Kevin Randle - Good UFO Cases Not Named "Roswell"

Kevin Randle answers the question of whether he thinks that there are any other good UFO cases besides Roswell in this excerpt from an interview I conducted with him in September, 2001. His ultimate conclusion might surprise some people - that the space aliens were here but seem to have left, a position that was also held by the late Karl Pflock.

Paul Kimball

The Shag Harbour UFO case - What the people involved thought it was

Most people within ufology have seen the headline in the Halifax Chronicle Herald from Saturday, 7 October 1967, which read: "Could Be Something Concrete in Shag Harbour UFO - RCAF," largely because it is the more sensational one. But here is the follow-up reportage a few days later - still rife with speculation and uncertainty (understandable all things considered), but also showing that an ET spacecraft was the furthest thing from anyone's mind. The explanation that most people credited was a secret American craft of some sort... which is what Laurie Wickens, the first person to see the UFO and report it, still thinks it was, all these years later - and I agree.

Paul Kimball

UFOs over Halifax on the night of the Shag Harbour Incident

My old friend Ron Foley MacDonald on set during production of my
most recent feature film, Roundabout, on which he was a co-producer.

Ron Foley MacDonald is many things – one of the best and most knowledgeable film, music and theater critics in Canada;  the senior programmer at the Atlantic Film Festival here in Halifax, Nova Scotia; an educator; a former musician during the heydays of the 1990s Halifax Pop Explosion who still writes songs for other artists. He’s also been a close friend for over two decades.

Ron shares my interest in the world of the paranormal (although perhaps not to the same extent). As Maritimers we were brought up with all  tales of all sorts of things that go bump in the night, from ghost ships to will o’ the wisps. But Ron has something I don’t – a genuine UFO experience of his own, which happened near his home in Halifax on the same night in October, 1967, as the famous Shag Harbour UFO incident (Shag Harbour is about a three hour drive along the shore southwest from Halifax).

Over the years Ron has recounted his story to me on a few occasions, and I think he’s mentioned it a couple of times on radio (he appeared for years on CBC radio with arts and entertainment reports), but it’s not something that has circulated publicly beyond this region, so I asked him if he would care to write up a short report of what he and his young friends experienced back in 1967 as I think it adds some interesting perspective to the Shag story. He was kind enough to oblige.

On the early evening of October 4th, 1967, I was seven years old. It was a warm early fall evening, with the light just fading, 8;00 pm or so. I was with my friends from the street at number 10 Sherbrooke Drive, Halifax, (next to Mount St. Vincent University) near what we called ‘The Pipeline’. We noticed something strange happening, particularly sounds first. All sorts of alarms went off, police, fire, air raid sirens, and this was the first time I had heard the short-wave siren as opposed to the older long-wave alarms.

We noticed strange lights in the sky, streaking over Halifax, coming from Dartmouth going towards Chester and the South Shore. From where we were we had a good view of the Bedford Basin and the Narrows, overlooking the City Dump and where Africville was or had been. 

The situation was something none of us – there were at least three or four kids all the same age – had ever seen or heard before. After a few minutes, it became too intense and we all scattered. I was so scared I remember, very vividly, crawling underneath a car parked in the driveway. After a while, I scuttled home, not telling anyone in my family what had happened. 

The next morning I distinctly remember the local paper, The Chronicle Herald, being full of reportage on the incident, including at least one story of animals having organs removed. The day after that, the paper withdrew its coverage and printed a story that it was ‘nothing’'. 

The incident was the talk of the schoolyard for some days. This was only five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so Air-Raid drills still happened a couple times of year, and the threat of a nuclear exchange lingered, although not as pervasively as in the early 1960s. 

This is my remembrance of the Shag Harbour UFO Incident, something that is imprinted on my mind quite sharply to this day. 

- Ron Foley MacDonald

Did Ron see space aliens over Halifax in 1967? Probably not… although who knows? But he definitely had a strange experience that left a deep impression on him, so much so that it remains vividly etched in his mind over forty years later. Others in Halifax and along the coast reported the strange lights as well, until they finally reached Shag Harbour late in the evening. Ron’s account is an important part of that broader narrative surrounding the events in the night sky over Nova Scotia on October 4, 1967 – a story that remains unsolved to this day.

Paul Kimball

"Where Did The Road Go" appearance - January, 2014

Something new for saucer fiends, as I took a little time off from shooting my new feature film to appear on the Where Did The Road Go show to discuss the Rendlesham and Roswell UFO cases in a not particularly flattering light... and the Shag Harbour case in a somewhat more positive light (at least as something interesting and mysterious). And other stuff...

