Colchis was as an ancient Georgian
state, kingdom and region in the Western Georgia (Caucasus region), which
played an important role in the ethnic and cultural formation of the Georgian
nation and its subgroups. The Kingdom of Colchis as an early Georgian
state contributed significantly in
development of the medieval Georgian statehood after its unification with
eastern Georgian Kingdom of Iberia-Kartli.
Now mostly the western part of
Georgia, it was in Greek mythology the home of Aeëtes and Medea and the
destination of the Argonauts, as well as being the possible homeland of the
Amazons. The ancient area is represented roughly by the present day Georgian
provinces of Mingrelia, Imereti, Guria, Adjara, Svaneti, Racha, Abkhazia and
the modern Turkey’s Rize Province and parts of Trabzon and Artvin provinces.One
of the most important elements in the modern Georgian nation, the Colchians
were probably established in the Caucasus by the Middle Bronze Age.
The kingdom of Colchis, which existed
from the sixth to the first centuries BCE is regarded as the first Georgian
state.
According to the renown scholar of the
Caucasian studies Cyril Toumanoff: "Colchis appears as the first Caucasian
State to have achieved the coalescence of the newcomer, Colchis can be justly
regarded as not a proto-Georgian, but a Georgian (West Georgian) kingdom."
A second Georgian tribal union emerged
in the 13th century BC on the Black Sea coast under creating the Kingdom of
Colchis in the western Georgia. This kingdom was a first state formation of the
early Georgians. According to most classic authors, a district which was
bounded on the southwest by Pontus, on the west by the Black Sea as far as the
river Corax (probably the present day Bzybi River, Abkhazia, Georgia), on the
north by the chain of the Greater Caucasus, which lay between it and Asiatic
Sarmatia, on the east by Iberia and Montes Moschici (now the Lesser Caucasus),
and on the south by Armenia. There is some little difference in authors as to
the extent of the country westward: thus Strabo makes Colchis begin at Trabzon,
while Ptolemy, on the other hand, extends Pontus to the Rioni River. Pitsunda
was the last town to the north in Colchis.
The name of Colchis first appears in
Aeschylus and Pindar. The earlier writers only speak of it under the name of
Aea (Aia), the residence of the mythical king Aeëtes. The main river was the
Phasis (now Rioni), which was according to some writers the south boundary of
Colchis, but more probably flowed through the middle of that country from the
Caucasus west by south to the Euxine, and the Anticites or Atticitus (now
Kuban). Arrian mentions many others by name, but they would seem to have been
little more than mountain torrents: the most important of them were Charieis,
Chobus or Cobus, Singames, Tarsuras, Hippus, Astelephus, Chrysorrhoas, several
of which are also noticed by Ptolemy and Pliny. The chief towns were Dioscurias
or Dioscuris (under the Romans called Sebastopolis, now Sukhumi) on the sea-board
of the Euxine, Sarapana (now Shorapani), Phasis (now Poti), Pityus (now
Pitsunda), Apsaros (now Gonio), Surium (now Surami), Archaeopolis (now
Nokalakevi), Macheiresis, and Cyta or Cutatisium (now Kutaisi), the traditional
birthplace of Medea. Scylax mentions also Mala or Male, which he, in
contradiction to other writers, makes the birthplace of Medea.
* Kingdom of Iberia
* Kingdom of Colchis
* Kingdom of Lazica-Egrisi
* Unified Georgian Kingdom
* Partitions
o Kingdom of
Tao-Klarjeti
o Kingdom of
Abkhazia
o Kingdom of
Hereti
o Kingdom of
Kakheti
o Kingdom of
Kartli
o Kingdom of
Imereti
* Democratic Republic of Georgia
* Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic
* Republic of Georgia
The area was home to the
well-developed bronze culture known as the Colchian culture, related to the
neighbouring Koban culture, that emerged towards the Middle Bronze Age. In at
least some parts of Colchis the process of urbanization seems to have been well
advanced by the end of the second millennium BC, centuries before Greek
settlement. Their Late Bronze Age (15th to 8th Century BC) saw the development
of an expertise in the smelting and casting of metals that began long before
this skill was mastered in Europe. Sophisticated farming implements were made
and fertile, well-watered lowlands blessed with a mild climate promoted the
growth of progressive agricultural techniques.
