Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

Page 35 of 82

Page 35 of 82
Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

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have been deposited. He was shocked to discover that this was going to be harder than he had imagined. Together with his friend Bob MacDonald he pored over hundreds of the older and newer charts of the area, comparing them. Chris had had no idea of the number of soundings to be found in just one small area of one portion of the ocean floor. There were literally hundreds of them sprinkled over each chart. And then they discovered another problem. The earlier charts had been sounded by hand and each position had been plotted on the chart by the old loran navigation method. Its accuracy could be off by hundreds of feet on this scale. These measurements could also have been altered due to the fact that there was a highly 1 : 1 ial an Fi tow 1 The new charts, on the other hand, were extremely accurate. Because of this it was impossible to determine whether any of the older soundings on the bottom matched up with the newer plots. Chris and Bob spent hours trying to make sense out of the discrepancies between them. They were nearly cross-eyed when they finally gave up on the theory, but not on their desire to find out what might be on the bottom of that sound. It would be nearly three years before Chris would get a chance to look in earnest. Chris was rapidly using up the small amount of information available in the libraries and archives in the Halifax area, but once more the Halifax Library Main Branch came to his aid. A source in the reference section suggested that he make an application to the National Archives in Ottawa for declassified UFO information under the Access to Information Act. He looked at a document explaining the act and found out that, after he made a formal application for such information, the National Archives had to respond within thirty days. Chris had two paths open to him now. He could try to locate and set up interviews with some of the Shag Harbor witnesses, and he could request information from the government. The latter was relatively easy to accomplish, so he tackled that first. Besides, the information might develop into more leads. He dashed off a letter on July 10, 1993, to the National Archives and was rewarded by a speedy reply in the mail on the twenty-eighth from Lana Merrifield, a research assistant there. She regretted that they had little on the Shag Harbor incident, but suggested that he might look for former military and police reports about it. She specified Record Group 77 at the National Archives. When Chris asked why she hadn't gone ahead and sent them to him, she informed him that this material was on microfilm and therefore was only available through the library loan system. They could be sent to an agency or library but not directly to an individual. He would have to request them from the library, and view them there. She also suggested that he contact the Department of National Defense. Chris had wasted no time making a request to the Halifax City Regional Library for the RG-77 information, then called Stanton Friedman for some advice about asking the Department of Defense for any declassified documents they might have. Friedman is a mine of information when it comes to finding your way around the federal bureaucracies in both Canada and the United States. After some discussion Styles decided to call Defense Headquarters directly. He received a telephone call back two days later from Lilliane Grantham, research assistant to the director of history. She was unfamiliar with the sightings at Shag Harbor. Chris gave her a brief history of the sighting, along with dates and locations, and she promised to get back to him with any secret submarine communications base at Government Point only thirty miles away.