Meanwhile, Seriah Azkath, the host of the podcast, just sent me this feedback he received on Twitter about my appearance, because he knew it would amuse me. 

"You take stupidity to an all time high talking about what UFO cases are more credible than others.Like all you debunkers You attack the person telling the story instead of actually providing any sort of actual evidence. Like retarded parrots You Do nothing but just puke out verbatim some scripted garbage that shows&proves nothing other than you can plagiarize you question Roswell&Rendelshem bc it happened "so long ago" yet you,like the vapid double talking idiotic lawyer you claim you are mention that the Shag Harbour case is a lot more credible bc and I quote : "It happened in the 60's&those witnesses aren't dead like Roswell". The level of hypocrisy in that statement alone should get you kicked off the podcast but I believe the following comment will win the case. You actually said having anonymous witnesses is better&makes this care more credible. My god who anyone takes you seriously is beyond me & just as a kicker you,as a film maker or whatever lawyer, debunker saying the guys from Rend. Forrest saw $ & thats what makes there story less credible proved you're most hypocritical thing ever.I have no prob with the other host but the debunking parrot does your podcast no favors"

For the record, I'm pretty sure I never said that having anonymous witnesses makes a case better because that's not something I would ever say (although I would say that having anonymous witnesses usually makes a case more entertaining because they are the ones who tell the craziest stories). Indeed, if I recall correctly, I was trying to differentiate between the witnesses at Shag which are not anonymous, and whose stories are relatively straightforward and grounded, and those whose stories are wilder but have chosen to stay anonymous, and who therefore can't be relied upon.

But I was definitely amused!

Paul Kimball

Reflections on Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings

An old friend, with only a passing interest in UFOs (he's much more intrigued by ghosts), asked me the other day what I thought about the 10 cases featured in my 2007 film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings -  my own personal opinions of each case, as opposed to the narrative of the film, which was dictated by the choices made by the panel of ufologists I enlisted to determined the top cases (with one exception, noted below), including Kevin Randle, the late Karl Pflock, the late Richard Hall, the late Mac Tonnies, Stanton Friedman, Brad Sparks, Bruce Maccabee, and Nick Pope, among others.

I thought about it, and then broke it down for him as follows:

10. Nuremberg, 1561 - A sighting that I added (bumping out the case the panel had voted in as #10) to demonstrate the point that UFO sightings predated the modern era. It happened so long ago that it would be impossible now to determine the accuracy of the report, or whether it was something anomalous, but it's worth noting that reports like it were far from unique. I think it can be chalked up to superstition, literary licence, and a misreading of a natural event.

9. Skylab III, 1973 - I have no doubt that it was a combination of space debris and camera artifacts.

8. Yukon, 1996 - This case relies solely on eyewitness testimony, and while there are multiple independent witnesses at different locations, there also seems to be a reasonable explanation that I accept.

7. Malmstrom AFB, 1967 - This case has generated more publicity than any of the others within ufology, if not the general public (Rendlesham is much better known there), largely because of the feud between "UFOs at Missile Bases" proponent Robert Hastings and James Carlson, the son of one of the officers allegedly involved in it all. I think they deserve each other, because they are both bonkers in my book. Focusing on the case instead of the feud, I don't buy it. I like Bob Salas (the primary witness) as a person, and think he is an honest man, but I also think that while he's made a genuine effort to remember things as they happened, he's got it wrong. When I interviewed him in 2006, he told me that he underwent hypnosis to recover his memories of the incident, which always rings alarm bells with me. There are no other witnesses or documents which corroborate his story - and there should be. Where are any of the soldiers who were topside who reportedly saw the UFO? I admire Bob for his advocacy of a nuclear free world, but I can't buy Malmstrom as anything other than a missile failure due to prosaic reasons, and some tall tales that he has absorbed as a truthful narrative.

6. Shag Harbour, 1967 - This case has multiple independent witnesses, all of them of impeccable character, as well as an official government investigation that called it a UFO. There are other stories that go much further, of underwater objects monitored for days by the US and Canadian navies until they flew off, but those rest on anonymous sources, and there is no documentation (although the stories were told to my friends Don Ledger and Chris Styles, whom I trust to have related them accurately - still, the stories and the witnesses can't be verified by others). What that leaves us with, I think, is a genuine mystery, but one that may or may not be as otherworldly as ET proponents would claim. It remains unsolved in my books, and very interesting.