Colchis was inhabited by a number of
related but distinct tribes whose settlements lay chiefly along the shore of
the Black Sea. The chief of those were the Machelones, Heniochi, Zydretae,
Lazi, Tibareni, Mossynoeci, Macrones, Moschi, Marres, Apsilae, Abasci (possibly
modern-day Abaza)[citation needed], Sanigae, Coraxi, Coli, Melanchlaeni, Geloni
and Soani (Suani). These tribes differed so completely in language and
appearance from the surrounding nations that the ancients originated various
theories to account for the phenomenon.
Herodotus, who states that they, with
the Egyptians and the Ethiopians, were the first to practice circumcision,
believed them to have sprung from remnants the army of Pharaoh Senusret III
(1878-1841 BC), and thus regarded them as Egyptians. Apollonius of Rhodes
states that the Egyptians of Colchis preserved as heirlooms a number of wooden
tablets showing seas and highways with considerable accuracy. Though this
theory was not generally adopted by the ancients, it has been defended – but
not with complete success, by some modern writers. There seems to have been a
Negroid component (which predates the Arab slave trade) along the Black Sea
region, whose origins could very well be traced to an Ancient Extra-African
expedition, although this cannot be verified by archaeological evidence.
Modern theories suggest that the main
Colchian tribes are direct ancestors of the Laz-Mingrelians, and played a
significant role in ethnogenesis of the Georgians.
In the 13th century BC, the Kingdom of
Colchis was formed as a result of the increasing consolidation of the tribes
inhabiting the region. This power, celebrated in Greek mythology as the
destination of the Argonauts, the home of Medea and the special domain of
sorcery, was known to Urartians as Qulha (aka Kolkha, or Kilkhi). Being in
permanent wars with the neighbouring nations, the Colchians managed to absorb
part of Diauehi in the 750s BC, but lost several provinces (including the
“royal city” of Ildemusa) to the Sarduris II of Urartu following the wars of
750-748 and 744-742 BC. Overrun by the Cimmerians and Scythians in the
730s-720s BC, the kingdom disintegrated and came under the Achaemenid Persian
Empire towards the mid-6th century BC. The tribes living in the southern
Colchis (Tibareni, Mossynoeci, Macrones, Moschi, and Marres) were incorporated
in the 19th Satrapy of the Persia, while the northern tribes submitted
“voluntarily” and had to send to the Persian court 100 girls and 100 boys in
every 5 years. The influence exerted on Colchis by the vast Achaemenid Empire
with its thriving commerce and wide economic and commercial ties with other
regions accelerated the socio-economic development of the Colchian land.
Subsequently the Colchis people appear to have overthrown the Persian
Authority, and to have formed an independent state.
The advanced economy and favorable
geographic and natural conditions of the area attracted the Milesian Greeks who
colonized the Colchian coast establishing here their trading posts at Phasis,
Gyenos, and Sukhumi in the 6th-5th centuries BC. It was considered "the
farthest voyage" according to an ancient Greek proverbial expression, the
easternmost location in that society's known world, where the sun rose. It was
situated just outside the lands conquered by Alexander the Great. Phasis and
Sukhumi were the splendid Greek cities dominated by the mercantile oligarchies,
sometimes being troubled by the Colchians from hinterland before seemingly
assimilating totally. After the fall of the Persian Empire, significant part of
Colchis locally known as Egrisi was annexed to the recently created Kingdom of
Iberia (Kartli) in ca. 302 BC. However, soon Colchis seceded and broke up into
several small princedoms ruled by sceptuchi. They retained a degree of
independence until conquered (circa 101 BC) by Mithridates VI of Pontus.
