At about 11:20 p.m. on October 4, 1967, at least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head toward the water at Shag Harbour, on the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Witnesses heard a whistle, a whoosh and a bang. Laurie Wickens and four friends driving on Highway 3 saw it floating 250 to 300 metres offshore and called the RCMP, thinking a plane had crashed.
Two RCMP officers arrived within 15 minutes and watched the object, still lit, before it sank. Fishing boats and then a Coast Guard cutter searched through the night and found only a strip of yellow foam. By morning every civil and military aircraft on the east coast was accounted for.
The Royal Canadian Air Force logged it as a UFO report and the Navy sent divers, who searched the seabed for several days and found nothing. Earlier that evening an Air Canada crew and a fishing boat had also reported strange lights. Shag Harbour is one of the few UFO cases that the Canadian government officially recorded as unidentified.