Shag Harbour

The record

Laurie Wickens, then 17, was driving home from a dance and called the RCMP from a payphone. The dispatcher asked if he had been drinking. The phone rang back almost immediately: more calls were coming in.

Const. Ron O'Brien, one of the responding officers, reported a light about 800 m offshore, being carried out to sea by the tide and gone before a boat could reach it.

RCMP commandeered two fishing boats and found a trail of yellow foam roughly 24 m wide and 800 m long. Some witnesses said it smelled of sulphur. CBC reported that no aircraft were operating in the area at the time. That is not the same as no aircraft being reported missing, which is how this read before.

On Friday 6 October a naval diving team searched for two days and found nothing on a flat sand bottom in good visibility. One fisherman said divers raised aluminium-coloured debris.

On 6 October 1967 Colonel W. W. Turner, director of operations at National Defence headquarters, wrote that the Rescue Co-ordination Centre "discounted the possibilities that the sighting was produced by an aircraft, flares, floats, or any other known objects." A later memo from Turner called it an unidentified flying object - which, as CBC puts it, does not make it extraterrestrial.

It was not only Shag Harbour. That night produced reports from Wedgeport, Sambro, Halifax and Mahone Bay. Researcher Chris Styles - a 12-year-old Dartmouth boy at the time - calls it "the Night of the UFOs", and himself saw an orange orb over Halifax harbour.