Mithradates VI quelled an uprising in
the region in 83 BC and gave Colchis to his son Mithradates Chrestus, who was
soon executed being suspected in having plotted against his father. During the
Third Mithridatic War, Mithridates VI made another his son Machares king of
Colchis, who held his power but for a short period. On the defeat of
Mithridates VI of Pontus in 65 BC, Colchis was occupied by Pompey, who captured
one of the local chiefs (sceptuchus) Olthaces, and installed Aristarchus as a
dynast (65-47 BC). On the fall of Pompey, Pharnaces II, son of Mithridates,
took advantage of Julius Caesar being occupied in Egypt, and reduced Colchis,
Armenia, and some part of Cappadocia, defeating Domitius Calvinus, whom Caesar
subsequently sent against him. His triumph was, however, short-lived. Under
Polemon I, the son and successor of Pharnaces II, Colchis was part of the
Pontus and the Bosporan Kingdom. After the death of Polemon (after 2 BC), his
second wife Pythodoris retained possession of Colchis as well as of Pontus
itself, though the kingdom of Bosporus was wrested from her power. Her son and
successor Polemon II of Pontus was induced by Emperor Nero to abdicate the throne,
and both Pontus and Colchis were incorporated in the Province of Galatia (63)
and later in Cappadocia (81).
Despite the fact that all major
fortresses along the seacoast were occupied by the Romans, their rule was
pretty loose. In 69, the people of Pontus and Colchis under Anicetus staged a
major uprising against the Romans which ended unsuccessfully. The lowlands and
coastal area were frequently raided by the fierce mountainous tribes with the
Soanes and Heniochi being the most powerful of them. Paying a nominal homage to
Rome, they created their own kingdoms and enjoyed significant independence.
Christianity began to spread in the early 1st century. Traditional accounts
relate the event with Saint Andrew, Saint Simon the Zealot, and Saint Matata. However,
the Hellenistic, local pagan and Mithraic religious beliefs would be widespread
until the 4th century. By the 130s, the kingdoms of Machelons, Heniochi,
Egrisi, Apsilia, Abasgia, and Sanigia had occupied the district form south to
north. Goths, dwelling in the Crimea and looking for their new homes, raided
Colchis in 253, but they were repulsed with the help of the Roman garrison of
Pitsunda. By the 3rd-4th centuries, most of the local kingdoms and
principalities had been subjugated by the Lazic kings, and thereafter the
country was generally referred to as Lazica (Egrisi).
* Aeëtes, celebrated in Greek legends as a
powerful king of Colchis, is thought by some historians to be a historic
person, though there is no evidence to support the idea. Louis Sheehan
* Kuji, a presiding prince (eristavi) of Egrisi
under the authority of Pharnavaz I of Iberia (ca302-237 BC) (according to the
medieval Georgian annals).
* Akes (Basileus Aku) (end of the 4th century
BC), king of Colchis; his name is found on a coin issued by him.
* Saulaces, "king" in the 2nd century
BC (according to some ancient sources).
* Mithradates Chrestus (fl 83 BC), under the
authority of Pontus.
* Machares (fl 65 BC), under the authority of
Pontus.
Note: During his reign, the local
chiefs, sceptuchi, continued to exercise some power. One of them, Olthaces, is
mentioned by the Roman sources as a captive of Pompey in 65 BC.
* Aristarchus (65-47 BC), a dynasty under the
authority of Pompey
According to the Greek mythology,
Colchis was a fabulously wealthy land situated on the mysterious periphery of
the heroic world. Here in the sacred grove of the war god Ares, King Aeëtes hung
the Golden Fleece until it was seized by Jason and the Argonauts. Colchis was
also the land where the mythological Prometheus was punished by being chained
to a mountain while an eagle ate at his liver for revealing to humanity the
secret of fire. Amazons also were said to be of Scythian origin from Colchis.
The main mythical characters from Colchis are Aeëtes, Medea, Absyrtus,
Chalciope, Circe, Eidyia, Pasiphaë.
For thousands of years, people have
sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their
stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest
to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that
the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked
why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of
Alzheimer's disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias
associated with Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth.
But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental
boost to the healthy, too.
