In Episode 423 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger explore the skies over Colchester, Vermont, searching for a cigar-shaped UFO that abducted two teenagers working at the old Buff Ledge summer camp on Lake Champlain back in 1968. The strange encounter gave rise to a popular book about the incident and one of the most famous UFO cases to ever grace the Green Mountain State.
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Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[CHILLY BREEZE]
RAY: This isn’t the ideal day to be out on the shores of Lake Champlain, Jeff.
JEFF: No, it’s not.
RAY: It’s cold, even dreary. I see some storm clouds in the sky to the southwest.
JEFF: Yeah, they do look ominous. Quite a contrast to the grounds of this former summer camp, isn’t it?
RAY: We’re standing near Bigfoot Stables in Colchester, Vermont. I can imagine in July, this place is picture-perfect summer fun with the horses and the lake just up the road.
JEFF: Yup, I could see that. Right near the water. Plenty of space to run the horses, swim, boat, and all of the other great summer activities.
RAY: Right.
JEFF: The kind of place where you only have to watch the skies for storm clouds… or…
RAY: Or… what?
JEFF: Storm clouds or… UFOs…
RAY: UFOs?
JEFF: Ray, We’ve come to Colchester, Vermont to watch the skies… because this was ground zero for the Buff Ledge UFO Abduction.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger and welcome to Episode 423 of the New England Legends podcast.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Thanks for joining us on our mission to chronicle every UFO, alien, ghost, monster, eccentric, roadside oddity, and all of the other wicked strangeness that makes New England like no other place. If you’ve got a strange story you think we should check out, please reach out to us anytime through our website.
JEFF: We’ll go looking for the Buff Ledge UFO right after this word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: Okay, Jeff. I love that these stables are called Bigfoot Stables.
JEFF: Right?!
RAY: But we’re not here to find Bigfoot.
JEFF: No.
RAY: We’re looking for UFOs.
JEFF: Right. At least there WAS a UFO here many years ago. These horse stables are on grounds once occupied by a girl’s camp called Buff Ledge Camp. It was around for many years but closed in 1980. In recent years it was reborn as a horse stable community.
RAY: This seems like a great spot for a summer camp.
JEFF: It was. No doubt. There were many camp songs sung here that I imagine some older adults still know all these years later. But the pinnacle event that occurred here is an alleged UFO encounter. An event so significant that it still echoes today. So let’s head back to the summer of 1968, and watch the skies.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s early August of 1968 here at Buff Ledge Camp on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. Most of the country has their eyes on Vietnam, as hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops are already over there, and there’s talk of president Lyndon Johnson reinstating the draft to building up the U.S. Armed forces.
[SUMMER SOUNDS AND KIDS LAUGHING IN DISTANCE FADE IN]
JEFF: But here at Buff Ledge Camp, Vietnam feels like a world away. The kids are having fun. “Hello, I Love You,” by The Doors is the Number One song on the radio, and the weather has been great around Lake Champlain. Though there’s trouble in the world, the staff and campers here are mostly insulated from it. Kids can be kids, camp counselors can be camp counselors.
[NIGHT SOUNDS / CRICKETS]
RAY: It’s Wednesday, August 7th. Buff Ledge Camp has been mostly silent today because the kids have been in Burlington all day for a swim meet. The sun is setting over the lake when two camp employees, 16 year-old Michael Lapp who works in maintenance, and 19-year-old Janet Cornell a water-skiing instructor, head down to the dock to watch the water and pretty view.
JEFF: The two are enjoying the quiet down time. It’s a perfect summer sunset, when… Ray, are you seeing that?
RAY: Yeah. That bright light? It looks like a plane.
JEFF: Maybe… But it’s so bright! Maybe it’s a star in the early evening sky?
RAY: Maybe… wait. It seems to be getting brighter… and bigger. (BEAT) Look… It’s the shape of a cigar. I’ve…. I’ve never seen anything like it.
JEFF: Me neither. It’s definitely getting bigger…. Or closer… It looks almost as big as the moon now.
RAY: Wait… the light is breaking up into three smaller lights now. It almost looks like they fell out of the cigar-shaped craft.
