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Shag Harbor UFO Returns -
Via A Postage Stamp
By Colin Nickerson
The Boston Globe
5-30-1

MONTREAL - It's back. The apparition that 34 years ago buzzed Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, sending a thrill of terror through the fisherfolk below, is making a return appearance by popular demand - in the form of a government-approved postmark.
 
Starting today, letters and parcels mailed from the harbor village on the ragged southern tip of the maritime province will be stamped, on request, with a nicely nautical image of a lighthouse and an oldtime fishing schooner scudding before the wind. With a flying saucer hovering above.
 
The blue-ink cancellation stamp, approved for sole use by Shag Harbour's post office, may be the planet's only mail-sack homage to an extraterrestrial visitor.
 
Oct. 4, 1967, is still a red letter date for those who think long, hard, and obsessively about unidentified flying objects. "The Shag Harbour incident may well become the enduring testament to the UFO phenomenon," said UFO investigator Don Ledger, coauthor with Chris Styles of a new book about the event called "Dark Object."
 
It surely was a night to remember for the hamlet, transformed within hours into ground zero of a search operation that saw military aircraft and vessels from the United States and Canada scouring the sea, and, allegedly, mysterious Yanks in dark suits tersely telling anyone who asked that nothing unusual was going on. Just another strayed weather balloon.
 
"Whatever it was, it made us the Roswell of the north," said Shag Harbour Postmaster Cindy Nickerson, referring to the New Mexico community where UFOlogists believe the U.S. government covered up the crash of an alien spaceship in 1947.
 
The new postmark reads: "Shag Harbour, Home of the '67 UFO Visit."
 
Scoffers may scoff, jeerers may jeer, but the dozen or so fishermen and other locals who stood gape-jawed by the old Irish moss plant on the harborfront that night aren't backing an inch from their tale.
 
"It doesn't matter who believes us, or doesn't," said Norman Smith, who twice a week drives a truck laden with lobsters to market in Boston. "We know what we saw."
 
Smith was 18 years old, hitchhiking home from a "night of chasing girls on Cape Sable" when he and a friend rounded Bear Point, stopping dead in their tracks in astonishment. "There were five lights shining from a flying object sort of tilted at an angle," Smith recalled. "It was terrifying."
 
They raced into Shag Harbour, rousing Smith's uncle, fisherman Lawrence Smith. By now, the apparition had whisked from over the village to about a mile-and-a-half out to sea. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer patrolling Route 3 spotted the thing as it seemed to settle onto the water, then sink. One lawman thought he was witnessing the death plunge of a conventional aircraft.
 
By dawn, the military was taking charge, later insisting that nothing unusual was discovered. "Probably we'll never know exactly what it was," said Norman Smith.


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