Such drugs are known as cognition
enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental
activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and
decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical
neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report* from the
Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number
of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades.
Sir Gabriel Horn, a researcher at Cambridge University who chaired the group
that produced the report, reckons that scientists are working on more than 600
drugs for neurological disorders.
History suggests that most of these
will fall by the regulatory wayside, but given their numbers, a fair few are
likely to be approved. And although none of the companies working on
cognition-enhancing drugs designed to treat illness intends to license them for
wider use, that is what is likely to happen—at least going by the growing
“off-label” use of existing drugs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and
Provigil (modafinil) by people who want to pep themselves up.
Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance
cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to
remember an extra digit or so to an individual's working memory (most people
can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight).
It also improves people's performance in tests of their ability to plan.
Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is
growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam
performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights.
Earlier this year, Nature, one of the
world's leading scientific journals, carried out an informal survey of its
(mostly scientific) readers. One in five of the 1,400 people who responded said
they had taken Ritalin, Provigil or beta blockers (drugs that can have an
anti-anxiety effect) for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate
focus, concentration or memory. Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and
44% Provigil. Most users had somehow obtained their drugs on prescription or
else bought them over the internet. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Given results like this, and the
number of drugs of this kind that look likely to emerge, many people, including
the authors of the report, believe that the use of cognition-enhancing drugs is
going to grow a lot.
There are a number of approaches to
cognition enhancement. One of them, according to Trevor Robbins, a colleague of
Sir Gabriel's at Cambridge and another member of the working group, is to
activate the brain's “off” and “on” switches. Crudely put, the brain's neural
networks can be thought of as electrical circuits. Neurotransmitters throw the
switches.
One such neurotransmitter is glutamate.
This throws switches to the “on” position in memory-forming circuits. Members
of a newly discovered class of compounds, ampakines, boost the activity of
glutamate and thus make it easier to form memories.
Cortex Pharmaceuticals, based in
Irvine, California, is one firm that is developing ampakine drugs. One of its
compounds, code-named CX717 to disguise its exact identity, is undergoing
testing for Alzheimer's disease in elderly patients. Early trials have already
shown that the drug can make people more alert. Unlike caffeine, amphetamines
and other stimulants, CX717 causes no increase in blood pressure or heart rate.
Nor does it offer any “high”, so is unlikely to be addictive. Louis J. Sheehan,
Esquire
Paradoxically, another
glutamate-booster, D-cycloserine, is being tested not to enhance memory, but to
abolish it. The paradox is resolved because unlearning (or “extinction”, in
neurological parlance) is a process similar in its details to learning.
By binding to certain glutamate
receptors, D-cycloserine selectively enhances extinction, suppressing the
effects of conditioned associations such as anxiety, addiction and phobias.
According to Dr Robbins, experiments have shown that if a rat is given a cue
that it previously associated with fear at the same time as it receives
D-cycloserine, the bad memory can be eliminated. Not only may this help remove
unpleasant memories, such as those involved in post-traumatic stress disorder,
but it may also help to return the brains of addicts to their pre-addicted
states. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
It may, for example, be able to remove
the triggers that cause smoking.
Another approach to cognitive
enhancement, says Dr Robbins, is through a neurotransmitter called
acetylcholine. Cholinergic neurons—the name for those that respond to this
molecule—are involved in concentration, focus and high-order thought processes,
as well as memory. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
It is the cholinergic system that degenerates in Alzheimer's
disease.
Interest has thus focused on drugs
that inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine, and also on nicotine, which works
by mimicking its effect. Dr Robbins says that cholinergic drugs may offer minor
cognitive benefits for things like alertness, and similar drugs could be
“potentially useful in normal humans”.
Mind-expansion may soon, therefore,
become big business. Even though the drugs have been developed to treat
disease, it will be hard to prevent their use by the healthy. Nor, if they are
without bad side-effects, is there much reason to. And if that is so, there may
be a very positive side-effect on the profits of their makers.
