BUFF LEDGE

Opening

On the evening of Wednesday 7 August 1968, with most of Buff Ledge Camp away at a swim meet in Burlington, two young staff members sat on the boat dock watching the sun go down over Lake Champlain. Michael Lapp was 16 and Janet Cornell 19; both names are pseudonyms. A light they first took for Venus began to move, released smaller lights, and one came in close to the dock. What happened next depends on which decade you ask.

Lapp kept a conscious memory of the craft, figures in its dome, and a beam of light before he lost consciousness. Cornell had no memory of the event at all until she was hypnotised. Ten years later Lapp telephoned Walter Webb, an astronomer and veteran UFO investigator, who spent five years on the case. Under hypnosis both described being taken aboard and examined. Webb concluded they were telling the truth, and published the case in 1994.

Timeline

Summer 1968According to summaries of Webb's findings, two other camp employees report watching unidentified objects hover over the lake for about 20 minutes earlier in the season.

7 August 1968, sunsetLapp and Cornell, alone on the dock, see the light, which drops toward the lake and releases three smaller objects. One approaches and hovers near them. Lapp sees two figures through a dome and has a sense of being spoken to in his head.

Same eveningThe two come round on the dock to the voices of campers returning from the swim meet, and watch the object give off rapid flashes before it fades from sight. Webb later finds other employees who saw lights over the lake that night.

1968 to 1978Neither witness reports the event. Cornell has no conscious memory of it.

31 October 1978After years of nightmares, by later accounts, Lapp reaches Webb, then working with J. Allen Hynek's Center for UFO Studies, by telephone. Webb, wary of a ten-year-old story, first tracks down Cornell.

From 1979In sessions arranged by Webb, both witnesses undergo regression hypnosis separately. The investigation, including interviews and transcripts, runs for five years.

1994The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies publishes Webb's Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History, a book of some 300 pages with the hypnosis transcripts.

2017The Colchester Sun visits the former camp, now a co-operative equine community owned by Jessica Ebert Edelmann and her husband Peter.

Key figures

Michael Lapp, by summaries of the book a maintenance worker at the camp, is the only witness with a conscious memory of the close encounter. He later pursued modelling and acting.

Janet Cornell, a water-ski instructor, recalled nothing of the encounter before hypnosis. She later raised four children.

Walter N. Webb, born in 1934, spent 32 years at the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston, as senior lecturer, assistant director and operations manager. He had trained under Hynek on the Smithsonian satellite tracking programme in 1957 and 1958, and in 1961 was the first investigator to interview Betty and Barney Hill.

Mary and Maskel Hunt ran Buff Ledge as a private girls' camp, near Colchester, over a run of about 25 years.

Physical and documentary trail

There is no physical evidence and no report from 1968. Everything comes through Webb's investigation, which began in 1978: his interviews, the hypnosis transcripts, Lapp's drawings of the craft and figures, and statements from other camp staff about lights that night. The book's own account, as summarised in press coverage, gives the telepathic message as "We are not here to hurt you", with the figures saying they were on Earth to obtain "some kind of energy".

The book includes transcripts from a series of hypnotic sessions with both witnesses, during which they reported consistent testimony, though Cornell hadn't previously recalled the event until she was hypnotized.

That sentence holds both the case's strength and its weakness. Two people hypnotised separately gave matching accounts. But one of them had no prior memory to check the hypnosis against, and both sessions came through the same investigator.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report: Webb's planetarium was the Charles Hayden Planetarium at Boston's Museum of Science, not "the Hayden Planetarium", which is in New York. The earlier version dated the hypnosis to 1978 and 1979. The sources available for this report confirm only that the sessions came after Lapp's call of Halloween 1978, within a five-year investigation. A hypnotist named in later online summaries could not be confirmed and is left out.

Things you might not know

• The investigator nearly passed. Webb wrote that Lapp's story contained almost every aspect of the UFO phenomenon ever reported, and it struck him as too good to be true. He would not go further until he had found the second witness.
• The beings copied him. In Webb's account, Lapp slapped his knee and one of the figures in the dome mimicked the gesture.
• Webb had done this before. He was the first investigator of the Betty and Barney Hill case, and came to see Buff Ledge as a better example of a two-witness abduction.
• The dock is gone. Previous owners demolished nearly all the cabins. A smaller dock has replaced the long wooden one, and old campers still drive down the dirt road off Clay Point Road each summer to look.

Competing explanations

A real abduction, as Webb concluded. Two witnesses, matching accounts given separately, other staff who saw lights that night, and an investigator who began sceptical and spent five years on it.

A real sighting with an abduction built on later. Something was seen over the lake by more than two people. The beam, the examination and the beings' messages came out under hypnosis a decade on, a method known to produce confident, detailed false memories, arranged in both cases by the same investigator, who knew the abduction literature well. By 1978 the abduction story, from the Hills onward, was widely known.

An ordinary light. The witnesses themselves first thought of Venus. A bright planet, aircraft or boat lights over a large lake at dusk could start an experience that memory reshaped. No source proposes a specific object for that night.

Later life of the case

Buff Ledge is regularly cited as one of the best-documented two-witness abduction cases, and Webb was appointed CUFOS's first Senior Research Associate in 1994. The camp closed long ago. The current owner keeps the story alive with a joke: when her son misbehaves, she tells him to go and sit on the dock and see if an alien picks him up.

Finding

Two camp staff members, and by Webb's findings others at the camp, saw lights over Lake Champlain on 7 August 1968, and nothing on record identifies them. The abduction is another matter: Lapp's conscious memory stops at the beam, and everything after that, for both witnesses, comes from hypnosis ten or more years later, with nothing physical and nothing written down in 1968. The lights are unexplained. The abduction is unsupported.

What still will not resolve: what came in over the water toward the dock that evening, and what the witnesses would have remembered of it without hypnosis.