inspired or just enchanted by something that they help explain it to the rest of us. And on a similar note to that, we want to extend a special thanks to our very good friend, Jordan Bonaparte, of the podcast Canadian Gothic. Yeah, Jordan is a master storyteller in his own right, and he generously allowed us to mine the incredible research he put into his own phenomenal three-part series on Shag Harbor a while back. He has a home field advantage, though, because he basically lives right at it, as well as a stone's throw from Oak Island, which is just 113 miles northeast of Shag Harbor. Oh, yes. And did we mention that the infamous White Bird missing airplane was thought to have vanished just across the Bay of Fundy in Maine, about 130 miles northwest of Shag Harbor? Ooh, I think we've just discovered the Shag Triangle. Yeah, I don't think that's a thing, but good luck with that. Yeah, it also sounds inappropriate in some way. It does sound inappropriate. Well, it depends on what country you're in. That's true. We did want to say thanks again to Jordan for letting us lean on his work. In today's world, you have to be extremely careful about the sources you're finding, and we knew we could trust him. But if you're looking for another captivating journey into the eerie and unexplained, we highly recommend checking out Canadian Gothic wherever you get your podcasts. Fantastic listen, and Jordan's work is top-notch. In fact, we may be going on his show to redux all of this with him in the not-too-distant future, because he is about ready to visit it again as well. Ooh, that's very cool. Yes, looking forward to that. That would be a blast. So, now coming back to Dark Object, one of now a few books with Chris Stiles' name on it about this topic, Stiles' connection to the Shag Harbor incident isn't solely academic. Not in the dry sense of the word, anyway. It's deeply personal, as we said. Chris wasn't just an investigator of the Shag Harbor incident. He was, in a very real sense, a witness to its prelude. That's right. As we'll discuss in more detail on the very night of October 4th, 1967, when those strange lights began sweeping across eastern Canada, a 12-year-old Chris Stiles was standing on the Dartmouth waterfront. He observed a featureless ball some 50 or 60 feet in diameter, glowing the color of iron in a forge, tracing the shoreline just 75 feet away from him. It was silent, gliding with an intelligence that, even as a young boy, he said, felt not natural and not fashioned by human hands. Well, think about that, that kind of feeling or impression at just 12 years old. The man who would dedicate 30 years of his life to meticulously researching this case actually experienced a key piece of the puzzle firsthand, long before he even knew what that puzzle was. We've seen this before with experiencers. As I was saying at the beginning, a few seconds can change your entire life. Yeah, you just, you never forget that thing that happens to you. And this is the thing that I always want to remind people who are, oh, this is a hoax. People are trying to sell books or whatever. You know, all due respect to Mr. Stiles. We do not know him and we've not spoken to him, although Jordan did. But you don't make a fortune writing these books and appearing on YouTube. It's a scraped by kind of existence. So to stick to your guns on something like this and make it decades of your life, if it's not a passion or an obsession, you're probably not doing it. You know, if you don't feel like it happened to you, you're not doing that. No, I mean, it takes over your life. We've talked to several folks now. We've been fortunate enough to make their acquaintance who something extraordinary has happened to. And the ones that do all this research, it takes over your life and for better or worse. And so it's not like a podcast. Yeah. You know, with this, though, it made such an impact. Well, we know a lot of folks. Our good friend Ryan Sprague, for instance, had a sighting. I always remember him talking about this when he was young. And I think fishing with his dad near the water, some kind of triangle craft. And that sparked his passion for all things paranormal. Yeah. Yeah. So it makes a huge impact, which the rest of us probably can't ever understand or feel. But thank goodness these folks have, like I said, because they have put the work in so that the rest of the world can know about these things. That's right. And as we said, Chris is a Halifax native. He became an avid researcher of the phenomenon itself, eventually partnering with Don Ledger when they wrote that book. Now, Ledger himself, a respected journalist and author. Chris appeared on Jordan's show, as we just said a few minutes ago. And that's what we're, a lot of what we're basing our research on tonight is some talks he's given on Shag Harbor that are available on YouTube. Yeah. Styles and Ledger spent countless hours sifting through microfilms, which I always loved in a romantic way, us sitting there in the dark library at night scanning through microfiche. Microfilm is so much fun. Yeah. The cool machines where you press the button and it makes a photocopy of the screen. I love it. And I, and I, I searched through some just today for this show and it was such a bummer because I found it online, but the reel I needed was T1744. Yeah. And the only one online at the site that I went to was T1741, which still was like 600 pages or maybe 1500. I can, and I went through the whole thing. I was like, well, maybe they lumped all these reels together and I went all the way to the end and it stops just before the good stuff on Shag Harbor. And I was like, ah, I can't get to it from here. So this is all analog research folks for some of this. And this is like visiting archives and libraries and, and like I said, making photocopies of stuff and writing it down on paper when you come across it. Cause there's no saving to anything for folks that don't know the, the microfiche is the basically they're like curled up film strips in a, in a, in a roll. And you would feed that into the machine, which is like a, basically a simple projector and scroll back and forth to find a mostly newspaper, entire pages of newspapers. Right. Right. And that's how those were documented and archived. And so in addition to the analog data, we're talking about talexes. I don't know if anybody remembers those. You could say it's a, like a fax machine, but with a typewriter receiving a, the data through telephonic means and retyping the document on the other end. Yes. So it wasn't like, yeah, it wasn't feeding into a digital image of sorts. It would just kind of recreate, it had the data to recreate the document on the other end. It was a, it was like a big old typewriter on a stand. Yeah. In addition, we're also talking about police reports, naval logs, anything and everything they could find to build a concrete undeniable narrative. And what they uncovered wasn't just a compelling story, but a documented paper trail confirming that a 60 foot unidentified flying object had indeed physically crashed into Canadian territorial waters. Yes. So as we said, this takes place on October 4th, 1967, a Wednesday night to be precise on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, just 72 days before the Silver Bridge would collapse in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The atmosphere this particular evening in Nova Scotia was actually perfect for observing something like this. It was cold, crisp, moonless. And as we've said before, cold air is denser and a cold night with no moon makes the night sky look absolutely breathtaking, even if you're dealing with a little light pollution. So this was what astronomers call a transparent sky. You know, oftentimes we think of these incidents as isolated sparks, you know, a light here, a quick sighting there, and then back to paranormal apathy. But this particular night began not with a single flash, but with a massive wave of aerial anomalies. These objects were sweeping across eastern Canada, all converging toward one tiny fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia. And to be clear, this isn't just another tale of a fleeting light in the sky. Tonight, we're talking about the single best documented UFO crash in recorded history. I'm not saying something. And what makes it so distinct, so unsettling, so astonishing? The fact that the Canadian government's own internal documents confirm it. And they confirm the involvement of an unidentified flying object. That's right. We're not talking about a simple, we couldn't identify it, so we'll just classify it as unknown. No, this was a case where the official report, the government's own paper trail, actually uses the term UFO. Not a misidentified weather balloon, not swamp gas, but a UFO in official government parlance. That, listeners, is a huge distinction right out of the gate. Yeah, I think there's something about the Canadian attitude that's a little less uptight, shall we say. It's like former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer coming out on the record and just saying, yep, it's a real thing. So, in this case, though, we're tracing the complete documented chain of events of this 1967 incident. And we're starting with those initial hair-raising sightings in the air, following it right through to the impact in the water. We'll be dissecting the first response, the strange physical evidence, and then ultimately the covert military recovery operation that would attempt to bury the truth for decades. We're talking about dozens of independent testimonies here from all over, across multiple provinces, involving pilots, radar operators, law enforcement, a spectrum of highly credible individuals. And it's not just a sighting. That's the key. There are tangible physical elements here. This is what elevates Shag Harbor above most other UFO, UAP, and, yes, USO incidents, which, kids, if you're taking notes, may connect back to some of the theoretical physics of how these craft might work that we talked about on the show last week. That's going to come up. That's right. I wish we had gathered buckets of that orange foam to sell online. Maybe we can make some. Well, possibly. Receiving new clothes as gifts for the holidays is always nice, but it can be a bit awkward, especially if you're not the one picking out the clothes. That's right. 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At 7.15 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time, Captain Pierre Charbonneau and First Officer Robert Ralph, both highly experienced pilots, are aboard Air Canada Flight 305. They're flying a DC-8 right on an IFR flight plan over southeastern Quebec, perfectly level at 12,000 feet. Now, hold on, Scott, here. IFR, Instrument Flight Rules. Yes. Yeah. Hopefully, there won't be too many abbreviations and initializations and acronyms and all that. Yeah, it's not too bad. It's not too bad. Okay. They are helpful for me, too, to hear them again. Anyway, for those who might not be familiar with aviation, that's actually crucial here, IFR. And why is that specific detail so important here in a story about an unexplained aerial phenomenon, you ask? Well, it's because it underscores the professionalism and, frankly, the absolute focus of the crew. This isn't a leisure flight. They're not just casually gazing out the window on a clear night. They're following strict protocols, relying on their instruments, on radio communication, and this is monitoring every aspect of their flight path. Why would a commercial flight be on an Instrument Flight Rules plan on a perfectly clear night, you wonder? Well, you know, the stars were out, moonless, and, as we said before, with the term transparent sky. Yeah. So, I didn't know the answer to that either. But cursory research tells me that the simple answer is safety and procedure. Right. For commercial airliners like this, an IFR flight plan is standard operating procedure every single time, regardless of how clear the weather looks. It means air traffic control is actively separating them from all other traffic, providing that positive control. It's not just for bad weather. It's about guaranteed separation, terrain clearance, and the overall predictability of the entire air traffic system. It's the highest level of safety. Right, right. Well, this, again, points to the nature of our eyewitnesses here. These are professionals in their professional work environment following the rules of aviation to a T. So, when professionals flying under IFR decide to report an external visual phenomenon, it means that phenomenon is so overwhelmingly distinct, so massive and bizarre, that it's demanding their attention away from their standard procedures. It has to be something extraordinary. Yeah, and what they saw was truly astonishing. That's right. Charbonneau, the captain, was the first to spot it. A huge, brilliantly lit, orange, rectangular object. It was traveling a perfectly parallel course just a few miles away on their left side. A rectangle for us. So, think about that shape alone. It immediately separates it from meteors or most conventional aircraft, especially in 1967. That's right, before the fashionable triangle shape came into a bow. Yes, yeah. But correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, but you're saying we didn't have flying rectangles in 1967, did we? No, we didn't. And I'm relatively certain we still don't have them. I could be wrong. Well, since then, I have heard a lot of descriptions about things being the size of football fields. So, that's pretty interesting. That's true. But it's not just that this was a rectangle. Charbonneau also described a string of smaller lights following right behind it, vividly, like the tail on a kite. Does anybody know what those are anymore? Remember, they used to tie a... Yeah, everybody knows what a kite has a tail. I don't know. Kids fly kites anymore. You're right, though. You're right. Maybe that's the most kind of thing. No, just to keep it centered. I know what you're saying. So, it's like it follows in a whip-like fashion. But, yeah. Yes. Anyway, imagine seeing that from a commercial airliner. A massive rectangular craft with a luminous kite tail pacing you at 12,000 feet. And you know what more current UAP concept this sounds like to me? Well, yes. That would be the mothership concept with drones following. Yes. Bingo. Yeah. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay. This is where it shifts from just a simple sighting to a horse of a different color. Because at 7.19 p.m. ADT, Captain Charbonneau and First Officer Robert Ralph witnessed a sizable silent explosion near the large object. A silent explosion, which you should be witnessing when you view a sci-fi movie like Star Wars. You would not be, of course, hearing any sound effects. But that phrase alone is a bit of a paradox, isn't it? It suggests violence or a massive mechanical failure on a scale that would ordinarily imply sound, right? Like I was saying, debris, chaos. But here, it's total silence. And this explosion created a dense, white, ball-shaped cloud that immediately started changing colors. That's right. It shifted rapidly, the pilots reported, from white to red, then violet, and finally to a deep blue before it just faded away. Ooh, pretty. But what could it be? If you'll consult your notes, kids, you might remember us talking last week about the U.S. Navy patenting theoretical propulsion models that may manipulate space-time and inertial mass. And you may also remember that the manipulation of space-time might generate different colors on the exterior of these craft if we were ever able to manufacture them. Or if someone else already has. Whatever the case, this does not seem like something human tech would be creating, even in a failure state, and even for the late 1960s. Yeah. And just two minutes later, at 7.21 p.m., there was a second, even larger explosion. This one formed a massive orange sphere at first, but it also faded to blue, just like the first. So, remember the blue shift? Right. Quoting Forrest from last week's episode when we were talking about the Alcubierre warp drive and vacuum engineering, we said, or you did, Forrest, rather, if you engineer the space-time metric around the craft to accelerate the time frame, which is to make time flow faster on the inside than the outside, the light coming from the craft would blue shift. I did say that. It's really eye-opening to think about all of these things, not just moving an object from point A to point B, but manipulating time as well. And then thinking about what that time manipulation might look like to the external observer. Yeah. And what's fascinating here, too, is like after the second larger silent explosions, and this is something that just occurred to me for us, it's like, are they in a sphere, like a vacuum sphere? Maybe craft or self-destructing inside of a manufactured vacuum, which is then eliminating sound waves. Right, right. And also time-shifting. Like, once you start thinking about all that stuff we talked about last week, it's like, oh, maybe this is how this thing could maybe work. I don't know that we're trying to patent, but like, who knows? You're in your own bubble, literally, in your own circle of this. Right, your own private Idaho. As we've always talked about, this has a lot to do with the observer as well. It is a little bit, I think, like Schrodinger's cat, you know, that experiment where the concept that the event depends on what the observer is observing and where they're at and what you experience. Relativistic. Yeah, right. And it changes. So you observing the action actually changes it. And would it be happening or what would be happening if you weren't? Getting back to what Captain Charbonneau saw here after the larger silent explosion, he reported that the smaller lights, the kite taillights, started performing what he described as strange maneuvers around these spheres. Yes, quote unquote, strange maneuvers. So Scott, coming from a commercial pilot in charge of hundreds of lives, that's a little bit interesting that he would pick up on that. You know, imagine seeing this outside your aircraft and literally having no idea what may happen next. Of course, you're always looking out for, you know, people think, or they might blame a pilot, but, you know, they want to live too. And so, but now you have the added, you know, responsibility of caring for all these other passengers and their safety. And to that, okay, your aircraft has no defenses of any kind available to it other than just evasive maneuvers, which you also have to be careful about. And, you know, you don't want to panic people either. And commercial airliners won't do, they'll probably do a lot more than you think they will, but they also won't do what a fighter jet's going to do if you are dealing with something that's way more sophisticated in terms of its flight, which is what it looks like that is happening here. Flight 305 was not the only airborne witness, however. Pan Am Flight 160 was at 33,000 feet over the Gulf of Maine on that same night, approaching the Nova Scotia coast. The first officer, Ralph Loewinger, along with Captain Kurt Olson and flight engineer Mike Littlepage, witnessed a formation of five bluish-white lights arranged in a left bank that appeared to be another large transport heading straight for them. Loewinger later noted the lights were remarkably similar to those reported by ground witnesses in Shag Harbor, who described a 60-foot object with orange lights flashing in a consistent sequence. Wow, yeah. You know, what strikes me as philosophical is the decision-making process of these pilots when confronted with the improbable. You know, despite seeing an intruder that Boston Air Traffic Control confirmed was not on radar, the crew of Pan Am Flight 160 chose not to file an official report simply to avoid the massive amount of paperwork and potential stigma, and I don't blame them. You know, we see this as a recurring theme of quote-unquote silence or silencing among military and professional witnesses, which is why Chris Stiles' work in tracking them down decades later is so vital to reconstructing the truth. Because it makes you wonder how many other encounters remain hidden in the dustbin of history because a professional understandably didn't want to risk their career over a three-minute incident. As the pilots themselves later speculated, what they saw may have been an accident or even a battle among these objects. The sheer power required to generate those colorful massive spheres at 12,000 feet. We're talking about technology that is well beyond any conventional aviation capabilities in 1967. Then they also observed instantaneous acceleration from a dead standstill to 4,000 kilometers an hour. So that all just defies known physics. Yeah. There's a lot of things going on here which are now somewhat classic in this discussion. And imagine, you know, we mentioned Roswell at the beginning, this being Canada's Roswell. And so one theory that's going around with Roswell is that there were two craft and they were actually battling each other. That's right. That's also an argument people put forth like, well, they got all the way here from some unknown universe or galaxy or dimension or whatnot, some distant planet, and they're dumb enough to crash here. It's like, well, there could be extenuating circumstances like that. You don't know. That's right. So also things malfunction. Doesn't matter how smart you are. In this case, it's almost as if the craft or crafts were interacting with the atmosphere on a molecular level. Or perhaps, as some might theorize, shifting through layers of reality or space time we don't yet have names for. But despite seeing what sounded like an aerial conflict or some kind of catastrophic incident, the pilots were understandably incredibly reluctant to report it right away because these are career killers. And as a good example, we've talked about before, and you're now seeing this case in a lot of the better UFO documentary series. And remember that Japan Airlines flight, 1628, this was in November of 1986. Captain Kenju Tarauchi and his crew, they witnessed three unidentified flying objects over Alaska. Right. And I think he was told not to talk about this, forget about all this. And he immediately said, no, I'm going to sketch it and go on and report this to the media. And he was canned for two years after that, I believe. And that's not too different from what's going on here. For Captain Charbonneau and First Officer Ralph, this is more than just a casual hesitation. Their reluctance is due to an official top secret directive known as JANAP-146. That's J-A-N-A-P, JANAP-146. Oh, JANAP-146. That sounds like a code word or a call sign from something of a straight out Cold War thriller, Scott. Yeah, yeah. Well, it actually is. The full title of this regulation was the Canadian United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings. This was implemented in December of 1953, by the way, just a few years after Roswell, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff specifically to control and, as many researchers contend, to plug the flow of UFO information to the general public. It remained in full effect until 1969. Yeah, so this wasn't just a suggestion, it was a mandate. Precisely, under JANAP-146, military personnel, Air Force officers, and commercial airline pilots were strictly prohibited from sharing UFO reports with the press, civilian agencies, or the public. All such sightings had to be reported exclusively through authorized military channels, and the consequences for talking, disclosing information regarding a sighting was categorized as a crime under the Espionage Act in the United States and the National Securities Act in Canada. Yeah, think about that. It's a crime with severe penalties. Severe, yes. We're talking about a fine of $10,000 and a prison term of up to 10 years. 10 years in prison just for talking about what you saw in the sky. This extreme level of suppression. Right. Well, think about all the levels of suppression that are out in the open like this, that are codified, and the ones where they're just veiled threats of like, this is not going to be good for you, your career, or your family, which is terrifying. But this clarifies the genuine professional and legal risk they were facing. And they did eventually file comprehensive reports, but only after requesting and getting anonymity from Air Canada. And so it just underscores the absolute sincerity of, I think, of what they saw versus the severe penalty for breaking that code of silence. It tells us that what they witnessed was so extraordinary, it was worth risking their entire careers and their freedom to put on record. NORAD also reported tracking the dark object long before it reached Nova Scotia. They picked it up entering the Earth's atmosphere and completing half an orbit over Siberia before moving toward the eastern coast of Canada and the Shag Harbor area. It was picked up by what they call the Mid-Canada Radar Line and the Pine Tree Radar Line Network, which read the target as a rapidly descending object with a high infrared heat signature. You know, that tracking data is where the story shifts from a local curiosity to a potential global security event. You know, military sources indicate the object was initially clocked at a staggering 7,500 miles per hour. Now, that's about Mach 10 before it suddenly slowed down, hovered, and then impacted the water. Yeah, so the good news about this slowdown is that it tells NORAD, well, this isn't an ICBM because they don't slow down and hover. But before that happened, they actually scrambled fighters out of North Bay to intercept it. Yeah, and if the NORAD tracking is real, that shows that this was a physical tracked event that triggered the highest levels of Cold War readiness. So that's pretty scary in itself. Yeah, it's super scary. And getting back to our pilots who were processing what they'd seen, the sightings continued to proliferate chronologically along the Nova Scotia coast that night. This wasn't an isolated event. It was a massive wave of aerial activity, a flap, if you will. And it was all heading southwest right toward the eventual crash site. Now, around 7.51 p.m. near the Shearwater Naval Air Station, we have William Thebo and his brother stargazing. Now, these guys are not amateur casual observers. They were experienced sky watchers using a surveyor's transit. That's essentially a high-powered telescope to scan the heavens. Yeah, perfect time, perfect place, perfect gear. So they knew exactly what they were looking at. And this wasn't a case of misidentifying a distant planet. Precisely. And they observed two dim white lights, followed by a brighter white light moving slowly from northeast to southwest. And their altitude estimate was a staggering 