Poland suffered more than any other
European country during the second world war. And there was an extra twist: the
history of that suffering was then systematically distorted by the
Soviet-imposed Communist rulers, and widely misunderstood abroad. Auschwitz,
for example, is still often referred to as a “Polish death camp”—rather than
one run by the country's Nazi occupiers, in which huge numbers of Polish
citizens perished. And gentile Poles are typically imagined to have rejoiced, collaborated
or simply stood by as their Jewish compatriots were exterminated. Poles, said
the former Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir, “imbibe anti-Semitism with their
mother's milk.”
Certainly prejudice was prevalent in
pre-war Poland; but many Poles defied it. One of the bravest was Irena Sendler.
As a doctor's daughter, she had been brought up in a house that was open to
anyone in pain or need, Jew or gentile. In the segregated lecture halls at
Warsaw University, where she studied Polish literature, she and likeminded
friends deliberately sat on the “Jewish” benches. When nationalist thugs beat
up a Jewish friend, she defaced her grade card, crossing out the stamp that
allowed her to sit on the “Aryan” seats. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
For that, the university suspended her
for three years. All this was good preparation for the defiance she was to show
after 1939, when the Germans invaded.
She was, a friend said, “born to
selflessness, not called to it”. Certainly she had good genes. A rebellious
great-grandfather was deported to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917,
after treating patients his colleagues shunned. Many were Jewish. Leaders of
the Jewish community offered money to her hard-up mother for young Irena's
education. Like many social workers in pre-war Poland, Mrs Sendler belonged to
the Socialist party: not for its political ideology, she said, but because it
combined compassion with dislike of money-worship. No religion motivated her:
she acted z potrzeby serca, “from the need of my heart”.
Under Nazi occupation the Jews of
Warsaw were herded into the city ghetto: four square kilometres for around
400,000 souls. Even before the deportations to the Treblinka death camp
started, death could be arbitrary and instant. Yet a paradox created a sliver
of hope. Squalor and near-starvation (the monthly bread ration was two kilos,
or 4.5lb) created ideal conditions for typhus, which would have killed Germans
too. So the Nazis allowed Mrs Sendler and her colleagues in and out of the
tightly guarded ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinations. Louis J.
Sheehan, Esquire
That bureaucratic loophole allowed her
to save more Jews than the far better known Oscar Schindler. It was astonishingly
risky. Some children could be smuggled out in lorries, or in trams supposedly
returning empty to the depot. More often they went by secret passageways from
buildings on the outskirts of the ghetto. To save one Jew, she reckoned,
required 12 outsiders working in total secrecy: drivers for the vehicles;
priests to issue false baptism certificates; bureaucrats to provide ration
cards; and most of all, families or religious orders to care for them. The
penalty for helping Jews was instant execution. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
To make matters even riskier, Mrs
Sendler insisted on recording the children's details to help them trace their
families later. These were written on pieces of tissue paper bundled on her
bedside table; the plan was to hurl them out of the window if the Gestapo
called. The Nazis did catch her (thinking she was a small cog, not the linchpin
of the rescue scheme) but did not find the files, secreted in a friend's
armpit. Under torture she revealed nothing. Thanks to a well-placed bribe, she
escaped execution; the children's files were buried in glass jars. Mrs Sendler
spent the rest of the war under an assumed name. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The idea of a heroine's treatment
appalled her. “I feel guilty to this day that I didn't do more,” she said. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Besides, she felt she had been a bad
daughter, risking her elderly mother's life with her wartime work, a bad wife
to both her husbands, and a neglectful mother. Her daughter once asked to be
admitted to the children's home where her mother worked after the war, in order
to see more of her.
Mrs Sendler need not have worried. Far
from being honoured, she narrowly avoided a death sentence from the Communist
authorities. Her crime was that her work had been authorised and financed by
the Polish government-in-exile in London; later, she helped soldiers of the
Home Army, the wartime resistance. Both outfits were now reviled as imperialist
stooges. In 1948 repeated interrogations by the secret police in late pregnancy
cost the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was not allowed to
travel, and her children could not study full-time at university. “What sins
have you got on your conscience, Mama?” her daughter asked her.
