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texture. It was neither hot nor cool. They all agreed it was not fuel oil or engine oil or anything they could identify. The Mountie was at a loss as to what it could be. Afterward the fishermen would say that they didn't like having to sail through the stuff. Lawrence said, "If I was going out to fish, I would go out of my way to avoid it. But since we were looking for possible survivors we didn't have much choice." Bradford Shand, a veteran fisherman and seaman, was interviewed shortly after the event by Michael James, a reporter for the tabloid newspaper the National Enquirer. He is quoted as saying, "I've passed that same stretch of water many, many times on my way to the fishing grounds, but I've never seen water like that. A patch of about eighty feet around was bubbling and covered in brackish foam. It was coe weird." Norm Smith figured the slick to be about eighty feet wide and a half mile long, going by the length of Shand's boat. Lawrence Smith noted that the bubbles coming to the surface near the area made it seem oa ae 14 wat The fishermen and their crew of would-be rescuers began to crisscross the area in a random pattern in an attempt to locate any survivors. By this time four more fishing boats had come out to join in the search. They moved steadily toward the southern end of the sound to compensate for the tidal drift. They knew that if anything made it out into the riptide, there was little chance of finding it during the night. It would then be under the influence of the tremendous currents of the North Atlantic. By 12:30 A.M. Coast Guard Cutter 101 had arrived and joined the fishermen in their search for the crashed plane. By this time Lawrence Smith, having overheard some information from the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax, wondered if they were really looking for a downed aircraft. More and more they were beginning to think of it in terms of a craft of unknown origins. By 10:20 A.M. the RCC was referring to the object as a UFO, having eliminated the possibility that it was a crashed airplane. A message stamped PRIORITY from RCC Halifax to Canadian Forces Headquarters on October 5 outlined the report of the RCMP officials on scene. It describes the craft as a UFO and refers to it as the "DARK OBJECT," perhaps because its orange light was no longer visible As curious as they were as to what had crashed into the sound, the men on the boats were getting tired. Some of them had been up continuously now for nearly twenty-four hours. At about 4:00 A.M., near daybreak on the fifth of October, Lawrence Smith and Bradford Shand turned back to the Government Wharf in the harbor while Coast Guard Cutter 101 returned to its berth in Cape Sable Island. They continued the search later the next morning, after getting some sleep and having a good breakfast, but their efforts turned up nothing. The following day, the sixth, the Royal Canadian Navy's Fleet Diving Unit arrived on the scene to begin preparations for a search that morning. It had taken a full day to get their equipment on-site from their base in Halifax, where it was stored on an aged destroyer permanently docked there. as if something had sunk there. He remembers a distinct smell of sulfur in the area near the rising bubbles and made a point of steering his boat clear of it. Since there was a chance some type of gas vapor was present, he was concerned about a possible fire hazard. beneath the water.