50,000 to 100,000 feet. And the key takeaway from their testimony, which they gave to the Naval Air Station, was their absolute certainty. They were certain these objects were not aircraft. They knew their planes. They lived next to a Naval Air Station. This was something else entirely. And the phenomenon became even more concrete an hour later at 9 p.m. when Captain Leo Mercy and his crew on the fishing vessel, M.V. Nickerson, about 32 nautical miles south of Sambro, experienced something far more tangible than just a visual sighting. They got radar confirmation. Uh-huh. And again, this is a fishing vessel. But we hearken back to last week's episode. And one of the observations that was taken in conjunction with visual observation gets you two-thirds of the way to a trifecta of evidence, says. Unfortunately, they didn't have infrared. That'd be great if we could have had just one more device there. But their DECA radar, D-E-C-C-A, is a reliable standard navigation tool used by fishing boats everywhere. And this night, theirs painted four substantial targets. And these aren't just random blips either. They were in a box formation approximately six miles on a side. And visually, they saw four brilliant red lights. Now, Mercy said they seemed to be on or just above the water, occasionally flaring up with an incredible intensity was so bright it would leave an afterimage on their retina. Ooh. He immediately radioed the Rescue Coordination Center, or the RCC, and the Harbormaster. And the response was clear. No military exercises were reported in the area that night, and radar wouldn't paint flares in a box formation like that. Right, right. Plus, Mercy's crew confirmed the urgency of the situation because of the frantic chatter they were overhearing on their multiband radio. Ooh, frantic chatter, you say? Yeah. Mainland radio communications. It was clear that Mounties, the RCMP, which is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, were getting UFO complaints stretching all the way from Halifax to Yarmouth. So this wasn't just a localized event. It was a full-blown regional incident being tracked by multiple law enforcement agencies. And the story just keeps getting bigger as the night goes on, pulling in more civilian witnesses who saw these objects much, much closer. Now, around 10 p.m., the activity transitioned to Halifax Harbor. And a woman near the ferry wharf saw a glowing orange fireball. She described it as 40 to 50 feet in diameter, the color of a red-hot poker, just drifting silently across the harbor. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but this is evocative to me about some of the sequences in Close Encounters, before the bullet point note here. Reading it again, there's that excitement I'm feeling that I felt when I first saw that movie as a kid in the theater. Yeah. And that, just remember the, you know, from the very first, the ATC, the air traffic controllers mapping it. It's like, you know, flight so-so, you want to report a UFO negative tower? So you have that, but also just the police cars chasing across state lines. And that- Yeah, yeah, yeah. This also reminds me of the feeling people must have had with Kecksburg, something like that, you know, it's going across several states and they think it's like a re-entry vehicle, but it's taking a weird turn. And that, yeah, so you're getting some confirmation here, that feeling of what it must have been like going over state lines. I don't know why, you know, that's so important, but just that this thing is being tracked in several different ways and all of the different craft and the witnesses and just the reports coming in and the excitement at the RCMP. Yeah. Of like, what's going on out there? You know, it's mind boggling. And then you have the compelling thing about this specific sighting is the personal connection that ultimately linked to the investigation of this entire phenomenon. And I'm saying like, it's not just random anonymous reports from people. That doesn't really make it personal. You have somebody like co-author Chris Stiles. As a 12-year-old boy, again, there's something about that youthful excitement. And again, that's what I'm getting at about seeing close encounters and like, could this be real? What is this? Yeah. That entire feeling that is so visceral and like I said, enchanting and just forms your whole worldview, all of that coming together to form the drive of Chris Stiles and wanting to document the story as much as possible. Yeah. Because he was there from his bedroom window in Dartmouth right across the harbor. He described the sphere as silent and huge, easily 50 to 60 feet in diameter. And his reaction kind of says it all. He ran recklessly down the street to try and get a better look at it as it was moving silently over the port. So, and this is just two hours before the crash. And the documentation doesn't stop there because sometime between 10.30 and 11 p.m. in Lunenburg, we have a photographer named Will C. Eisner. That's right. Suspended, motionless, and silent over some spruce trees for over 15 minutes. And a professional photographer for us is an excellent witness. They have a trained eye for light, for distance, for image capture. Yes, absolutely. Also reminds me of Frederick Valentich, the Australia-Tasmania sighting there. There was a, remember, a professional photographer on the beach? There was a photographer, yeah. And he captured something which, analyzed later, seemed to have a plume around it. That's right. When you put it through some filters. Pretty interesting here. Well, Eisner here, applying his photographer's eye, instinctively photographed the objects using a time exposure. And he stabilized his Pentax camera on a rock and just held the shutter open for minutes. And for you photography nuts, that's the bulb, I believe, the B setting there stands for bulb. And so that's just however long you want to press down on it or you've got a plunger trigger, you can lock it down and just keep it open. So here, you know, it's open for minutes. And then he gets a documented image. He captured an image of three silent suspended lights. And this just adds another critical layer of scientific and observational credibility to this whole wave of events sweeping the coast. That's right. And then just before the impact, around 11 p.m. near Weymouth, you have RCMP Constable Andrew and several game wardens. They see a silent orange candle flame-shaped light, but it's upside down. And it's moving slowly at a low altitude, maybe 200 to 300 feet up. They also noted it was emanating sparks or some kind of corona. Now, the fact that the RCMP were still actively tracking and observing these things so late in the evening confirms the event hadn't been classified or shut down yet. This wasn't just a one-off. It was building. Yeah, so many weird things here in a progression happening here. You know, from a huge high-altitude incident with explosions over Quebec. To radar contacts way offshore. Right, right. To these large silent objects moving at treetop level right before the crash. This is kind of like a symphony warming up for an earth-shattering performance. So, all this together, just imagine it. It's ominous. And for Shag Harbor, it's only just beginning. So, you started taking AG1 about a week before me. Are you feeling anything yet? Well, yeah. You know, I can honestly say a little bit of change is happening. Like feeling a little more calm first thing in the morning, rather than, you know, overwhelmed with mental to-do lists. A little more energy out of the gate, and digestion seems to have improved. And part of that, I realize, is the new morning ritual. You know, first thing, before coffee or breakfast, I just mix one scoop with eight or ten ounces of cold water, and then you're done. You're on your way to filling those nutrient gaps and nutrition you might not be getting throughout the day, keeping you nourished. 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And, Scott, I ask you, what adventure does not happen without a group of teenagers out in their cars? That's exactly what I was going to say. They're at the crux of every good story. Yes, there you go. Point Pleasant and the Mothman and the, yes. It always starts out, the group of teenagers, those meddling kids. Seriously, think about this. Who would be out at that time of night, usually? You know, kids, the older folks, they're in bed eating their milk toast, you know, and kids are out. That's right. And they're fresh observers, you could say. Well, the primary witness here, the focal point, is Laurie Wickens. Laurie is 18, and he's driving his car along Highway 3, just outside Shag Harbor, with four friends, including, and these names will come up again, Norm Smith and Dave Kendricks. Now, to be clear, Wickens wasn't out looking for the paranormal, wasn't drinking, and wasn't joyride. No, that's what they all say. Yeah, well, point well made. But he was already on alert this night because he knew where the RCMP patrol cars hung out, like we all do at that age. And he was actually in the process of slowing down when this happened to avoid a known speed trap. He was being very responsible. I'll give you that. You know, teenagers doing normal teenage stuff, and I think you and I also had a mind if you're, not that we did anything bad late at night with cars, but we were mindful of those kinds of safety things, even though, you know, something can be a little insane. Gotta be careful. But, you know, yeah, so teenagers, you know, their lives can change in an instant for good bad. You know, like we said earlier, the conditions for witnessing all of this were really just perfect. We talked about the transparent sky, the cold night, there being no moon. It's super clear out. They see a massive, brilliantly lit object. Wickens and his friends said it was flying incredibly low, pacing their cars as they drove west towards Woods Harbor. And there were four distinct orange lights. But it wasn't just glowing a solid color, mind you. These lights would flash in a deliberate, almost mechanical pattern. One, then two, then three, then four. Then they would all go dark for a second and then immediately repeat the one, two, three, four cycle. Yeah, Laurie was convinced it was an airplane crashing. So he's very deliberately telling everyone in the car to keep an eye on it because they might need to help or let the authorities know. But it was big enough for him to think that that was what's happening, which is an important detail. Right. From another philosophical standpoint, you know, that one, two, three, four sequence with the light suggests something intelligent, not a misidentified natural occurrence like a meteor. So whatever it was, it seems this thing was controlled. And while they were watching this thing, it made a decisive, purposeful move. It tilted at a sharp 45 degree angle and began a rapid descent directly toward the water. Well, what looked like a controlled descent anyway. A controlled descent, right. And it wasn't moving with the typical speed of a falling meteor or a jet going down. They said it seemed to slow down, sometimes even pausing its descent altogether before continuing. This is erratic non-ballistic motion. And this lines up with what NORAD apparently was seeing on their systems as well. Yes, it's your favorite thing. The ballistic and non-ballistic motion, whatever the motion is, you want it to be ballistic somehow. But again, this is reminding me of what people describe with Kecksburg. Exactly. So now the car is rounding a turn near a small rise in the road when everyone in it hears a high-pitched whistling sound, an almost piercing shriek that Laurie vividly compared to the sound of a falling bomb. This was immediately followed by a massive violent whoosh of air and water displacement, the unmistakable sound of something enormous crashing into the water. You know, and then the shocking finale of our symphony of UAP activity, a final echoing loud bang upon impact that reverberated through the entire harbor. And it's fascinating, Scott, because while the whistling sound suggests something moving through the air with significant friction. Okay, you're picturing that, or I guess you're hearing that in your mind's ear as I have to, right? Yes, of course. The whistling bomb falling. Perhaps, okay, in this case, incredible speeds we're talking about. Yet the subsequent whoosh sounds may be more controlled, if you get what I'm saying. You know, whatever the case, this thing was violent, okay? It's an undeniable arrival for something that was about to really behave strangely now that it was in the water. That's right. Wickens was so certain of what he'd just seen, so convinced by the sheer scale of the sound and the impact that he didn't even think UFO. His first rational thought was more like mass casualty event. He believed he was looking at a Boeing 707 or a B-52 going down in the harbor. So he frantically drove to a nearby gas station, found a payphone, remember, 1967, and called the RCMP detachment in Barrington Passage and reported a downed aircraft to Corporal Victor Werbiecki. And that phone call was legendary because Corporal Werbiecki actually asked Lori if he'd been drinking, of course. But Lori wasn't drunk. He was just terrified. And he wasn't the only one calling. Because within 15 minutes, the police station was flooded with reports from unrelated witnesses, all describing a massive aircraft hitting