It was not until 1983 that the Polish
authorities allowed her to travel to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her
honour at Yad Vashem. Many of the children she had saved sought her out: now
elderly themselves, all grateful, but some still yearning for details of their
forgotten parents. In 2003 she received Poland's highest honour, the order of
the White Eagle. It came a little late.
The Shag Harbour Incident was the
well-documented crash-landing of an unknown large object into Shag Harbour,
Nova Scotia in October 1967. The crash was investigated by various Canadian
government agencies, and at least one underwater search was launched to recover
remains of the object. The Canadian government declared that no known aircraft
was involved and the source of the crash remains unknown to this day, at least
publicly. It is one of very few cases where governmental agency documents have
formally declared an unidentified flying object was involved. Several
interviewed military witnesses, including a diver involved in an attempted
recovery, have claimed an alien spacecraft was involved. It was also claimed by
several of the witnesses that the U.S. military was involved in recovery
attempts. The case was also briefly investigated by the U.S. Condon Committee
UFO study, which offered no explanation.
On the night of October 4, 1967, at
about 11:20 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time, it was reported that something had
crashed into the waters near Shag Harbour, on Nova Scotia's South Shore. At
least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head down towards the harbor.
Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound "like a bomb,"
then a "whoosh," and finally a loud bang. Some reported a flash of
light as the object entered the water. Thinking that an airliner or smaller
aircraft had crashed into the Sound next to Shag Harbour, some witnesses
reported the event to the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment.
The unknown object was never
officially identified, and was therefore referred to as an unidentified flying
object (UFO) in official Canadian government documents. A Canadian Naval
recovery effort immediately followed. The event is sometimes compared to the
Roswell UFO incident and Kecksburg UFO incident, two other events alleged to be
military crash-recoveries of UFOs.
The initial report was made by Laurie
Wickens, a local resident, and four of his friends. Driving through Shag
Harbour on Highway 3, they spotted a large object descending into the waters of
the harbor.
Attaining a better vantage point,
Wickens and his friends saw an object floating 250 to 300 meters out to sea.
Visibility was good – clear with no moon. At that time, the object only had a
yellow light shining from its top side.
Wickens contacted the RCMP and
reported he had seen a large airplane or small airliner crash into the Sound.
At first he wasn't believed. However, subsequent calls from other witnesses
quickly confirmed Wickens' story. One was from Mary Banks on Maggie Garron's
Point reporting similar information. Other residents also called in to report
the incident, adding details about loud whistling noises and bangs. Other
residents had also seen the descent and agreed the object was about 60 feet
long, angled downwards at 45 degrees, and initially displayed four or five
flashing and glowing amber lights.
Assuming an aircraft had crashed,
within about 15 minutes, three Mounties were at the scene along with multiple
other witnesses, and also observed the pale yellow or white light bobbing on
the surface of the water.
Concerned for survivors, the RCMP
contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax to advise them of the
situation, and ask if any aircraft were missing. Before any local effort at
rescue could be made, the object started to sink and disappeared from view.
A rescue mission was quickly
assembled. Within half an hour of the crash, local fishing boats went out into
the Sound to look for survivors. At the location at which the object had sunk,
a yellow foam was observed on the surface, about 80 feet wide and half a mile
long. No survivors, bodies or debris were located, either by the fishermen or
by the Coast Guard vessel, which arrived about an hour later.
By the next afternoon, it had been
determined that no planes were missing. Still searching, the captain of the
Coast Guard vessel received a message from the Rescue Coordination Center that
all commercial, private and military aircraft were accounted for along the
eastern seaboard from Atlantic Canada down into New England.
Two days after the crash, the Rescue
Coordination Center had assembled a team of Navy divers, who for the next three
days combed the bottom of the harbor looking for the object. One local
fisherman said he saw them bringing up aluminum-colored metal, although it was
unclear if this had been actual crash debris. The final report said not a trace
of the crash object had been found.
