At approximately 11:20 PM on October 4, 1967, residents of the fishing village of Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia watched four bright orange lights flashing in sequence descend at a shallow angle across the sky and strike the water about three hundred yards offshore. The object floated briefly on the surface, emitting a whistling sound and a hissing noise described by witnesses as similar to a tea kettle, then sank into the Gulf of Maine. A yellow foam was observed drifting on the water where it had gone down.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police received multiple independent reports within minutes. Officer Ron Pound, Constable Ron O'Brien, Corporal Victor Werbicki, and several local fishermen arrived at the scene and were themselves able to see the yellow foam and the area of disturbed water. The RCMP contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre at Halifax, which organized a search; Coast Guard cutters and Canadian Navy divers from HMCS Granby arrived within hours. Divers conducted a three-day underwater search of the sea floor but publicly reported finding no wreckage.
The Department of National Defence formally investigated. The resulting file, now held at Library and Archives Canada and released under access-to-information requests in the 1990s, is the only Canadian government document of its kind that explicitly describes an 'unidentified flying object' that had crashed into Canadian waters. Subsequent research by investigator Chris Styles uncovered retired naval officers who described a second object reported on sonar several days later off nearby Shelburne, which naval and U.S. forces allegedly tracked and may have engaged.
Shag Harbour is remembered as the only instance in Canadian history in which a UFO crash site was officially documented by the federal government with a coordinated military and RCMP response. A small museum in the village today preserves the story, and the incident remains a cornerstone of Canadian ufology — frequently cited as proof that the phenomenon is taken seriously by some governments even when no public explanation is ever issued.