the water. And the RCMP have to then pivot from being incredulous to scrambling into action. That's right. So Corporal Werbiecki is now getting multiple independent corroborating calls. He immediately dispatches Constables Pond and O'Brien and then drove over himself. Now, Constable Ron Pound actually witnessed the lights while they were still in flight as he drove toward the village. Now, Pound is a crucial witness because of his training. He provided a forensic estimate of a physical structure about 60 feet in length. Now, when he reached the shore with these other two officers, they watched a single pale yellow light drifting on the waves approximately 300 meters offshore. This thing didn't just sink immediately like a piece of lead. It bobbed there for five to 10 minutes, moving with what appeared to be intelligent purpose before it finally submerged and vanished. Yeah, 60 feet. Now, pace that out if you have the space outside. That's an official estimate from a police officer standing on the shore observing an object that wasn't a ship and it wasn't a plane and was absolutely not supposed to be there. Now, I'm always – I think about this myself. You probably do too, Scott. The estimates on the size. Not that it matters if this thing was 50 feet or 60 feet or 70 feet. Right. But just that 60 feet seems to be about the same and I wonder if I could make that accurate – be in that range of how many feet this thing is. Yeah, it keeps coming up. All the witnesses say the same thing. Right, right. They say 50 or 60 feet, which I think is really compelling. I think there may be something significant about that because for researchers, that 60-foot measurement is incredibly significant because it immediately rules out any kind of small private aircraft and any simple fishing vessel or really any kind of conventional debris that would be on the water or land. And this wasn't a fleeting glimpse of a distant light. This was a confirmed structured object visible to multiple law enforcement officers. And this is the first of the undeniable public facts about Shag Harbor. Yeah. So, Constable Werbiecki, now completely convinced, immediately orders the search to begin. But as we said, the object hadn't stayed put. Constable Pound watched as the pale yellow light grew fainter, a kind of dimming, and then it disappeared entirely. Now, it looked like it just slipped silently under the water. But Stiles and Ledger noted in their book that it vanished about an hour and 40 minutes after high tide, which is important because it means the strong coastal currents were already starting to move out to sea. This becomes very important for the later search efforts or, frankly, the lack of a successful search. Yeah. If this had been a conventional aircraft, it would have been floating, or parts of it, of course, or sinking rapidly, or burning. Instead, this dark object, 60 feet across, just slips beneath the surface after being semi-stable for several minutes. And the confirmation that multiple RCMP officers were on scene who saw the light, estimated the size, and watched it submerge. Like, that's why this case has remained so robust for decades, I think. It was verified by law enforcement before what's going to look like a lot of military cover-up had even a chance to start. That's right. And the first responders weren't just police. They were also civilians and people focused purely on rescue. Fisherman Lawrence Smith on the vessel Rhonda Dee and Bradford Shand on the Joan Priscilla, along with four more boats, launched immediately into the dark. They weren't looking for lights anymore. They're out there looking for people, for survivors. Yeah. That's also, I think, I don't know, maybe adds to the credibility that most people aren't, their first thing isn't crashed UFO, it's crashed human craft. And there's people to be saved. That's right. So that's their first instinct and motivation here. And, you know, they were searching for what you'd expect then, plain wreckage, survivors' bodies, life vests, seats, oil slicks, you know, what we sadly see on the news floating up. You know, the standard, you know, heartbreaking signs of a plane crash. But what they found, or rather what they didn't find at the impact site again, kind of redefines this into a category outside of a conventional plane crash. Yeah. Instead of debris, they sailed into a massive bubbling patch of glittering yellow foam. This wasn't the thin white froth of a typical, like, maritime tide, which we've all seen. The ocean gets kind of frothy or whatever. This was a dense, glittering mat, estimated by Norm Smith to be four to six inches thick, stretching for an astonishing half mile along the sound and possibly 80 feet wide. That's 211,000 square feet of this stuff, a little less than five acres. And they could see bubbles visibly rising up from beneath it. The local fishermen were like, yeah, we're not saving it. And did anybody manage to jar any of it? Did they scoop any of that up? No, I don't think they did. They probably weren't out there with jars. That's curious to me that nobody saved it. Not that any, of course, the next part of the story that would happen is that some officials wearing vaguely military uniforms with no insignia come and take it from you. Thank you. We'll give you a receipt for this. You can get it later. And then that's gone. Well, that's one of the first things you think about. Your boat is your livelihood. And there are enough things out there that can damage it or foul your props without you knowingly sailing into something you've never seen before, which also reminds me of the, remember the supposed dinosaur that was dragged from the depths? Yes. On the back of that boat. So it's like, at least I got one really good photo of it. And then I remember from that Omni article at the time is why didn't they save a part of it? And what happened is that thing cracked in half. Some really horrible, awful fluid started pouring out of it. Yeah, it stank. And they said, hey, we got a cargo hold full of fish worth a lot of money. Dump that thing over the side. Yeah. And that's what happens. Yeah. We don't need that right now. What we need to do is pay our mortgages when we get home. I boat a lot with my family down at the beach. I had the coastal family. And we would look out for plastic bags whenever we were out, because sadly they were out there. Not tons of them, thank God, where we would go. But they're out there. And someone would yell bag fish if we saw one, which meant you took evasive maneuvers. But this is a whole other level of hazard. A crewman on Shan's boat actually reached over the side and touched it. He said it was oily, but not like petroleum. It wasn't hot. It wasn't cool. And it was absolutely unidentifiable as any kind of conventional fuel or oil. And adding to that, Norm Smith noted a distinct and hazardous sulfur smell coming from the area where the bubbles were rising. So that maybe suggests like some kind of industrial process, or maybe as we discussed last week, the byproduct of some kind of unconventional propulsion system. Aside from the smell, I was starting to think of lemon meringue, because it's just kind of, that's what I picture in my mind, just light phobia. We're both hungry. It's phobia. We're recording this at 1230 in the morning. It's like, that's when your body's like, is it breakfast yet? All right, well, enlighten me on this, though. Norm is not in the car anymore with Lori Wicken, so is he on a boat now? Yeah, yeah. I forgot to point that out. Norm was in the car with Lori and Dave Kendricks, and one other unnamed person, I think. But after seeing what they saw from the car, he was dropped off at his father's house, and then Norm and his father drove to the Shag Harbor shoreline in a truck. And then at the harbor, Norm hopped onto the fishing boat, the Joan Priscilla, captained by his uncle, Bradford Shand, who we already mentioned. So that's his uncle. Yeah, I mean, you're hoping, of course, it's not a plane crash with casualties, but what a cool evening. Just kind of like you could hop on the boat and check it out. Okay, so this is starting to make more sense. So now Norm was now on Shand's boat, and that's important, too, because you're getting a sense of how long and involved this series of events are. And on top of that, you've got some witnesses having ongoing and different types of experiences with it. So now let's get back to the yellow foam, the yellow submarine foam. This wasn't just a film on the water. Norm had described it as almost like a solid mat. Okay, so what you're talking about, just a thick, like, foam mat. And it had a consistency that simply wasn't characteristic of anything natural they'd ever encountered in these waters. And this is interesting. It's not something I knew until we researched this episode, but the smell of sulfur can obviously come from a lot of things. But it's often associated with high-energy electrical discharges, particularly in saltwater, or with very specialized propellants, which suggests something truly exotic, possibly, an unknown kind of reaction taking place in the water, producing this strange foam and odor. Now, skeptics will often try to dismiss this, saying, well, it's a biological bloom or some kind of stagnant organic matter that got stirred up from the seabed. But we have to remember, these are professional mariners. They lived on that water every day of their lives. They knew the difference between natural seafoam and glittering, oily residue that smelled like a chemical fire. Yeah, so we might entertain the possibility that the foam was a byproduct of a craft. That was somehow compromised from the crash, I guess, or maybe, I don't know, something about its propulsion system was leaking. Some kind of highly anomalous material when it hit the water. You can gather from that a material that did not originate from a known terrestrial source. But man, sulfur comes up so much. Just in the paranormal in general with the phenomenon and ghost hunting and smelling sulfurous, brimstone-y kind of scents to something like a Trojan feast, describing smells that you encounter from these kinds of possibly alien interactions. And OK, so even if you consider some of the more mundane theories, like this being debris from a classified military experiment, you're then still left with a profound mystery of what kind of material would behave like this, and then why the Navy divers, in their initial three-day search of the harbor floor, would only find what was officially reported as nil results later on. But then, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, why not? We always do. That's true. All right, let's sally forth with the getting ahead. But OK, but the bottom line here is that this is certainly not kerosene or diesel fuel. So now I'm thinking also of the Martin Mariner Flight 19, I think, where when you go to search the area, all you see is that oily slick, because that's what's going to rise up. The oil slick, yeah, because it exploded. But sadly, that's what you look for. That's what's going to first come up. But this is not that, apparently. So here, I have a little surprise for you, Forrest. I didn't warn you about this article. One thing I want to touch on here for sure is that the initial articles when this happened were all about UFOs. But then a cover-up article came out saying it was top-secret military tech. And that was literally syndicated into every newspaper you can find, word for word. I found like 50 articles with the same language that came out later that was clearly meant to squash what initially happened. But here's the first one that I see you reading. Stop reading it. I'm going to read it out loud. I'll just watch you on our video chat to do your buttery toes. This is from the Calgary, Albertan, Tuesday, October 10th, 1967. This appears on pages 1 and page 11. The first part on the cover. UFO lands in sea but leaves no clues. Shelburne, Nova Scotia. The search for a mysterious object that disappeared beneath the waters of Shag Harbor on the southern tip of Nova Scotia has been terminated, a Navy spokesman said. The team of seven Navy divers, we'll be getting into that here in a minute, was to return to Halifax today, having found absolutely no clues, no trace of anything. A four-man diving team was sent to the scene after local fishermen could find no trace of the object. Three more divers joined the search Saturday. Witnesses said a dark object more than 60 feet long with four lights glided to the surface of the water about one-half mile offshore. An RCMP constable called to the scene said he saw a light, but it disappeared before boats couldn't reach it. It was being carried out to sea by the tide and disappeared before we could get a boat to it. Fishermen reported sighting a wide patch of yellow foam in the area immediately after the object splashed down, but it had disappeared when divers arrived. Naval spokesman in Halifax said Defense Department officials had ruled out the possibility that the object fell from an aircraft or came from a passing ship. No aircraft were reported in the vicinity at the time of the sighting. You might think the article ends there, but there's two more paragraphs that I want to share from 1967 and this newspaper in Nova Scotia, completely unrelated to what happened in the water, but will be pertinent to our listeners. Here's the last two paragraphs. Meantime, at Alamosa, Colorado, an autopsy on a