Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

Page 52 of 82

Page 52 of 82
Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

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ninety miles away. Chris was beginning to experience the endless bureaucratic problems that go along with researching government documents. The problems continued on the following day, Tuesday the eighteenth. Chris discovered that the file he had requested had arrived, but had been transferred by mistake across the street to the Access to Information Review Center. It turned out there would be another twenty-four-hour delay. The next morning Chris was again informed by an apologetic staff member that the RG-24 documents were still being held up. Chris decided to go across the street to see if he could hurry up the process in person. At the Review Center he was referred to Bob Macintosh, who was in charge of Access Reviews of Military Information (Canadian and American) and International Affairs. They talked for about an hour and he told Chris, "Don't worry. Potential embarrassment of the government or the military is not sufficient grounds for them to deny you access to the documents." Chris thought that was a fairly provocative statement. Chris gave Macintosh an overview of the Shag Harbor/Shelburne situation. Macintosh in turn told Chris that such important documents would most likely never have been sent to the National Archives to be preserved. Instead, they would have been allocated to that level of secrecy alluded to as "above top secret," which means, for all intents and purposes, that the material does not officially exist. This allows the military to bury something so deep that even elected government officials are denied access to it. The many sections, subsections, and clauses of Canada's Access to Information Act give little direction on how to get around this evasive maneuver. Macintosh ended their meeting and Chris returned to the National Archives main building to find the file waiting for him. He was shocked at the small size of it. It contained only about two dozen documents, and none of them contained any information relating to UFOs. In the bottom file, labeled "temporary" on a yellow slip of paper, was a statement that this file group had had significant deletions in July 1994. The last time someone had reviewed this file had been in 1984, and this had been done by one O. M. Solandt from the Defense Research Board of Sightings. It seemed to Chris as if the file had been sanitized. Even documents Chris had obtained earlier were missing. Chris wondered why, after ten years, the documents had been thinned out. Perhaps it had to do with his guest appearance a month earlier on a popular Canadian morning TV talk show, where he had discussed the Shag Harbor events in detail. Further attempts to get information at the National Archives, and later that day at Canadian Forces Headquarters, were useless. But later that evening he was more successful. He located the person whose name was affixed to several of the documents dated OH or around October 4, 1967 - Squadron Leader William Bain, chief of the Air Desk in Ottawa, at that time the clearinghouse for UFO reports for the Royal Canadian Air Force and the federal government. The next day, Thursday, October 20, Chris met with Mr. Bain in the lobby of his hotel for several hours. Chris described Bain, who had been retired for several years, as a no-nonsense type, very direct. His gaze was steady and unflinching.