Chris Styles was just 12 years old on a clear night when he looked out his bedroom window and spotted a strange light moving along the shoreline a few blocks from his house.
He grabbed his grandfather’s binoculars to get a better look and then ran out of the house, much to his dad’s dismay, down to the water’s edge.
“There’s this huge sphere and it was a very dull orange, and it was glowing just like a poker in a fireplace,” said Styles about what he saw on Oct. 4, 1967, around 10 p.m. AT.
While that date is best known for a UFO sighting in Shag Harbour in southwestern Nova Scotia, Styles was in Dartmouth, N.S.
Primarily between the Halifax area and southwestern Nova Scotia, people recorded seeing things in the sky that night, which has led ufologists to call it “The Night of the UFOs.”
“If you were outside that … night and you looked up, and for some hours afterwards, you would have seen something,” said Styles. “It was a clear night. People were seeing the faintest stars without binoculars.”
Styles has written or co-written three books about UFO sightings, including Impact to Contact: The Shag Harbour Incident. He said coverage of Shag Harbour meant other sightings fell out of the press, such as what the crew of the MV Nickerson saw in the waters off Sambro.
Around 9 p.m., Capt. Leo Mersey said he spotted an object with three flashing red lights. The object, which showed up on radar, was about 25 kilometres away.
The man who phoned in Canada’s most famous UFO sighting became the face of the mystery
“It was very clear that night and we could see the lights of Halifax,” Mersey said in a statement he filed with the RCMP.
The radar also showed three objects about 10 kilometres away, but he could not see them.
Around 11 p.m., the object he could see went into the air, but by then had only one red flashing light.
“I had never seen anything like that before but it sounds like the thing they are looking for down off Shelburne or Barrington Passage,” Mersey said in the statement, which was taken Oct. 7, 1967.
The RCMP statement, taken by a corporal with the Lunenburg detachment, noted: “Capt. Mersey is considered to be a reliable type individual and bears a good reputation in his community.”
But Shag Harbour has long remained the focus, said Styles, in part because of the large witness pool, what authorities said at the time, and the subsequent paper trail left behind.
In Shag Harbour, an object with flashing lights crashed into the waters off the tiny fishing village.
Besides the many eyewitnesses, adding credence to the account was that a responding RCMP officer, Const. Ron O’Brien, described seeing a light from the object floating about 800 metres offshore.
“It was being carried out to sea by the tide and disappeared before we could get a boat to it,” he told the Chronicle-Herald in an Oct. 7, 1967, article.
Styles said RCMP officers commandeered two fishing boats to see what was in the water and if there were any survivors, assuming a plane had crashed. They were joined on the boats by local fishermen and other residents.
He said depending on who you talk to, the object either disappeared or submerged, but there was a yellow foam on the water that some say smelled of sulphur.
On Friday, Oct. 6, a naval diving team was brought in, and seven divers searched through the weekend, but reported finding nothing.
The investigation reached the highest levels of National Defence.
An Oct. 6, 1967, memo by Col. W.W. Turner, the director of operations at National Defence headquarters, noted: “The Rescue Co-ordination Centre conducted [a] preliminary investigation and discounted the possibilities that the sighting was produced by an aircraft, flares, floats, or any other known objects.”
His son, John Turner, told CBC News his father often mentioned to the family that he received reports of alleged UFO sightings.
“Many were easily discounted as photos of a Frisbee or a hubcap, but he often said others simply could not be explained,” Turner wrote by email.
Styles wasn’t the only person to see something in Dartmouth on Oct. 4, according to the Chronicle-Herald on Oct. 7, 1967. The newspaper reported that a woman on her way home from work saw a bright, round object in the sky moving from the Halifax-Dartmouth ferry terminal.
“She described it as brighter, more vivid than a star, with an orange hue like a halo around the circumference,” the reporter wrote.
The woman looked at it through binoculars when she got home and saw it was not a star.
The newspaper checked with CFB Shearwater’s control tower to see if anything was on the radar during the window the woman described. Control tower personnel said no one was monitoring the radar at the time.
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