Buff Ledge Camp Abduction (1968) | Vermont’s Lake Champlain UFO Mystery

A Quiet Camp on the Water

The shoreline of Lake Champlain in Colchester, Vermont, was unusually still on August 7, 1968. At Buff Ledge Camp, most of the kids and staff were away at a swim meet in Burlington. For once, the lakefront wasn’t full of shouting and splashing — just the ripple of waves against the dock and the high rasp of crickets in the grass.

Two employees, Michael Lapp (16) and Janet Cornell (19), lingered by the water. The sun had gone down. The camp was hushed.

Then, above the darkening sky, a strange light appeared.

Lights That Split in the Sky

At first, Lapp thought it was a star or planet. But the object brightened, and then, to their astonishment, seemed to split into three smaller lights.

“They were like little pearls that just fell out of the big one,” Cornell later told Webb. “They moved so smoothly. Nothing I ever saw flew like that.”

One of the smaller lights drifted closer, angling silently toward the camp dock.

Lapp remembered, “It wasn’t like a plane or a helicopter. There was no noise at all. Just… movement.”

Then everything became strange.

A Gap in Memory

Neither Cornell nor Lapp remembered the next stretch of time clearly. One moment the lights were overhead — and the next, it was later, and they were back at the dock as if nothing had happened.

That missing time would haunt them for years.

It wasn’t until 1978, a decade later, that Lapp wrote to astronomer Walter N. Webb, then with the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). Webb listened, intrigued, and tracked down Cornell to compare her account. Both admitted to that same blank in memory.

Webb suggested hypnosis — and what emerged would unsettle them both.

What They Remembered Under Hypnosis

Under separate sessions with Dr. Harold Edelstein, Lapp and Cornell described being lifted in a beam of light and taken aboard a craft.

Cornell recalled:

“I was lying on a cold table. They touched my hair, pulled at it, as if they wanted to see what it was. Something pressed on my neck… a pinching feeling. I remember the smell — sharp, chemical. Like a hospital.”

Lapp’s memories echoed hers but with his own detail:

“I saw the inside. Metallic walls, curved. There were little figures — not tall, no bigger than me, maybe smaller. Their eyes were… not like ours. They didn’t walk like we do. More like sliding.”

He also remembered a larger craft above the one they were taken into — a kind of mothership hanging in the sky.

Both described fear, paralysis, and the overwhelming sense of being watched.

The Investigator Who Believed Them

Walter Webb was not easily swayed. A veteran investigator, he had logged UFO reports since the 1950s and had worked alongside J. Allen Hynek. At first, he considered the possibility of ordinary lights, aircraft, or even exaggeration.

But after ten years of interviews, transcripts, psychological profiles, and cross-checks, Webb concluded:

“They were telling me the truth, as they experienced it. The Buff Ledge case remains one of the clearest examples of abduction phenomena.”

In 1994, he published his 300-page monograph, Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History, cementing the incident as a classic in UFO literature.

Skeptics Push Back

Not everyone agreed. Skeptics note that:

  • The ten-year delay before reporting makes memory unreliable.

  • Hypnosis is prone to producing false recall, especially when cultural abduction stories were common by the late 1970s.

  • Lights splitting over a lake could have been flares, aircraft, or astronomical objects distorted by the horizon.

Psychologist Susan Clancy would later argue that abduction memories often come from sleep paralysis and suggestibility under hypnosis. “Recovered” detail doesn’t mean historical accuracy.

But even skeptics admit: the consistency between Lapp and Cornell’s independent regressions remains unusual.

Folklore Echoes by Lake Champlain

Looked at through folklore rather than UFOlogy, the story fits a much older pattern:

  • Waterside abductions appear across cultures. In Celtic tales, lakes are portals; in New England ghost lore, strange lights near water lure travelers away.

  • The missing time motif echoes centuries of fairy lore, where mortals vanish into another realm only to return confused.

  • The image of two young people alone by a lake, carried off by lights feels less like science fiction and more like the rebirth of an ancient archetype.

In this sense, Buff Ledge is as much an American folktale as it is a UFO report.

Legacy of a Summer Night

The Buff Ledge property has long since closed as a camp, but the story hasn’t faded. UFO researchers cite it as one of the earliest abduction patterns with multiple witnesses. Folklorists see in it echoes of timeless motifs.

For Lapp and Cornell, it was never just a story. It was something lived. Cornell once said:

“We weren’t looking for flying saucers. We were just kids at camp. But that night has never left me. It never will.”

Conclusion: A Legend of Light and Silence

The Buff Ledge Camp Abduction remains unresolved. Maybe it was alien contact. Maybe it was memory reshaped by hypnosis and the passing years. Maybe it was something stranger — folklore dressed in modern clothes.

What is certain is this: on a summer night in 1968, two teenagers by a quiet Vermont lake saw lights that no one could explain. And for a stretch of time they can never quite account for, they were gone.

 

The waters of Vermont hid more than reflection — and they were not the last. Two years earlier, a prospector on the shore of Canada’s Falcon Lake faced a craft of his own. Continue in The Falcon Lake Incident — and explore the Out of This World Collection, where relics of such encounters endure.

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