The Buff Ledge Camp Abduction

Buff Ledge Camp was a private girls' summer camp on about 30 acres of Lake Champlain shoreline. It was reached by a dirt road off Clay Point Road in Colchester, just north of Burlington. Mary and Maskel Hunt directed it for 25 years. Earlier in the summer of 1968, two other employees had reported a sighting that lasted about 20 minutes. Today the land is an equine co-op. One original cabin still stands.

Wednesday, August 7, 1968. Late afternoon, sliding into full darkness. Michael Lapp, a 16-year-old maintenance worker, and Janet Cornell, a 19-year-old water-ski instructor, were at the boat dock. A single bright light came down fast over the lake and seemed to flatten. Three smaller lights separated from it. Zigzags. Loops. Descents like a falling leaf. They settled into a triangular formation. A sound carried across the water, like a thousand tuning forks. One light flew straight up, then dove into the lake and vanished beneath the surface.

It came back. A disc-like craft glided across the water, heading straight for them. On top sat a transparent dome. Inside were two childlike creatures with large heads, elongated necks and big wraparound eyes. Michael sensed a message in his mind. "We are not here to hurt you." The beings wanted "some kind of energy."

Then the craft was overhead. A beam of light came down on them both. Michael screamed, "We don't want to go!" The light was so bright he could see the bones in his hand. It felt liquid. They felt themselves floating free. They came to on the dock, watching a distant light depart. About an hour was gone. Missing time.

Janet remembered only lights in the sky. Michael's memory stopped when the light reached the dock. In 1978, troubled by intense nightmares, he contacted the Center for UFO Studies. Walter N. Webb was assigned the case. He found Janet and hypnotised each witness separately.

Michael described being lifted aboard in the beams. Through a transparent dome he saw Earth, the Moon and stars, and a large cigar-shaped mothership. He watched Janet on an examination table as skin, hair and blood samples were taken. A being told him the mission was to "make life like ours…other places." Janet knew nothing of his account. She recalled lying on a table, feeling cold, something pulling her hair and pinching her neck, and a guide who was her "only source of comfort." The beings stood about 5 feet tall, with long thin limbs, greenish-blue skin, skintight suits and three-pointed web-like digits.

Webb was no newcomer. He had worked on the Smithsonian satellite-tracking programme under J. Allen Hynek and spent 32 years at the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston. He was also the first investigator of the Betty and Barney Hill case. He interviewed the witnesses, commissioned psychological assessments and cross-checked their stories with camp staff, some of whom had seen strange lights over the lake that night. His verdict: the two had "no opportunity for collusion" and "experienced a real external event of unknown origin." His book, Encounter at Buff Ledge, appeared in 1994.

Some local residents and former camp alumni called it a hoax. Webb answered that such a plot "simply wasn't possible," and that hoaxers would not have waited ten years to go public. A 2013 blog claimed photographs showed elaborate props, a claim that remains unsupported. Skeptics point elsewhere. They cite hypnotic confabulation after a decade, abduction stories that were well known by the late 1970s, and the lack of any physical evidence. The lights over the lake, they suggest, could have been flares, aircraft or astronomical objects distorted near the horizon.

No photograph. No radar. No trace. What remains are two accounts gathered separately, and Michael's sketches of the craft and its occupants. Local papers and podcasts still return to the dock at Buff Ledge, and the case has never been resolved.