New Minas is a town in the Annapolis Valley of about 5,000 people. A village rich in history and home to box stores between Kentville and Wolfville. But while driving through the town thinking about hitting the cidery for a tasting flight, did you ever pause to consider that you are in the place of one of the first recorded UFO sighting in North America?
On October 12th, 1796, a merchant and militia colonel from Liverpool, Nova Scotia named Simeon Perkins wrote in his journal about a UFO sighting that was all the talk in Colonial Nova Scotia. He relates the tale of a young woman from New Minas who claims to have seen some sort of unidentified flying object.
The report talks about flying airships that “were said to be seen at one Mr. Ratchfords in New Minas.” The young woman who saw the ships claims there may have been 15 “ships in the air … and a man forward with his hand stretched out.” And much like any claim of aliens, “the story did not obtain universal credit but some people believed it.”
Perkins journal is rich in details about life in Nova Scotia during that era, but the sensational bit that gets play is this X-Filesesque tale from the Valley.
But was this the first recorded UFO sighting in North America? It depends who you ask. There is one early story I could find that dates back to 1639! John Winthrop was a founder and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England. He shared a secondhand account of unidentified lights above or near Boston. He wrote that a man named James Everell was rowing a boat with two boatmen on the Muddy River when he saw a “great light” in the sky that “when it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours.”
What separates these two accounts is that the New Minas report does feature a clear description of a ship or ships which we could interpret as being alien spacecraft where as the Massachusetts sighting is considerably more vague.
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