horse believed by its owners to have been killed by inhabitants of a flying saucer, revealed its abdominal, brain, and spinal cavities were empty, the pathologist who performed the autopsy said. The pathologist, a Denver specialist who wished to remain anonymous, said the absence of organs in the abdominal cavity was unexplainable. Aha. Alamosa, folks, we've talked about it before. It is ground zero for cattle mutilations in Southern Colorado, and I've been there several times, very close friends of my dad's, have a 100-acre ranch out in the middle of nowhere down there, and that's just where this has been going on forever, but it was crazy to me in researching this story. We're reading these articles, oh, look at that. I'm going to read this original article about the UFO crash in Nova Scotia, and then the last paragraph is like, oh, by the way, Alamosa, cattle mutilation, 1967, for people who wonder how long cattle mutilation's been going on. Ah, so- Is it related? You're talking about snippy? Snippy, I don't know if this was actually snippy, but it could have been. We've talked about snippy before. Snippy was the very first horse that got fame. Yeah, not the first folks, but one that was gaining some media attention, let's say, and I think the owner did a review here. There's a great article on this, UFOs and a horse called snippy from the Denver Public Library. In skimming it, you could see that I think the owner said that snippy was actually the mother of the horse that was sadly mutilated, and it was Lady was the actual name of the horse. So there you go. Ah, well, there you go. That's interesting. Are these things related? And you had made the connection without any prompting. Yeah, it just happened. Coming back to our timeline, however, behind the scenes, the official government response is now escalating rapidly. RCMP Corporal O'Brien reported the incident to RCC Halifax at 11.38 PM. Yes, RCC, again, that's the Rescue Coordination Center, and their response was immediate, and this is why they're there. This is what they trained for. They move out fast, and they help people in distress. This is also important because the RCC message about what was going on was stamped priority and dated October 5, 1967. It's a bit of a smoking gun for researchers here because here specifically is what it said. Quote, subject, F-U-O-R-E-F-R-C-C-Halifax. Request subject UFO report be investigated by your HQ. Consideration should be given for an underwater search of the area ASAP. Okay, so the first part of that message, yes, we realize F-U-O, unless it's an insult, is supposed to be UFO and got transposed somehow. But you never know, like I said, you never know what the real truth is. Subject, it's the very first thing in the subject line. It must be in the UFO. Well, again, under duress and stress, you never know what the real story is about these things, but it maybe means something else. But continuing on, and it's in that very same paper trail here within Library and Archives Canada under record group RG-77, that we see the first phrase, dark object, in quotes. In that priority, telex sent on the morning of October 5th, 1967, less than 12 hours after the initial impact. That moves us past just glowing lights in the sky angle on this and into the realm of a physical, non-human presence hanging out in Shag Harbor. That telex dispatched from the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax to Canadian Forces headquarters in Ottawa uses some pretty stark language in its specific formatting under item F. It explicitly states, dark object in excess of 60 feet, four white lights. Now, Chris Stiles, the author of the books we've been referencing tonight, thinks the military moved to this terminology because the brilliant white lights reported by witnesses had extinguished upon impact, leaving what was essentially a dark silhouette drifting in the harbor. Interesting. You know, a Department of National Defense, the D&D memo, signed on October 6th, 1967, formally labeled the incident, as we said in the cold open, quote, a UFO report. So that I think is significant. It admitted the object was of unknown origin and specifically not a flare, not an aircraft, not any known object, not even a Mylar Batman balloon. Right. And I say that in jest, but we're getting the same things over and over still. Yeah. Reflection of a plane far off in the distance and this and that. Right. Right. So this isn't just a UFO sighting. It's a government documented UFO crash. Right. Let that sink in, especially compared to Roswell. It means that the Canadian government bureaucratically recognized that an unidentified flying object had physically crashed into their territorial waters. Yes. And once again, we have to remind people because they jumped to this and that's why they changed the three-letter designation to a P is that it's a flying object or it was and it's unidentified. Right. Which doesn't automatically mean alien or non-human intelligence. Well, I know. It just means we don't know what it is and it's flying. No, we have to take baby steps and we have to get over ourselves. That's the biggest lessons here in the study of this phenomenon. So, yeah, what they're looking at, it was no longer just an aerial anomaly. It was a dark object, as they're now calling it, resting on the surface of a silent harbor, then slipping beneath the waves, inviting the most powerful military forces in Canada to come see what they could find. And then it only gets even stranger from there. You know, there are some tasks in life that very few of us look forward to, but they must be done, like moving or doing your taxes or... Or car buying. Exactly. And these are chores where you'd really love to, and it pays to, get some trusted help with. Oh, yeah, yeah. We both know that from previously painful experiences. And when it comes to buying a car, it's a big deal and a fair amount of money out of your bank account. So, you definitely don't want to go in blind. 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Now, a reminder, we already told you about Captain Leo Howard Mercy of the fishing vessel M.V. Nickerson and his radar corroborating that it picked up multiple targets that night prior to the crash. If you'll remember, that was four targets in the shape of a box about six miles on a side, which is a big box. But we're revisiting, and I'm not suggesting that that's a solid object, but that's what they saw on the radar. So we're revisiting that because it's more than just an eyewitness account. This detail is significant, but it's still anecdotal, right? We don't have proof of what his radar showed. But if we believe him, this is additional sensory data, like we talked about last week. He had reported the four stationary blips on his screen. They weren't moving. They were holding position. And visually, he and his crew saw one red light arcing over his ship at what he estimated to be over a mile in altitude. So, you know, we often talk about anecdotal stuff, eyewitness stuff. And I think this is more than anecdotal because there were other participants in the radio calls and multiple records after the fact, stating that he radioed about that and asked what they could be. The details of what his radar saw are even in the Conner report. But we're going to talk more about that later. And as far as data is concerned, uh, you, you've seen the Nova special on, uh, UFOs. What are they? Or, you know, that was just, uh, it was on last night on PBS is why I mentioned it. But one of the interviewees scientist was talking about like, yes, you have anecdotes. You've got eyewitness testimony. Thank goodness. We, you know, you don't rely on that. But what we do need is censored data. That's the one thing we can look to. Yeah. But even then for some folks, it's like, you don't have the floppy disk, uh, was it a five and a quarter inch floppy disk in your hand, whatever they put that on, perhaps at that time, uh, you don't have that. You're still going off anecdotes of data, but we're talking about now sensors and not human vision. Mercy reported the contacts to the rescue coordination center in Halifax. And the response he got was that there were no military exercises in that area and no other craft were supposed to be there. So this isn't just a fishing boat picking up some atmospheric anomaly. This is a train captain using expensive verified equipment, confirming multiple stationary unknown targets where nothing should have been. And this was before the crash into the Harbor and the DECA radar system, even in 1967 was, as the Brits say, an impressive bit of kit. Just Google it. Um, this was a really sophisticated system. It's not your dad's fish finder or a pair of binoculars. Now, if we look at the actual search for physical evidence on the Harbor floor, that's what we're going to turn to now. This is three days later. That'd be October 7th, 1967. And the Royal Canadian Navy has dispatched the diving tender HMCS Granby to Shag Harbor, which also was my wife's grandmother's nickname. What? Shag Harbor? Granby. Granby. Oh, Granby, you mean. Well, uh, that's interesting here. Cursory research tells us it's apparently old Norse, I guess, and comes to us from the Marquess of Granby. Uh, but that Granby, which is a historic village in Nottinghamshire, looks like it might mean a bearded one and village or maybe a farmstead or homestead, something, right? Right. So if I had a farm, I could call it Granby. Uh, well, you're bearded. Uh, so as far as I'm concerned, you're bearded and you should go for it. But, uh, now Granby sounds like, I think that's also a wrestling move. Well, in this case, it's the HMCS Granby, uh, and there's a specialized detachment on it from Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic, led by Diving Officer Tom Essary and Senior Petty Officer Jim Palmforth. Now, these are not just guys with snorkels. These are elite clearance divers, highly trained professionals. Okay. What's a clearance diver? Well, this is what it says today about clearance divers, but this comes from the Canadian government's website. Royal Canadian Navy clearance divers are highly trained underwater specialists who are responsible to deliver mine countermeasures, diving, maritime explosive ordnance disposal, and underwater engineering support worldwide on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces. And clearance divers are primarily based at Fleet Diving Unit in the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Fleet Diving Unit Pacific in Eskimoalt, BC. What I'm going to do from here on out, I've decided the Fiat decision is to pronounce every possible pronunciation that comes to my head. The listener can pick one. I'm with you. Eskimoalt. Eskimo. Eskimo. Eskimoalt, BC. Take your pick or provide your own. Well, smaller detachments of the units here are, of these clearance divers are located at the Experimental Diving and Undersea Group in Toronto, Ontario, and within Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, Cansofcom. Shout out to my cousin's husband who did basically the same kind of thing for the Navy and then for years. And then now he's an instructor, but he trained with Bud, so he had to go through the basic underwater demolition. And his job was underwater ordnance disposal. And he also wore the big Navy diving suit, you know, with the weighted shoes and the diving bell helmet and all. He did all that. Yeah. And I asked him what it was like. He said, it's very cold. I bet. Well, there you have it. These folks are real good at their gig. And in this case, the diving team is made up of Leo Gano, Butch Bouchard, Rick Woods, Ralph Romans, and Chuck Wilson. And Tom Esri, as you said, is the OIC or officer in charge. And Jim Baumforth is the senior petty officer. They hit the water in pairs, working through the daylight hours for three days under pretty intense media scrutiny. Yeah, we've all seen this kind of diving on the news after a maritime tragedy that requires investigation and recovery. And invariably, the media is watching with glued camera lenses, you know, everything that they can see from wherever they're allowed to observe their recording. So you have reporters and you have photographers literally hanging out over the rails of nearby boats, waiting for these divers to pull something out of the muck. And the point being made here, at least that I'd like to make, is that there's anticipated to be something there. That's right. They're not all this commotion of just like, oh, some kids thought they saw something. They're all expecting a wreckage, a body, some definitive proof of what happened. And then yet, when the Navy officially pulls the plug on October 10th, the report is suspiciously brief. The operations director for maritime command, W.W. Turner, wrote that the search produced, as we said, nil results. The local press echoed this with a famous headline, not a trace, not a clue, not a bit of anything. Yeah, this is where the ground truth gets kind of murky because the local accounts tell a different story. That's right. Donald Nickerson, a local fisherman who is not, as far as we can tell, connected to the fishing vessel, M.V. Nickerson. But what a coincidence. Yes. This is captained by Leo Mercy. Donald is another local fisherman who was watching the operation very closely, and he claimed he saw the divers bringing up physical debris from the seabed, and he specifically described it as aluminum-colored material. Even