​UFOs are a fascinating phenomenon that has interested people for many years and is still relevant today. A UFO is an unidentified flying object or unidentified areal phenomenon that can not be immediately identified or explained. Upon investigation, most UFOs are known objects of an atmospheric phenomenon, while few remain unexplained. UFO sightings have been reported from all over the world. Residences of the Sunshine Coast have reported UFO sightings on a number of occasions. The first newspaper report of UFOs on the Coast is from July 18th, 1947, in the Coast News. Prior to this reported s ..read more

photo #1797 of Charles Bedford and his shell collection. ​We are looking to collaborate with the community to create a new exhibit in one of our cabinets upstairs! Any community members with ideas for exhibits relevant to the Sunshine Coast are welcome to submit a proposal. The exhibit can be historical or contemporary, and doesn’t necessarily need to include objects!  We are particularly interested in including anything related to under-represented histories, or stories not yet explored in our current exhibits.   Proposals can be filled out online through our social media or on ou ..read more

The summer is almost over and it’s almost time for me to head back to school! I’ve had such a great summer here at the museum. It’s been fun to learn more about local history, and to gain skills related to museum work. Pulling artifacts from storage and figuring out what they were was always a treat. Getting to do research about artifacts and the history of the Sunshine Coast was so interesting, I feel like I learned so much this summer. It’s been so neat to have the opportunity to explore both the exhibit spaces and the behind-the-scenes parts of the museum. Thank you to Allie, Enya, and Ma ..read more

B.C. Archives # 1-29110, Aerial photo of The Malibu Club in Princess Louisa Inlet Swíwelát (Princess Louisa Inlet) has been traditionally a very important location for the shíshálh nation, with massive amounts of spiritual significance, and for having contained a village in the past, called  ásxwíkwu. Today, if you’re able to go up and explore beautiful swíwelát, you can find a gorgeous lodge that houses the luxurious Young Life Malibu Club, a summer camp for teenagers. If you had ventured up there in the 1940’s however, those buildings were a part of a very different enterprise. In 193 ..read more

To begin my summer museum work and to get some experience with handling artifacts, I’ve been working on a little bit of rehousing. This is where I take a box of artifacts from storage, unpack the artifacts to see how they’re doing, and then replace them in the box. While I repackage the items I’ve also been checking in our artifact database to make sure that they are registered correctly. It’s been interesting to trace the origins of an object, through looking in the database and at the donation form from when it originally came to the museum and its path through the museum accession process ..read more

​Hi! My name is Lucy Wolchock-Brown, and I’m so excited to be starting my job as the Summer Museum Assistant here at the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to see how the museum functions, and to learn more about Sunshine Coast history. I’m from Roberts Creek, and went to Elphinstone Secondary for high school. This past September I moved to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia. There I’ve been pursuing an arts degree, and am hoping to major in either anthropology or art history. I’ve always been a big museum visitor, and I'm delighted tha ..read more

      Many visitors to the Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives ask “where are the archives?” While we maintain a robust collection of archival documents in storage, many of these archives are not available for in-person viewing due to preservation concerns. What we have on exhibit is only a small percentage of the Museum’s collection, which includes 7000+ artifacts, 1600 archival documents and over 8000 photographs and negatives. We also house The Coast News and The Peninsula Times newspapers, along with an assortment of other regional publications. The museum is committed to m ..read more

Before Winegarden Park or Brothers Park there was “Fairy Glen”, more commonly referred to as the Glen. It was a popular picnic area enjoyed by locals, summer complaints and cattle alike, but until recently, the Glen was no longer the community gathering space that it was 100 years ago. According to The West Howe Sound Story, during the 1920s “the Glen was a lovely secluded picnic area […] at the north-eastern boundary of the Village of Gibson’s Landing”. Church services and fundraising events such as summer teas were often held there alongside everyday picnics. It became so common to have thes ..read more

Crowe Road Commune, Funny Food Farm, and Sugar Mountain Commune are just some names of the groups that populated the Sunshine Coast in the early 1970’s. This may not come as much of a surprise, as many of us are familiar with the Coast’s countercultural attitude, so what made 1971 any different? This year was especially notable in the history of these communes because, for a short period of time, they were funded by the Federal Government. Mushroom Festival, Fall 1969. Photograph by Michael de Courcy, from the Intermedia Catalogue. Courtesy of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Un ..read more

After an interesting in-person semester of my Motion Picture Arts program at Capilano University, I’m excited to be back at the Museum- and to have a normal schedule again! I’m very much looking forward to welcoming back visitors in the near future, it’s so quiet here now that I swear I can hear chattering from the dolls upstairs. Working at the Museum has allowed me to see that although events transpire in a fixed way, our knowledge and perception of history is constantly evolving. This process of re-learning and un-learning has given me the opportunity for much self-reflection, and the abili ..read more