While the official story of the
incident ends here, further evidence attributed to various military and
civilian witnesses might imply a highly secretive military search involving a
small flotilla of U.S. and Canadian ships about 30 miles to the NE of Shag
Harbour near Shelburne, site of a top secret submarine detection base.
According to one military witness, he was allegedly briefed that the object had
originally been picked up on radar coming out of Siberia. After crashing in
Shag Harbour, it traveled underwater up the coast and came to rest on top of
the submarine magnetic detection grid near Shelburne, where it was supposedly
joined by a second vehicle. Ships were anchored there for a week, according to
the witnesses, in an attempt to recover the object. A barge was said to have
been brought in from the United States to assist in the recovery, as reported
by another military witness. Regional newspaper stories did mention a barge
being brought to Shelburne for emergency repair, theorized by some as a cover
story to explain its presence there.
One American diver, known only as
"Harry" in the book Dark Object by Styles and Ledger, stated that the
object wasn't from planet Earth. "Harry" claimed photographs were
taken by the divers and some foam-like debris brought up. Another military
witness claimed that there were actually two objects, one perhaps trying to
assist the other. The naval search was suddenly called off on October 11. That
night, a seemingly identical UFO was reported departing the area by witnesses
near the original Shag Harbour crash site.
The most recent History Channel
documentary about the incident, which aired on August 10, 2006, also reported
that one of the divers involved in the Shag Harbour search did come forward
during the mid-1990s, refusing to allow his identity to become known publicly.
Once the researchers verified that the man in fact had served as a diver during
that search, he recounted his version of what had happened at Shag Harbour.
In this recounting by probably the
same diver, by the time they reached Shag Harbour, they already knew that
nothing would be found there, because the target had already been located off
the coast at Shelburne. He went on to further say that the Canadian military
and the United States Navy monitored the "unknown objects" by radar
and sonar, and that the objects were underwater. This monitoring continued for
at least three days, until a Russian submarine was observed entering allied
waters to the north. With that, the navy departed to intercept the submarine,
and by the time they had returned, the "unknown objects" had
evidently departed.
However, unlike the event at Shag
Harbour, no official documentation or confirmation has yet emerged to support
witness stories of a second search near Shelburne. There has been nothing to
substantiate the diver's claims, with the exception of archived records that
indicate a substantial amount of search and monitor activity in the Shelburne
area during that 10 day period.
Today, no known RCMP reports of this
sighting remain. However, several other Canadian government documents do
mention the event. One was a Priority message to CANFORCEHED (Canadian Forces
Headquarters) from RCC (Rescue Coordination Center) Halifax, advising that a
"UFO" had impacted in Shag Harbor. The report named the RCMP officer
in charge as a witness.
In addition, there was a Priority
Telex from CANMARCOM (Canadian Maritime Command) to CANCOMDIVELANT (Fleet
Diving Unit Atlantic). It gave instructions for the unit to task out of the
Coast Guard station at Shelburne on the cutter HMCS Granby, proceed to Clark's
Harbour, and provide a diving officer and 3 divers for a search for the crashed
object reported by the RCMP. The latitude and longitude and the approximate
distance from the shore were given. The unit was to work with the RCMP officer
in charge and be advised by him of the object's likely location. Written in the
top right hand corner was the name of the head of the Royal Canadian Air Force
Air Desk in Ottawa, then the clearinghouse for all civilian and military UFO
reports in Canada. The word "UFO" was printed in capital letters and
underlined 3 times.
Another Priority Telex was from
CANFORCEHED to CANMARCOM, again from the head of the Air Desk, and again using
the word "UFO" (twice). It requested their department investigate the
UFO report and recommended an underwater search of the area as soon as possible.
Lou Sheehan
Several other RCMP UFO reports from
the night of October 4 also turned up. Another report was filed from a family
of a very similar object to the Shag Harbor crash object seen leaving the area
exactly 1 week later, also reported in the Halifax newspaper.
The Canadian Department of National
Defence has officially identified this sighting as unsolved. To some, use of
the term "UFO" in the government documents implies
"extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional." To others, it merely means
official sources don't know or for some reason will not say what the people of
Shag Harbour saw.
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