New Minas is a village located in the eastern part of Kings County in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. As of 2011, the population was 5,135. Geography New Minas borders the town of Kentville to the west and the unincorporated community of Greenwich to the east. The town of Wolfville is further east on the other side of Greenwich. New Minas is approximately 100 km northwest of Halifax. The village is located along the south bank of the Cornwallis River occupying the lower slopes of the South Mountain. Nova Scotia's Highway No. 1 runs through the village forming the main street. History New Minas was founded in 1682 by Acadians from the Grand Pré area, the largest of the settlements known as Les Mines or Minas after the French copper mines explored at Cape d'Or at the entrance to the Minas Basin in the 1600s. As the Minas settlement grew, families moved westward up the Cornwallis River led by Pierre Terriot and founded a new settlement which came to be known to English surveyors as "New Minas". The Acadians knew their settlement as St. Antoine. It was built beside a tidal island in the bend of the river, later known as Oak Island. They repeated the pattern of the Grand Pré settlement by connecting dykes to Oak Island to turn tidal marshland into productive farmland. The settlement grew to include a mill, chapel and burial ground at Oak Island. However the Acadians were expelled and the settlement was destroyed during the Bay of Fundy Campaign of the Acadian Expulsion in 1755. New England Planters resettled the area in 1760s as part of Horton Township but built their farms further from the river along the Old Post Road, later Nova Scotia's Highway No. 1. New Minas was the site of one of the first accounts of a UFO sighting in North America on October 12, 1796. The diary of a merchant in Liverpool, Nova Scotia named Simeon Perkins reported that stories were circulating of ships flying in the air which "were said to be seen at one Mr. Ratchfords in New Minas" by a young woman and two men who at sunrise saw as many as fifteen “ships in the air ... and a man forward with his hand stretched out.” Perkins continued, "the story did not obtain universal credit but some people believed it." New Minas remained a predominantly farming and