This is the talk I gave on September 30 at the 50th Anniversary Festival commemorating the Shag Harbour UFO Incident in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia. A few notes. First, the ending is a bit rushed and lacking detail near the end. For reasons beyond my control, what was supposed to be a 75 minute talk got truncated to about 60 minutes, and I was unaware of this until I got the “5 minutes left” signal! People at the festival seemed to enjoy it, though. Second, apologies for the audio quality; I recorded the talk on my phone, so it’s not super, although it’s way better than I expected.
The Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society put on a great event and I hope you enjoy this hour long ramble through some known and unknown “UFO crash” stories.
The Saucer Life 
Just a note. I was a government contractor from 2009 to 2013 stationed in a government office. Due to years and years of ongoing budget cuts there were few resources available to digitize or maintain old paper records. In our office, a couple of overworked, disinterested feds determined what was destroyed or kept. To comply with the budget more documents went for shredding than were digitized. Even digital storage was at a premium, so deleting quantities of files to free up space was routine. We had no cloud storage as late as 2013. Government IT is about a decade or so behind the private sector and academe (not a lot of funding available for needed upgrades). Before I worked for the government, missing files always sounded suspiciously like a cover-up. Now I realize there’s an overabundance of documents with inadequate resources to maintain them. Anything that on the face of it looks defunct to whomever is tasked with deciding its fate can end up going straight into an “oops” shredder. But, it’s much more glamorous and sexy for UFO buffs to see lost files as evidence of a dark cover up rather than lousy file maintenance because of budget constraints.
Fun talk. I particularly enjoyed the cocaine sniffing, hashish smoking reporter and the reference to pie being served.
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Thanks!
I agree about “missing” files–bureaucratic procedure is the real villain! Although I do see why the timing is somewhat suspicious sometimes–for example, Helms ordering a vast number of MK-Ultra docs to be destroyed shortly before the Church Committee hearings.
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Agree about that. But that was back in the days before clamoring for less government and willy nilly cutting of government budgets became a national religion. Now, when I hear people complain about how long it takes for a response to a FOIA request or that the response is that there are no files, I’m no longer suspicious. We’re getting exactly what we have been willing to pay for since the 1980s.
We can’t expect that there’s still an army of government employees diligently maintaining records when we keep voting to take away the money to pay for them. We don’t want to pay for government, yet we continue to expect that the services it provides will not deteriorate nor be curtailed.
Really, how crazy are we?
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I agree completely!
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Great talk! Love the topics, but am fairly new to deep discussion. When listening, and thought crossed my mind: General F. A. Kerr. When said quickly, the word ‘FAKER’ seemingly materializes. Coincidence?
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Wow. I totally blanked on that very obvious name!
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