Monday, October 1, 2007

Shag Harbour: 40 Years And Still No Answers

One night four decades ago, Laurie Wickens followed a familiar winding coastal road that leads to Shag Harbour in Shelburne County and landed in the middle of one of the world’s best-known UFO cases.

He was just a couple of weeks shy of his 18th birthday back then, a young man from nearby Bear Point who had quit school the year before to fish, sometimes helping his father and, other times, taking to the waters in his uncle’s boat.

Now, 57, with that career mostly behind him, he recalls the drive with friends on a cold and clear autumn night as if it happened yesterday.

"What was happening, it’s still vivid in my mind," he said recently, as Shag Harbour prepared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its very own close encounter.

On Oct. 4, 1967, Mr. Wickens and his friends thought the flashing row of orange-yellow lights in the sky must be a plane, even though they’d never seen anything quite like it before.

"One light would come on, then two, then three, then four, then they’d all go out for a second, then they’d repeat," he said.

"It seemed to be going along with us for, I don’t know, three or four minutes, while we were driving up to Middle Shag Harbour. . . . As we started to make the corner, the lights, instead of flying level, they started flying maybe a 45-degee angle down towards the water. We (were) at the bottom of the hill, and we only lost sight of it for a few seconds and when we made the top of the hill, the light was in the water."

Mr. Wickens rushed to the nearest payphone a couple of kilometres down the road.

He’d just seen a plane crash into the water, he told the skeptical officer on the other end of the line at the Barrington Passage RCMP detachment.

"And the first thing the cop said was, ‘What have you been drinking?’ "

By all accounts, his was the first call to police that night — but not the last.

"The people who saw it coming down all thought an aircraft was crashing and that’s what they reported," said Don Ledger, co-author of Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash, a book.