Lori Wickens, who we talked about, the primary witness who was out there on the water, went on record saying he was convinced the divers found something, even if he couldn't prove it. And one of the Granby divers, Chuck Wilson, later explained that the debris locals thought they saw was actually just the divers returning to the boat to swap out their air tanks. Maybe. Well, in 1967, those tanks were only charged at 2,200 PSI, so they were surfacing constantly. Wilson maintained that they found nothing but, quote, rocks, sand, and sea creatures like wolf eels. Yeah. So we have a clear divergence here, really. Official military reports, nil results. Local eyewitnesses saw debris, or at least they thought they did, saw something being brought up. Skeptics say the divers just missed it because of the strong currents. This is something we talked about, and you brought up Flight 19 earlier. There's some thought as to the, in that case, the Gulf Stream taking the planes many miles away between, from the time they hit the surface to where they might have gotten to the bottom of the sea. That was the first time I learned about how much current can affect where debris winds up during the sinking process. But we also have this sulfur-smelling foam that was a direct result of the object's impact, which lots of witnesses saw. So it suggests something was definitely physically there and leaking or broken in some kind of way. So what happened to it? Where'd it go? Again, these things do happen. Well, as we've talked about before, there's another famous case known as the Ghost Bomber, which crashed into Pittsburgh's Monongahela River on January 31st, 1956. And that was a World War II-era B-25 Mitchell bomber. Right. They can't find it, right? Yeah. They know it crashed. They just can't find it later. And, you know, strong currents, a little bit of hydro shenanigans. So these things do happen. But in this case here, and you're asking where did it go, you know, if this object was physically present, it was large enough to cause that kind of chemical residue. And then the military divers, despite a three-day search, find nothing. So it's all suggesting a mystery much deeper than simply missing wreckage. It suggests that perhaps the Navy was just, as it said then, making television for the public, while a more secretive or nuanced retrieval going on under the waves, you know, something else entirely was actually underway or had already occurred. Oh, so it's like an ignore the man behind the curtain kind of situation. Well, now we're hearing, you know, I'm not surprised that any of the subterfuge kind of goes on and that's what we hear and it gets denied to this day about all the famous cases here. But what's the other alternative here? You know, but a case of whatever ended that water traveled away from the area while it was still submerged. That's like we said, Monongahela. I hope I'm saying that right. You know, whatever the case is, the government knew they weren't dealing with a conventional aircraft crash. And so when they say nil results, that just makes it a bit more confusing. Perhaps on purpose or maybe they just had no idea what they're dealing with and whatever it was had just simply left the area. This is where modern technology years later comes into play. Long after the military divers packed up their gear and the media attention had faded away, independent researchers, as they do, went back down to look for what the Navy supposedly missed. And one of them, David Svet, using modern survey techniques, reported finding something strange on the seabed. We actually found some video of him diving on it on Facebook. It's in our links if you want to see it. Okay. And what Svet found were two distinct dish-shaped depressions. And you can think of them as giant, perfectly round indentations on the seafloor, each measuring about six meters across. Yeah, 18 feet or something like that. Yeah, meters about 3.28. 18, 20 feet. These weren't just random bumps, these anomalies. Anyways, they got to really challenge the idea that the harbor floor is just featureless muck, right? Or anything that hitting it would be just leaving a messy impact crater. Because another thing a friend told me who does a rescue dive or did for the fire department is that when you dive on a lake, you can barely sometimes see your hand in front of your face. It is so silty, so murky. Every little movement kicks stuff up. He pointed out that these circles were strangely clear of the usual rocks, silt, and marine life you'd expect to find coating everything down there. He described them as looking as if the area had been swept clean, which suggests some kind of work may have been done that doesn't easily fit with natural tidal movements or typical underwater erosion. I'll quote some excerpts from the video of him diving that's on Facebook. He said, quote, definitely a depression. I'd say maybe 15 to 20 feet across. And there was some sea life crawling across it like lobsters and stuff, but there wasn't any sort of vegetation. And then at the brim of the depression, that's when you see all the seaweed and all the plants and rocks. So it was kind of interesting from that perspective. It looked like it was swept clean. However, regarding the visibility, he said, if you were anywhere above the bottom, you couldn't see anything. Interesting. So a lot of folks wonder if this was where something landed. Right. Then you wonder, is that us cleaning that all up or is that them cleaning that all up? Or is that just a byproduct of whatever happened? Exactly. So let's also consider natural causes though for those. I mean, the currents in the sound are notoriously strong, often running at four to five knots. I think the locals call it the rip. It can definitely move sediment around in weird ways. However, Svett's findings get more specific. The covering within these depressions was comprised specifically of pebbles two to four centimeters in size, while the surrounding seabed was full of larger rocks and heavy vegetation. So it's hard to explain why a natural current would selectively sweep a perfect six meter circle, or two of them in this case, and leave behind like a uniform bed of small pebbles and then normal sea life around the outside of these depressions. Yes. Well, we hear about that on land all the time. These strange marks of evidence having strange results on whatever should be naturally there, animals and vegetation and just the ground, the terra itself. Yeah. This all leans towards a kind of deliberate, possibly almost controlled action. And if the object that impacted in 1967 was a functional craft that eventually moved under its own power, known as the one that got away, as Chris Stiles calls it, then it wouldn't necessarily leave a traditional debris field of aluminum or wires. Instead, it might leave a physical impression like what Svett saw. Yeah, and if we consider that the initial search produced nil results, despite the obvious initial impact in the chemical foam and all that stuff, then Svett's discovery of these depressions might be the only physical ground truth we have left of where that craft or what was left of it might have rested temporarily. Now, the object wasn't necessarily wreckage to be found. It could have been a vessel that was just resting or perhaps frantically repairing itself before departing the area underneath the water. We don't know if it, you know, by its definition, if what it did was a crash. It's what it looked like to humans. Yeah. And we were just talking in the last episode about underwater skid marks off the coast of Catalina. That's right. And that these trenches don't look natural. They look gouged out. Who knows? But it all brings us back to the theory that we might be looking at transmedium craft. Yeah. And the perfectly round, clean depressions Svett found could represent actual docking or maybe landing sites where these objects temporarily interact with the earth. Yeah. And if you look at it from a strictly mundane perspective, the Navy story is pretty straightforward. They looked for wreckage. They found some kelp and some eels. And then they went home. But everyone saw that object enter the water and it didn't just vanish into thin air. It's submerged. So this is where we need to transition to what might be the most significant piece of the puzzle, even though it predates the 1967 Shag Harbor incident by seven years. Aha. And hats off to Chris Stiles here. This is why Stanton Friedman called him the bulldog. For years, he was plagued by this persistent, almost mythical story of another older event in Shelburne in the same region. It was kind of a red herring that kept getting tangled with Shag Harbor. I like the herring. I wanted to put, make sure that I used the word herring with this. Yeah. With the sea, the sea faring tail. Well, it actually, it took Chris 29 years to finally untangle the two and prove they were distinct, separate cases. This is what we can now call the 1960 Shelburne incident, thanks to him, or as the military officially knew it, Sweep Clear 5. Well, that sounds like a sterling cellophant screenplay or novel. Yeah. Well, it was the objective of the mission, as we're going to find out here. And just for our listeners to get a geographic fix for us, where is Shelburne, or the harbor anyway? I know we're in Shelburne County, but where is this location related to Shag Harbor? Shelburne is about 25 miles up the coast to the northeast from Shag Harbor. You're still on the south shore of Nova Scotia, so it's not exactly right next door, but it's very much part of the same maritime region. Yeah, it's not a huge distance for something that can move through air and water at impossible speeds, of course, but it makes it clear that we're talking about the same general area, the same stretch of coastline. Yeah, precisely. While Shag Harbor gives us the gold standard for documented evidence, Shelburne gives us this incredible chilling secondary corroboration for the region's high strangeness. Yeah, and for this bit of info, our source was a much newer book by Stiles called Sweep Clear 5, NATO's UFO Encounter. This was published recently, just in 2023. Now, we'll have a link to where you can buy it in our show notes. And while Shag Harbor is significant, Shelburne gives us another connected incident that's arguably a much bigger deal. Now, Stiles had a breakthrough on this on December 28, 2021, when he spotted a single sentence in a Wikipedia entry. See? Wikipedia still has some value. For the HMCS Cape Scott, that single sentence led him to a December 1960 issue of the RCN magazine, The Crow's Nest, which detailed a massive joint NATO exercise off the Shelburne coast. Yeah, we're not talking about a couple of fishing boats here, folks. This was a full-scale NATO operation involving 18 warships, 10 U.S. units, including minesweepers like the USS Agile and the USS Bold, and then eight Canadian vessels led by the maintenance ship HMCS Cape Scott, right? So they even had an elite fleet diving unit and a diving tender, YMT-8, on site for 18 days. So it's a pretty big operation here. The official narrative for this huge deployment was that it was a minesweeping and preparation operation. Yeah, but there's off-the-record accounts from divers who were there, often identified by pseudonyms like Harry and Wade, who claimed they were sitting over two occupied UFOs on the seabed in seven fathoms of water. It's about 42 feet deep. Now, it's important to note here that the direct forensic paper trail for the 1960s Shelburne incident is not as strong or as easily verifiable as the 1967 Shag Harbor crash. However, much of what we know comes from interviews conducted decades later by Chris Stiles and others who he reasonably believes were there. Now, I'll add that when I first read Stiles' book, Dark Object, years ago, some of those conflated details between Shag Harbor and Shelburne were in his first book. So it's super cool that he's teased those two stories apart and updated his research to reflect that. Yeah, we've seen this over the years before. Similar events become conflated and then intertwined. It's just part of human nature and perception here. Fixing that can be an extremely difficult task. But Stiles did it, and now we get to talk about the repair and extraction theory as it relates to Shelburne. These Shelburne divers claim that one craft seemed to be immobile or damaged, and the second craft had actually joined it on the ocean floor to provide assistance, which that's just a cool thought. It's just that, like I said, they need a AAA sometimes. You know, this wasn't a crash in the terminal sense. It was more like a maintenance event carried out by some kind of non-human intelligence right under the hulls of a massive NATO fleet. Yeah, so a mundane explanation, which was actually pushed at the time by the military, was that they were simply investigating a Soviet submarine. But the divers themselves that talked to Stiles were insulted by that cover story. Harry, the diver, even got into a physical altercation with an American protocol officer who tried to insist it was a Russian sub, shouting that whatever was down there might be from Mars, but it definitely wasn't from Moscow. That kind of heated, like, firsthand testimony strongly suggests they knew what they were dealing with was not a conventional terrestrial adversary. Right. And here's where we get to a detail that's pretty profound. It's buried in the