The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

At around 11.20 p.m. local teenager Laurie Wickens and four of his friends, driving through Shag Harbour on Highway 3, spotted a large object with flashing amber lights descend into the waters of the harbour, where it floated about 1,000 feet (300m) out from shore. Believing an aircraft had crashed, Wickens alerted the RCMP; other residents had seen the object descend, and they too contacted the police. Within quarter of an hour, three RCMP officers arrived at Shag Harbour, where they witnessed the object floating on the water; one of the Mounties, Ron Pound, later recalled the craft as being around 60 feet (18m) long. Concerned that the crashed craft might have survivors aboard, the RCMP contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, who dispatched Coast Guard boat 101 to the scene. Before this boat arrived the object sank, leaving only a wide trail of yellow foam behind it.

On checking with the NORAD radar station at Baccaro the RMCP discovered there were no reports of missing aircraft in the region. At 3.00 a.m. the next day the Coast Guard called off its hunt for survivors. However, Rescue Coordination Centre ordered a team of Navy divers from HMCS Granby to comb the harbour bottom for the object. One local fisherman reported he saw the naval divers retrieve aluminium-coloured debris. The final report from the Canadian authorities stated that not a trace of the crashed object had been found.

For 30 years the Shag Harbour mystery went cold, until one of the original witnesses, Chris Styles, decided to reinvestigate the case. He interviewed two of the navy divers from HMCS Granby, who informed him that the crashed craft was a UFO which had then gone 25 miles (40km) underwater to Government Point, near the Shelburne submarine detection base. There it waited for a week, when it was met by another UFO and together they sped off into the skies. There were indeed, Styles discovered, reports of strange lights in the sky on 11 October, the night the UFOs allegedly vamoosed.

The verdict? Something clearly occurred in the Shag Harbour region in late October 1967, as archived Navy records show an unusually high amount of patrolling at the time. One diver claims that the Shag Harbour object was «not of this world», although a number of terrestrial explanations have been put forward. Noting the mention in naval witness interviews of a Russian submarine in the Shelburne area, it is speculated the Shag Harbour UFO was a crashed Russian «sputnik» and that Moscow dispatched the subs to retrieve the object; or that the craft and lights witnessed by Shag Harbour residents belonged to RCN antisubmarine units, their earthly presence distorted by moonlight on water.

Canadian/US authorities covered up truth of alien UFO crash at Shag Harbour: ALERT LEVEL 4

Further Reading

Don Ledger, Chris Styles and Whitley Strieber, Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash, 2001

Tupac Shakur

On 7 September 1996 rap superstar Tupac Shakur was mortally hit four times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, after coming out of the prizefight between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. What Elvis Presley was to white-boy rock’n’roll in the 50s, what John Lennon was to the freaks of the 60s, Tupac was to the hip-hop scene of the 90s. Now rap found its icon removed in suspicious circumstances. To this day nobody has ever been charged with Tupac’s homicide. But, then, is «2pac» really dead?

Tupac Shakur was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1971. His given name was Lesane Parish Crooks but it was later changed by his mother, Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther, to Tupac Amaru Shakur. During his teens he studied dance and theatre at Baltimore School for the Arts, and in 1991 he won a lead part in the gangster film Juice. That same year, Tupac made his first rap album — and had his first big, violent run-in with police, when he was beaten up by Oakland’s finest. Turning the tables in Atlanta, he shot two policemen. Charges against him were dropped because the police were intoxicated, but in 1993 he was sentenced to the penitentiary for sexually assaulting a woman in his hotel room. The vortex of violence and crime in which he found himself gripped ever tighter: while on remand he was shot five times in a New York recording studio, surviving despite a bullet hole in his head. He said he believed his assailants were connected to the Notorious BIG (aka Biggie Smalls, Christopher Wallace), the rap star who had once been Tupac’s friend and was now his rival. The Notorious BIG was signed to Sean «Puffy» Combs’s Bad Boy Records; Tupac was signed to Marion «Suge» Knight’s Death Row Records.