5. Santa Barbara Channel, 1953 - The famous sighting by Kelly Johnson and his wife at their home in Agoura, CA, at the same time as a crew of top Lockheed pilots and flight engineers saw the "object" whilst flying over Santa Barbara Channel. They all wrote reports that still exist, so we can read in their own words about what they saw. There are some inconsistencies, but a general common narrative is possible to glean from it all. My friend Lance Moody has suggested that they mistook lenticular clouds for a structured craft, which I just don't buy (and neither did Johnson et al, who considered that possibility at the time of the sighting and ruled it out), but that doesn't mean I think that it was space aliens. The quality of the witnesses mark this one out as a good case, and I think it's still unexplained.

4. McMinnville, 1950 - I have always been convinced that it was a hoax. Not much more that I can say.

3. Rendlesham, 1980 - Another controversial case. There's no question that multiple witnesses saw something on two nights in late December, 1980. That's something everyone can agree on... and it's about the only thing! Skeptics like Ian Ridpath say that the US military men under Charles Halt misidentified a local lighthouse, and others suggest that the military police officers on the first night misidentified local police cars. But I'm not sure either of those jibe with the reports of the witnesses, particularly Halt, who was the deputy base commander and recorded the second incident on a tape recorder. The far out claims that have lately surfaced from Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, two key witnesses from the first incident, have further muddied the waters. Skeptics think that it just shows they're liars trying to cash in on the New Age element within ufology; believers look at their claims of telepathic communication and say that it absolutely fits with coming into contact with some advanced intelligence from another planet. This case is often called Britain's Roswell, and I think that's accurate, but not for the reason most people use the term. Like Roswell, I think it's a Rorschach test on what people think about the ETH. Either way, you'll see what you want to see. Sitting in the middle as an agnostic, I see a case that has already become so encrusted by mythologizing from both sides that it will never be solved. My gut tells me that the witnesses might have seen something weird, but they might also have been mistaken - and that's as far as I would ever go.

2. Tehran, 1976 - Still stands the test of time as an unsolved case. Genuinely mysterious.

1. RB47, 1957 - Since my film came out this long-overlooked case has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, with skeptics trying on a number of occasions to offer a plausible explanation (which was one of these point of the film - to encourage people to examine these cases and try to come up with answers). Tim Printy tried the hardest in his SunLite publication, but it didn't ring true to me any more than the original USAF answer that it was all a misidentified commercial flight, hundreds of miles away. I showed Printy's explanation, and others, to surviving RB47 crew members I know, including Bruce Bailey who appears in the film and had his own encounter with a UFO a couple of years later, and they all thought it just didn't wash. I still consider this a truly mysterious case that remains unsolved, despite the best efforts of honest skeptics. 

So there it is. The only cases in the film that I find genuinely interesting and still unsolved are #6, #5, #2, and #1. Rendlesham is just too Roswellized for me to either credit or dismiss. The others I consider either solved, or too tenuous to merit any further consideration.

Paul Kimball

Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings - Yukon (1996) and Shag Harbour (1967)

Here are the last two cases to be uploaded to YouTube from Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO sightings - both from Canada.

# 8 - 1996 Yukon multiple witness sighting



# 6 - The 1967 Shag Harbour incident



A note about the Shag Harbour segment - the portrayal in the film extends beyond what is officially known and reported, and includes references to anonymous testimony given to researchers about what happened after the initial incident, as related to the Navy's efforts. This aspect of the case remains highly controversial, to say the least. I made the editorial decision to include it in the narrative because it's part of the story, and I trust the accounts relayed to me by key researchers, while not necessarily accepting the information contained within as legitimate. As with almost any UFO case, however, there is the official story... and then there always seems to be an "unofficial" story. Sometimes those turn out to be accurate (the RB47 case, for example), and sometimes they don't. With the Shag Harbour case, research continues.

Paul Kimball

The Original Shag Harbour UFO Story

Ray MacLeod was a reporter for the Halifax Chronicle Herald in 1967, and was the man who initially covered the Shag Harbour UFO incident. His recollection of the events, his reportage, his thoughts on why he was pulled from the story, and his original article, can be seen at MacLeod's blog "Ray's Place".

Part 1

Part 2

An excerpt:

I arrived early Sunday night to start following leads on the Shag Harbour story. I was told management (above the managing editor level) had taken me off and arranged for Bentley to do all follow-ups “because we feel we can handle it better on dayside.” On the quiet, I was told David would have specific instructions and direct supervision. The next day, I ran into Bentley as the shifts changed. He drew me aside and apologized profusely, saying it wasn’t his idea and he didn’t like the smell of it. I asked him why he had not followed up some of my contacts, including RCAF Squadron Leader Bain in Ottawa whose comment had been used for my headline. Bentley stared at me and said Bain did not exist. I was never sure how to take that.

More information on his editor at the time, David Bentley, can be found here.

Interesting stuff from the first guy to cover the story.

Paul Kimball