deck logs of the HMCS Cape Scott, which Stiles has photos of in his book, Sweep Clear Five, on October 12, 1960, exactly 90 minutes after entering the mineswept channel, and that's the highest state of readiness for imminent nuclear war. This occurred for a period of about three minutes. So let's just repeat that. Military historians will tell you DEFCON 1 has officially never happened in NATO history, and yet there it is, stitched into the legal historical record of a command ship off the coast of Nova Scotia. This entire fleet then sat at anchor for four days without moving an inch, positioned directly over the reported USO location. Right. So we had this intense standoff, a NATO fleet literally at DEFCON 1 over these submerged objects for a week. Now, according to the insider accounts, the flotilla eventually left the station, but the objects didn't just stay there. Divers reported that after this week-long surveillance, the objects eventually broke the surface and vanished into the sky within seconds. It strongly suggests that whatever they were, they were mobile, capable of both deep-sea operation and atmospheric flight. Forrest, why don't you read the description Stiles has under that picture of the HMCS Cape Scott logbook page? It's on page 133 of his Sweep Clear 5 book. Right. So what we have is an image of a scribbled and tiny script here, a handwritten logbook, and the description here, the caption is, The screenshot above is an excerpt from the October 1960 logbook for the former Royal Canadian Naval Vessel, HMCS Cape Scott. The visible portion shows that at 1242, HMCS Cape Scott, the Sweep Clear 5 missions command ship, assumed DC-1, standing for DEFCON 1. Cape Scott first entered the Minesweep channel at 1102 at a readiness level of DC-5, DEFCON 5, but immediately assumes DEFCON 1 at 1242. According to the RCN divers, this was the moment when, and this is a quote, there was no doubt as to what we were dealing with below. It was a pair of alien craft with live aliens on the seabed, end quote. At 1435, that'd be 2.35 p.m., HMCS Cape Scott reverts to DC-5, DEFCON 5, the lowest state of readiness. Note the lowering of lifeboats at 1500 hours, that's 3 p.m. According to military historians, DEFCON 1 has never been declared by either the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon or any U.S. or Canadian commander in the field. Since the DEFCON system was first employed in October 1959 until the present day. Again, for your notes, kids, DEFCON 1 has officially never happened in NATO history, but this, the Shelburne incident, was seven years before Shag Harbor, which would happen 25 miles to the south. Right. So, the Shelburne incident fundamentally changes how we interpret the nil results comment from the Shag Harbor search in 1967. If you look at it from a strictly mundane perspective, the Navy's story about the Shag Harbor is pretty straightforward. They looked for wreckage, they found some kelp and some eels, and then they went home. But all those witnesses saw that object enter the water, and it didn't just vanish, it submerged. This is where the Shelburne becomes the critical secondary corroboration for what was actually happening under the waves. It wasn't just a misidentified craft. It was a physical presence the Navy was clearly afraid of, one that had already visited Nova Scotia seven years earlier. It's the repair work that really flips the script. When you look at the accounts from divers like Harry regarding the 1960 event, they weren't just looking at static wreckage. They claimed to come face-to-face with two distinct USOs, unidentified submerged objects, sitting in 42 feet of water on the seabed. Now, the insider's belief was that this wasn't just a chance encounter. They were witnessing an intelligently managed rescue operation, and a second craft had joined the first to render assistance or perform repairs on a unit that had been damaged during its entry into the atmosphere. I want to read this excerpt from Stiles' book, the Sweep Clear book. This is from pages 25 and 26. These are quotes from Harry, from the diver calling himself Harry, which is pseudonym. I was off duty for a few hours one afternoon and having my beer allotment at the bar. I was nursing my beer in a corner with a few of the other divers when a US officer saunters in, orders a Coke, and sits down. That would happen occasionally on those joint missions, all in the name of international cooperation or some such BS. Usually these guys moved about with one of our officers in tow as an escort, but this fish head, which is a commissioned officer nickname, was flying solo. He struck up some friendly line of small talk with a few of the enlisted men, quite unusual and not at all well-received. I mean, we always made the US enlisted men feel welcome, but never the brass. The guys and I were having a huddle, talking shop, and the topic of the evening was, of course, our guests, who were residing on the seabed, a few fathoms below us. I guessed that I'd had a few too many and I was getting a bit loud. That's when the US officer leans in and suggests that it might be best if we'd laid off talking about that Soviet sub we were sitting over. Well, none of us were getting much sleep on the mission and I just lost it. I jumped to my feet and was all over our US friend like a bad smell. I started with something like, that's the whole problem with you Yankee boys, is that you see the red menace everywhere you look. That isn't a Russian sub and you bloody well know it. It might be some other kind of red menace from Mars, but I suspect it's from somewhere much further out. Anyway, I'm sure if they meant to do us any harm, we'd already be screwed and there would be precious little that any of us could do about it. Maybe you should get yourself a real drink, sit down, and just chill. But like a flash, he left the room and the old man came below to deal with me. We might have been technically in command of the mission and in our own territorial waters, but there was still US scrutiny and oversight. The captain came below without our American comrade and told me to go to my bunk and sleep it off. I told him I wasn't drunk and he countered with, go to your bunk, it's an order. Yes, sir. And that was that. I'd got off easy. And yeah, I'd had a few, but I wasn't that drunk, just pissed, mostly pissed off. Well, yeah, I know what I saw. So anyway, that has a ring of verisimilitude. Well, the other thing that is fascinating about Shelburne is that Stiles has Harry, another diver who was there, stating that these two craft were unequivocally occupied. And on top of that, they saw beings that they captured on film. It's from page 32 of Sweep Clear 5. Continuing on. However, everybody in the galley heard the whole enchilada, the day that Harry ran his mouth at an American officer. Basically, what the divers were saying was that there were two flying saucers sitting on the seabed and that there were live, bloody aliens inside them. In fact, they claimed that they'd even seen them outside the craft in the water. The divers also said they had shot film of what they were calling alien activity. It always ended with them saying, there's no doubt what we were dealing with down there. No doubt. I didn't know what to think about it at the time. It was weird. Damn weird. And things were certainly tense aboard that ship. You could feel it. But you didn't question orders in those days. I was just thankful to get the hell off. Christ, I hated the ships. So there's film. There's film somewhere. That's right. And Stiles corroborated that two crew members went ashore to get it processed. And Harry said that was him and Wade taking it to get developed in a deuce and a half they called Old Sid. And that's a two and a half ton truck. Yeah. So I mean, this story is hard to verify, I guess. Meaning these divers were the guys. But Chris Stiles did a lot of work on that. And frankly, I believe him and them and that this is real. It's harder to pin down than Shag Harbor. But it sure is, outside of the aliens chilling on the seafloor part, believable overall. Well, it'll definitely get you thinking. Yeah. So folks, Stiles' latest book on this is super compelling. If this story interests you at all, it is a must read. But let's talk about the implications here from an analytical standpoint. You have to ask why a multinational NATO fleet would sit over two objects for a week. Assume DEFCON 1, even if it was just for a few minutes. And then, according to these accounts, simply watch them break the surface and accelerate into the sky at impossible speeds. Now, if these were Soviet subs, which was the standard cover story pushed by the Americans at the time, the RCN would have forced them to the surface or engaged them immediately. The fact that they just monitored activity underwater for seven days suggests the military knew they were dealing with something they either couldn't control or something that might have been a non-human intelligence damage control team. Or dealing with something they already had an agreement with. Oh. So that's a valid point, too. Again, you never know what the... Because now, of course, we're... Actually, these are nothing new, but just the agreements we've had with NHI for their activities and ours and what we're allowed to do and what we say they're allowed to do, but don't follow our rules because what are we going to do to stop them? Okay. So anyway, but for these beings here, if you believe any of this at all, the ocean floor isn't just a hiding spot. It's kind of a hangar where they can manage their tech, protected by the water and currents that we puny humans find hard to navigate it. And we talked about this last time. Just think about it. Logically, it's a great place to do your business. Yeah. So we have this intense standoff, the NATO fleet at DEFCON 1 literally over these objects for a week. And according to the insider accounts of the divers, the flotilla eventually left and whatever they were, they were mobile, capable of both deep sea operation and atmospheric flight. This raises a fascinating question, though, about the 1967, seven years later, Shag Harbor object itself. If it was damaged when it hit the water, what was its next move? Did it stay put? Did it also leave under its own power? Initially, researchers, including Chris Stiles in his earlier work, considered the possibility that the 1967 Shag Harbor object, if damaged, might have moved underwater before it escaped, just like Shelburne. But wait, there's more. The Shelburne incident was critical because of the location. The seabed there was a top-secret sensitive location. So it was home to a critical sensor array for the SOSUS network, S-O-S-U-S. Now, for our listeners who might not be familiar with SOSUS, can you quickly explain what that was, Mr. Scott? You learned about it in The Hunt for Red October, right? Yeah. I can't remember now if they actually mentioned that movie, but I know at some point I've had to look it up. SOSUS stands for Sound Surveillance System. During the Cold War, this was a highly classified top-secret network of hydrophone arrays, essentially giant underwater microphones laid out on the ocean floor, particularly across strategic chokepoints. Its primary purpose was to detect and track Soviet submarines moving through the Atlantic, especially when they got close to North America. It was a critical early warning system, listening for any deep-sea movement. Yeah, it was the SOSUS network that heard the Titan sub-implode back in June of 2023, sadly. They knew what happened to the Titan pretty much right away. But getting back to the 1960 Sweep Clear 5 incident, this wasn't just any old coastal spot. Government Point near Shelburne was a site of a highly sensitive NATO military base connected to SOSUS. For the 1960 objects to have been located precisely near this base, designed to monitor for hostile underwater incursions, well, let's just say it could probably make some people very nervous. Yeah, and this is where Stiles' painstaking research conducted years after his initial book really deepens our understanding. His most recent work, particularly the 2023 book Sweep Clear 5, untangles the mixed-up details that are out there and have been, and part of the oral history of both events, between Shelburne in 1960 and Shag Harbor in 1967. So while the 1967 Shag Harbor object was initially theorized to have moved towards Shelburne for repairs, Stiles now believes the 1967 object likely left under its own power from its original vicinity near Shag Harbor after some kind of repair or possible assistance. He points to the Cameron sighting on October 11th, 1967, where two sets of lights were seen rising out of the water near Shag Harbor and then accelerating into the sky as the likely finale for that particular object. Yeah, so that was seven days after that came down. Now, Stiles now argues that Shag Harbor was, quote, the one that got away, because much like in 1960, a second craft may have rendered the necessary aid for the primary craft to leave under its own power from that initial vicinity, but we can't be sure. And I think even for him, there's still some fuzzy areas over what happened in the first incident and what happened in the second incident. But the bottom line is, when the dive teams were in Shag Harbor, they said that they didn't find anything. So we have to wonder, was it true that nothing was recovered and maybe the thing got away