Page Content (OCR)
statement surprised us both, coming as it did right out of the blue. It dropped nicely into the puzzle. Could we confirm that there had been a barge in the area and find out where it had come from? Yes, we could. Was the barge capable of doing the job required by the cover story in the newspaper? Yes, it was. Did the reason for the barge being in the area, as stated in the newspaper story, make sense? For the leak, yes, for the cargo, no. Had the "repair job" carried out on the barge been handled in a normal fashion? No, it had been done too quickly to be believable. So there it is, another small piece to add to the puzzle of this intriguing story, the story that, for Chris and me, won't go away. THE SEARCH By the summer of 1995 one question troubled us more than any other about the Shag Harbor incident. Could there be debris, artifacts, or even evidence of seabed trauma waiting to be found beneath the waters that lie between the Dark Object's initial impact site and its last known surface position? Could re tou mia ~m It is a well-recorded fact that the original military search claimed "nil results." But one should bear in mind that the search carried out by the Royal Canadian Navy's mobile Fleet Diving Unit, stationed on HMCS Granby, was decidedly a low-tech, low-priority effort. It consisted of pairs of divers, working through the daylight hours with handheld, underwater lights from October 6 until sundown on October Undoubtedly they could not justify the cost of doing more. Former RCAF Squadron Leader William Bain, an ex-staffer on the Air Desk, told us that money was always a concern. In an ideal world he would have preferred to have at least three Sikorsky "Sea King" helicopters at his disposal. However, UFOs were not a matter of high priority with the military brass or the bureaucrats in Ottawa. In retrospect it is more likely that these types of military assets were rerouted to the waters off It seemed to us that there were three possible scenarios that could have taken place that October evening in 1967. Strong tidal currents could have carried the UFO farther out to sea, where debris was likely never to be found. Or the object could have come to rest on the seabed outside of the divers' search area. A third possibility is that, after submerging, the UFO abandoned the area under its own power, moving into the Shelburne area. By the summer of 1995 there were two things to consider. First was the state of underwater technology. Side-scan sonar, magnetometers, and subbottom profilers are powerful new tools of detection. Navigating by GPS (global positioning satellites) guarantees that what you discover on the sea bottom CHAPTER NINE it be that simple to find proof? Government Point. No matter which of these theories is correct, a sixty-foot unidentified flying object may still be resting on the seabed off Nova Scotia's southwestern shore.