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Sixty tons isn't heavy for an aircraft, when you consider the weights of some of our own military aircraft, like the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, featured in the movie Top Gun. It has a length of sixty-three feet and weighs seventy-four thousand pounds, or thirty-seven tons. Remake it as a round object and fill in all the gaps and it could easily run up to seventy or eighty tons. A B-52G Stratofortress, for instance, has a maximum gross takeoff weight of 244 tons. The problem would be that a destroyer could not lift an aircraft that heavy and would not have the deck space to carry an object of the sort they were searching for in Shag Harbor, which would have been about sixty feet long. To get one of these UFOs aboard a ship, if it weighed sixty or seventy tons, would require a boat with great lifting capability and stability and a deck capable of supporting such a heavy deadweight. If an aircraft carrier had been brought in, this would have been a big news story. Canada's one carrier, the Bonaventure, was just coming down the St. Lawrence from a refit at that time. At any rate, the mouth of Shelburne Harbor did not have the clearance required for one of these. But a barge would fit the bill very nicely. The very nature of its construction makes it an ideal conveyor of awkward and heavy materials. Barges are normally low in the water, and they frequently carry large cranes and derricks for lifting. Still, there's nothing suspicious about a harbor with a barge in it. Chris was looking at all the floating stock in the area at the time, searching for anything that might have supported the flotilla theory and the possibility of a UFO recovery, or at least an attempt at a recovery. A barge would definitely have been an asset at the time. What made Chris suspicious was the mention of atomic furnaces, which sound like something out of science fiction. And if you read the newspaper article again you notice something else - the speed at which the barge was repaired. The paper states that the barge was only three feet above water when it was pulled into the harbor, the result of an obvious leak. Yet the next day the barge is en route once more and supposedly headed for the St. Lawrence River. Once it entered the harbor, divers were hired from Liverpool, equipment was brought to the scene, the leak source was determined, the barge was pumped out overnight, and the divers were in the water making repairs, presumably at night, so that this barge could go on its way by awoew Chris, who had been around ships all his life, thought the speed at which the repair was done a bit unbelievable. Living, as we do, in Halifax, an area that has been a home to shipbuilding for over two hundred years, one tends to learn a great deal about ship repair over the years. Diving is a tough business, particularly at night. The water would be cold and any welding or patching job would be hazardous and labor intensive. From its arrival Friday night after dark (it would have been dark by 6:30 P.M.) until its departure from Shelburne Harbor at 11:50 the next morning is about seventeen hours, and a lot of that time would have been taken up with docking and departure. There wouldn't have been tat te waa We got another clue several months later, when I was doing a phone interview with our ELINT crewman about his role in the aerial search for the UFO. I asked him if, when they were flying over the area near Government Point, he noticed any ships grouped near the point. "Oh, yeah," he said, "they had quite a few ships anchored over this sunken object. They even had a barge towed up from down in the States, from around Norfolk, Virginia, in a big hurry, to put the thing on when they got it up." That noon the following day. much time left over to accomplish the repair.