extraordinary%20encounters

52 Buff Ledge abduction
wild, if somewhat crude, stories, but there are
those who believe in him, many for just that
reason. Frankly, I suspect that he would
change this aspect of his activities if he could”
(Nebel, 1961).
See Also: Contactees
Further Reading
Dean, John W., 1964. Flying Saucers and the Scrip -
tures. New York: Vantage Press.
Nebel, Long John, 1961. The Way Out World. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Nelson, Buck, 1956. My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and
Venus. Mountain View, MO: self-published.
———, 1955. “A Strange Tale from Missouri.” Fly -
ing Saucer Review 1, 2 (May/June): 4–5.
Buff Ledge abduction
The UFO abduction that re p o rtedly occ
u r red at Buff Ledge, north of Bu r l i n g t o n ,
Vermont, is unusual in that it invo l ved two
persons who, though separated by years and
distance, provided strikingly similar accounts
to an inve s t i g a t o r.
The incident took place at Buff Ledge
Camp, a since-closed girls’ camp. The two
witnesses have never been publicly identified,
but astronomer and ufologist Walter N.
Webb, who spent years probing the episode,
gives them the pseudonyms Michael Lapp
and Janet Cornell. On the evening of August
7, 1968, Lapp and Cornell, who worked as
counselors, were relaxing on an L-shaped
dock that jutted one hundred feet out into
Lake Champlain and which was largely concealed
by the bluff from the view of others.
The camp was nearly deserted; most campers
and counselors were off on a trip elsewhere.
Lapp and Cornell witnessed the approach
of a bright light that soon resolved into a
white, glowing, cigar-shaped object. Soon
three smaller white lights emerged from the
bottom right side. As the last light came into
view, the cigar-shaped object sailed away. The
small UFOs executed various maneuvers
through the sky, moving close enough so that
the observers could see that they were domed
and disc-shaped. After five minutes, two of
them departed in opposite directions, to the
north and south, emitting sounds like “thousands
of tuning forks,” as Lapp would put it.
The remaining UFO flew toward them, and
now it looked the size of a small house.
Abruptly it streaked upward, vanished, then
reappeared to plummet into the water about a
mile away.
Soon the UFO came back to the surface
and flew, at an altitude of fifteen feet above
the water, toward the witnesses again. It
stopped some sixty feet from them, and now
it was so near that Lapp could see right into
its transparent dome, where he was shocked
to observe two large-headed figures, short in
stature with big eyes and small mouths, who
were clad in gray or silver uniforms.
Turning to his companion, Lapp saw a
woman in an apparent trance. She did not act
as if she had heard him when he spoke to her.
At that point Lapp decided to try an experiment,
and he addressed the entities. Who
were they, he asked, and why were they here?
To his surprise a voice with a “feminine quality”
spoke inside his head to assure him they
meant no harm. Over the next few minutes,
as Lapp spoke his questions aloud, and the
alien woman replied telepathically, he was
told that the aliens had “returned after the
first atomic bomb exploded” and that they
were seeking some form of energy about
which the voice provided no details. They
were also engaged in war with others of their
race, characterizing these enemies as “evil.”
When Lapp asked where they came from, he
heard a name he could not pronounce or subsequently
remember.
Finally, with the two beings disappearing
below the deck, the UFO positioned itself ten
feet above the witnesses’ heads. A beam shone
down on them, a kind of “liquid light” that
felt weirdly as if it were shining inside Lapp’s
head. He and Cornell fell down on the deck
as voices and machine sounds echoed.
The next thing they knew, it was dark.
They were lying on the deck as two girls atop
the bluff were shouting about a UFO. The