JEFF: I don’t hear any sound at all. There’s no way that’s a helicopter or plane. It’s silent. Even blimps make some noise.
RAY: One of those smaller lights is heading right toward the dock… it looks like some kind of saucer with a dome.
JEFF: I see it! It’s closing in fast. (BEAT) Wait… now it’s just hovering near the dock.
RAY: I see two figures inside the dome of the craft. They look sort of human, but they have long necks and really round heads.
JEFF: Look at Michael Lapp… he’s just staring at the craft like he’s in a trance. Janet Cornell looks the same.
[OLD TIME BEAMING SOUND]
JEFF/RAY: Ahhh! There’s some kind of blinding light coming from the craft! I can’t see a thing.
[BEAM FADES AWAY]
[DISTORED ROBOT VOICE] We are not here to hurt you. We are here to obtain energy.
JEFF: We seem to be inside some kind of strange craft.
RAY: Look at Michael… These peculiar being are mimicking his movements. Theses creatures have bulbous heads, long neck, small bodies, and long spindly arms with five fingers at the end. Their legs are shorter than seems proportional, but they look human-like.
JEFF: Now both Michael and Janet are being examined on a table. These beings are lifting Janet’s long hair and seem to be interested in the back of her neck.
RAY: This is so strange… what’s that over…
[OLD TIME BEAMING SOUND]
[KIDS IN THE DISTANT BACKGROUND]
JEFF/RAY: Wait… What happened?!
RAY: We’re back on the dock. Michael and Janet are lying on the dock and waking up.
JEFF: I can hear that the campers have just come ba…
RAY: Look! Now there’s one light in the sky. It’s pulsating…
JEFF: It’s getting smaller too. It seems to be speeding aw…
RAY: It’s gone.
JEFF: Dazed. Confused. Michael and Janet stand up on the docks. The two agree to not say anything to others. Who knows what people will think… And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: Okay, there’s a lot more to say here.
RAY: Yeah. We first need to address the fact Michael and Janet agreed not to say anything, yet we know a lot about this story.
JEFF: Right. They mostly didn’t say anything. Except after a few years, Michael Lapp began having horrible nightmares. He felt like he was reliving a scene he couldn’t remember. It’s important to point out, when Michael and Janet woke up on the dock, they only recalled seeing the lights. The abduction elements would get filled in later. In 1978 – ten years after the incident at Buff Ledge Camp, Michael called UFO investigator Walter N. Webb, who was also a senior lecturer at Boston’s Hayden Planetarium.
RAY: So Webb began his investigation. He tracked down Janet Cornell, and through separate hypnotic regressions, both Lapp and Cornell gave eerily similar accounts of what they saw that August night back in 1968, and what happened after the blinding light.
JEFF: It’s also worth noting that Webb was able to track down others who saw strange lights in the sky that same night. Not only that, two other camp employees claimed they watched strange lights in the sky for close to 20 minutes on a different night that same summer. So some craft was visiting the Lake Champlain region multiple times.
RAY: Webb’s investigation continued for five years. He was meticulous in chronicling every detail he could about the event. Eventually, all of his findings were published in the 1995 book, Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History. It was published by J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. And now thanks to the research and the book, it’s one of the best-known UFO cases in Vermont history.
JEFF: Of course, some people dismiss this whole story as a hoax or mistaken phenomena. That always happens when it comes to these subjects. However, there were many UFO sightings in the late 1960s. The cigar-shaped craft and the saucer-shaped craft were common all over the place.
RAY: Also, the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction in New Hampshire was just seven years before this incident.
JEFF: That’s right.
RAY: So New Englanders had already spent years watching the skies.
JEFF: They did. Though this case isn’t as well-known as Betty and Barney Hill, today people still drive by the old summer camp and park their cars by the lake to watch the night sky wondering if tonight is the tonight… the UFO returns.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: You’ve returned to After the Legends where we take a deeper dive into this week’s story and sometimes fly off course.
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To see some pictures related to this week’s story, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our website and click on Episode 423.
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Until next time remember… stay legendary.