under its own? Or did they recover something under the water that they never shared with us? There's no way to know that. That concept of rescue then is reinforced by the presence of that thick yellowish mat of foam and the sulfur smell at Shag Harbor. These craft are manipulating the quantum vacuum or using high energy plasma sheaths to slide through the water without friction. As modern patents suggest, if you listen to the last episode, the residue reported by Norman Smith and other fishermen could be the literal chemical byproduct perhaps of an intense underwater propulsion repair or reboot. So we're not looking at a crash. We're looking at some kind of a pit stop by a civilization that treats her oceans like a garage and then also a gas station and maybe a restaurant. I don't know if they love sea food. Well, it kind of hints at the idea that these entities are not just visitors, but maybe something maybe more than the visitors, you know, perhaps residents with a deep understanding of our planet's geophysics because they seem to utilize specific corridors like the waters off Shelburne County to conduct repairs or harvest energy under the cover of the North Atlantic. The perfectly round, swept clean depressions found on the harbor floor by modern divers like David Svet might be the literal footprints of where these trans medium craft rested before they broke the surface and then accelerated back into the infinite beyond. But also, you know, we've heard stories of UFOs and UAP near military facilities, no doubt, specifically nuclear ones. And if we believe those stories and these beings have trans medium capabilities, then maybe it wouldn't stand to reason that they might also be interested in the SOSUS network or everything we've got, every tech. Yeah. I mean, that seems possible, completely possible. So I feel like we've laid out a pretty compelling case for something extraordinary happening in Shag Harbor and off Shelburne. But to really do this justice, we got to play devil's advocate for a second. Realistically, there are several mundane explanations that skeptics have used to try and anchor the Shag Harbor incident to earthly origins. One of the most persistent theories is that we weren't looking at a craft from another world, but a highly classified piece of Cold War hardware from the Corona satellite program. The Corona program, for those unfamiliar, was a top secret U.S. project where spy satellites in orbit would eject film canisters that then drifted down on parachutes. And these were designed to be retrieved in midair or plucked from the ocean by the Navy, which brings us to one of our favorite movies we've talked about a million times on the show. Ice Station Z. Right. Okay. That's a great popcorn movie. And it's like six hours long. Right. So for those of you who don't know, just a quick recap here, the joke I made earlier, it's sounding like a Sterling Slyphant screenplay, if it were a movie, but the novels were written by Alistair MacLean. And that book comes from 1963. So we're in the time zone here of this Cold War submarine adventure. Great cast, by the way. We're talking Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, Patrick McGowan, and directed by John Sturgis. So classic Cold War thriller. Also think about the, as Scott would say, the 10,000 foot picture and that everybody's on edge at this point. Super Cold War stuff going on here. Everybody's tense. Everybody's wondering who's going to drop the bomb or pull the trigger or press the button. Yeah. And Ice Station Zebra is obviously based on the Corona satellite program. And when you think about it and you think about this, you can see why this might initially fit some of the search and rescue vibes, especially since there was a U.S. base just 30 minutes away at government point. So it's like the perfect drop zone for film from one of those satellites. It's a tidy explanation. Yeah. I mean, we were also, again, getting back to like Kecksburg and Cosmos 96, wherever the Russian thing is. We talked about that before, about how they would do that. They would take high resolution film, photographic film photos, and then eject them. And those were picked up. But what we're talking about, I guess, the struggles with the, I guess, the physics of the impact. And what's to be expected and how this is, none of the reports are describing anything mundane, it seems like. Yeah. It's not a parachute coming down with a little canister on it. Exactly. You know, canisters, they don't usually glide at 45 degree angles. They don't exhibit non-ballistic motion that witnesses describe before reaching the water. Okay. And they're small. This is, you know, from a broader perspective, the Corona theory is, I guess, in a way, another attempt to fit that square peg of high strangeness in that round hole of 1960s technology. Although they did have some pretty advanced tech back then. You and I visited. Yeah. Remember, we went and saw the spy exhibit, the museum exhibit at the Ronald Reagan Library. Yeah, that was super cool. Well, I have the same opinion here about the flare theory too, which is another theory that comes up. We know on October 13th, 1967, just days after Shag Harbor, a UFO report in Moncton was quickly debunked as a simple 12-inch aluminum army flare found by a demolition worker. And skeptics love that because it suggests the whole region was just seeing things during a period of high tension, like you just mentioned. Yeah, but you don't see things like flares showing up on radar. That's right. And that's why you need that extra dimension of sensory data. Yes. As we were describing before, it's go to the data and then we can't ignore the biological explanations for that yellowish orange foam Norman Smith was describing. And also the RCMP, they saw that bubbling up on the surface. Some researchers say it was just a biological bloom of an, or an accumulation of some kind of stagnant organic matter being roiled up by the tide. They'd even argue the, the burnt sulfur smell was nothing more than a rotting marine vegetation or marsh gas. Oh, and here we go. Yes. So we've gone from swamp gas to marsh gas. To marsh gas. Yeah. We're in the water. The answer for everything. Yeah. All of that was essentially the stance of the infamous Condit Committee, the U.S. Air Force Commission group that most ufologists will have heard of or enthusiasts. And they looked at this case as case 34, where they interviewed a few officers, heard the divers found no results, and basically decided no further investigation was justifiable. They classified it as unsolved while simultaneously trying to downplay the significance of UFO research in general. Well, in a way I will go with unsolved or not finding anything, you know, nothing they could explain anyway. You know, this Condit report, it's, I think pretty legendary for its dismissive attitude. Even scientists like Dr. James McDonald shredded it for its specious argumentation and for ignoring the most puzzling cases while focusing on the trivial ones. Sound familiar? Project Blue Book, all the projects, all the books, all the, all the blueness. But the Condit Committee dismissing this by saying it's just nil results really missed the bigger picture here entirely. I think, you know, they were looking at a failed search for wreckage, but they really weren't accounting for the unique nature of the described object itself. Yeah. And that's where our framework for understanding this changes. We've established the object was tracked at Mach 10 by NORAD, that it made an evasive maneuver by suddenly stopping and hovering before continuing its trajectory. That speed, that kind of stop-start required materials technology that simply didn't exist in 1967. No known aircraft, not even the most classified prototypes could do that. It was impossible for human tech at the time. Okay. So when you consider that Mach 10 speed, that sudden stop, that non-ballistic motion before it impacted, and, you know, consider all that, and then you try to fit the corona canister or the flare theory, those explanations just kind of fall apart. You know, the technological capabilities described by the witnesses and later by NORAD tracking data fundamentally rebut any local experiment theory. I don't think that just, it just doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work at all. And to really explain that immediate intense culture of silence that fell on everyone, the pilots, the police, the military, again, you look at the bureaucratic hammer that enforced that, the JANAP 146D, that 1962 agreement between Canada and the U.S. Yeah, we mentioned this briefly earlier, but it's worth revisiting its full weight here. This agreement made divulging UFO reports to the public a crime under the Espionage Act. We're talking about potential prison time and a hefty fine. So when you see a comprehensive lack of curiosity from the Canadian government, it wasn't that the evidence wasn't compelling. It's just that the consequences for talking were existential and severe. Exactly. Yeah. You're being deep dooky if you said that you saw something like this. And framing the silence that way, that transforms the narrative of the story from a mystery that was ignored to one that was actively covered up. So when we look back at the 1967 Shag Harbor incident, it's easy to see why this has truly earned the title of Canada's best documented UFO sighting. This isn't just about one person's experience. This was a multi-agency response involving the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Coast Guard. We're not talking about local lore here. We have internal Department of National Defense memos explicitly stating that this object was not a flare, a float, an aircraft, or any known object. The military is formally acknowledging that it was technology of an unknown origin. Yeah. And it's that documentation that forces us past the simple question of, are they real? And then into the more unsettling reality of what they were doing in those waters. And when we couple this with the secondary corroboration from the 1960 Shelburne incident, we start to see a very deliberate pattern. We begin to get a sense of non-human intelligence, NHI, using the Nova Scotia coast. It's kind of a secure, perhaps even preferred underwater hangar. The reports from the divers on the Sweet Clear 5 mission of being face-to-face with occupied craft that were apparently undergoing some kind of repair or assistance protocol. This starts to paint the broader picture. And the counterpoint, of course, is that the nil results reported by the fleet diving unit, Atlantic, from the HMCS Granby's 1967 search, they'll say that the military just found nothing. But those divers were working under intense media pressure. Even if the official line was nothing was found, local witnesses like Donald Nickerson that we mentioned were adamant that they saw aluminum-colored debris being recovered. So when you combine that with the 1967 priority telexes, with the 1960 deck logs of the HMCS Cape Scott, assuming DEFCON 1, the whole thing gets a lot more real. Mm, yes. Granby roll. That's the wrestling move, and or a delicious pastry of Canadian origin here. Okay, so we're talking about the legacy of Shag Harbor now, particularly when viewed through the lens of the Shelburne incident. I think it's pretty profound. It provides a window into non-human intelligence or NHI that seems to understand the geophysics of our planet far better than we do, and why wouldn't they? You know, they aren't just visitors passing through. They appear to be residents maybe, even perhaps utilizing our oceans for energy harvesting or tactical extraction of something, right under the hulls of NATO fleets. If an NHI can repair a damaged craft on the harbor floor and then accelerate it back into the sky in seconds, as reported, our technological dominance is nothing but an illusion. As Rear Admiral Gallaudet once suggested, these entities seem to be interacting with humanity entirely on their own terms, leaving us with the most unsettling question of all, whose planet is this anyway? Well, it is a story that's still being written, and if you find yourself on the south shore of Nova Scotia, you should visit the Shag Harbor UFO Incident Museum and Interpretive Center. It's located right on the aforementioned Highway 3, and it provides a focal point for all the witness testimonies and official documents we've discussed. You can even go down the road to the UFO gazebo and look out over the exact coordinates where the dark object first hit the water. Well, we definitely need t-shirts from that place, and we need an answer to this question. It could be down there right now. Who knows? That's going to wrap up episode 321 of Astonishing Legends. We're dark the next two weeks, but we'll be back on February 7th, 2026 with the first of three shows in a row. In the meanwhile, look for new episodes of the Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays, and keep an eye on our Patreon for more bonus content. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Boland, for lending his voice to our shows. Hi, I'm Connor Jason. Hi, I'm John Eddie Jr. D-A-N-N-Y. My name is Spell. Kendra, K-I-N-D-R-A. Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com or interact with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Discord, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Door. 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