There -- he points -- only a kilometre or so out from this rocky shore, is the spot many of the residents of this sleepy town believe holds a mystery that has captivated the world and eluded government officials and sci-fi buffs looking for clues into what has been called one of the most important UFO sightings ever.
"Something came down there, there's no doubt about it," Smith, his eyes squinting with intensity, says in a heavy south-shore drawl.
"I'm not sure what it was. It's made me wonder, ya'know, way out there in space, if there's some other type of life besides us.
"Whatever that object was, it come from somewhere and our authorities don't know anything about it, so they're saying."
Smith, now 68, was a 34-year-old fisherman on Oct. 4, 1967, when the RCMP called him at around 11 p.m. to see if he could take his boat out in the sound.
There were reports, they told him, that what looked to be a plane might have gone down in the harbour.
Smith jumped in his truck and raced to the wharf where dozens of people had already gathered and were buzzing about a mysterious object that glowed a dull orange.
Cars lined the shoreline near the old moss plant, their headlights trained on the site where they said something had plunged into the water.
"God, it was quite a fiery looking site with all those lights," says Smith, wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a flying saucer and a logo that reads, Shag Harbour -- Home of the '67 UFO Visit.
"It was a lovely night, no moon or anything and no stars. It was just a dark calm night."
Smith, a couple buddies and an RCMP officer jumped in his boat, travelling at full throttle out to where they thought the plane had crashed. The men had laid out lines and hooks to retrieve debris and help survivors into the vessel.
But they found no debris, no survivors and nothing to indicate a plane had gone into their bay.
"All we found was a patch of yellowish brown foam on the water -- the colour looked like burnt pancakes to me, you know when they're good and brown," says Smith, one of the few surviving fishermen who witnessed the strange happenings that night.
"It was a strip of foam that looked like a runway to me, where something come down on the water and sunk or the lights went out and it lifted off again."
By this point, the RCMP, a Halifax newspaper and other agencies were receiving a flurry of calls from people along the coast, including fishing captains, motorists and an Air Canada captain.
All of them said they had seen an unusual object that had several lights and looked nothing like a conventional aircraft.
The Air Canada captain, flying a DC-8 over southeastern Quebec, reported seeing a large rectangular object, followed by a string of lights at about 7:20 p.m. Seconds later, he said there were several huge explosions near the object, while small lights flickered around it.
Chris Styles witnessed the object from his bedroom that looked out over Halifax harbour. Just 12 years old, he ran from his home in Dartmouth, N.S., down to the waterfront to figure out what was hovering over the ocean.
"What I saw was an orange sphere that was probably 60 feet in diameter, slightly above the water, not making a sound, just tracing the shoreline," said Styles, co-author of Dark Object, a recently released book about the Shag Harbour incident.
"It just gave me a cold feeling inside, like this is the other, this is what you're not supposed to see."
As he and the less than 700 residents of Shag Harbour puzzled over the object, the Royal Canadian Air Force moved in to investigate and the navy dispatched a team of divers to search for wreckage.
They could find nothing, although some fishermen said they saw divers bringing up shiny pieces of debris, according to Styles' book.
By this point, speculation was growing that the orange object that some say floated noiselessly in the skies over the south shore was not an airplane.
Days after the incident, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald was emblazoned with a bold, two-inch red headline that read Could be something concrete in Shag Harbour UFO -- RCAF.
"By 10:20 a.m., the Rescue Command Centre in Halifax was referring to the object as a UFO, having eliminated the possibility that it was a crashed airplane," Styles writes of the incident that was being called Dark Object.
Despite that, the Canadian Forces Maritime Command called off the official search on Oct. 9, concluding in its report there was "not a trace ... not a clue ... not a bit of anything."
There was never any official explanation, but theories swirled, particularly since the event occurred at the height of the Cold War and near CFB Shelburne, a top-secret submarine detection base.
For years, that's how the incident was treated -- an unexplained phenomenon that most in the community gladly let drift into obscurity.
Many were afraid the object could come crashing down on their village again. They spoke little of it, says Smith, whose brother still won't talk about the night of Oct. 4, 1967.
But that quiet lifted earlier this year when Styles' book was released and the local post office released a commemorative stamp depicting a flying saucer hovering over water with a lighthouse and boat beneath it.
In an instant, people in this south shore town were dealing with a buzz that stretched around the world.
TV crews from the United States and Canada showed up to interview witnesses. Enthusiasts stopped by to have their picture taken. The National Enquirer wanted to do interviews. People from Roswell, N.M., were visiting to compare notes about their infamous alien crash incident.
Now, there is talk of a company taking tourists out to the site to collect bottles of water.
Postmaster Cindy Nickerson, who came up with the idea for the stamp two years ago and has had 370 requests for it since May, says the attention has aroused a fond interest in her town.
"So many people stop in from all over wanting to take pictures of the post office," she says from the small building on Shag Harbour's main street.
"At the moss plant, where people went that night, there's always people up there taking photos.
"It's kinda neat."
Neat for some, but a bother for Smith, who wishes he never went out on his boat that night after wondering for years what happened. Did he see the remains of a UFO? Or, since it was at the height of the Cold War, was it a Russian spacecraft or submarine, as some have speculated?
"I wouldn't want to go out there again," says Smith, sporting a cap from the Space Channel, which interviewed him about the crash.
"If I saw something today I'd just forget it. It caused too much trouble -- too many interviews."
World still mystified by Nova Scotia UFO
SHAG HARBOUR, N.S. (CP) -- Lawrence Smith stares out through a thick, milky fog hanging heavily over Shag Harbour's quiet bay.
C-News / Canada | Alison Auld - July 26 2001
