Episode Details

August 7, 1968. The number one song in America is "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors, Richard Nixon is being nominated in Miami Beach, and Congress has just spent a day asking scientists whether UFOs are real. It's also the day Kim was born. So for her birthday, the gang investigates the strangest thing that happened on her actual birth date: the Buff Ledge abduction, one of the best-documented UFO cases in American history, which played out on a quiet Vermont lake the very day she arrived.

Buff Ledge Camp sat on the shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Burlington. That Wednesday evening the camp was nearly empty, the swim team away at a meet. Two teenage staffers, sixteen-year-old Michael Lapp and nineteen-year-old Janet Cornell, were on the boat dock watching the sun go down when a bright light appeared in the darkening sky. It descended, flattened into a disc, and released three smaller craft that looped and fell like leaves over the water. One of them plunged into the lake, resurfaced, and glided straight toward the dock.

What Michael described next has kept this case alive for more than five decades: a transparent dome, two childlike beings inside, a strange feeling of mental contact, and then a beam of light so intense he said he could see the bones in his own hand. His last clear memory of that stretch of evening is screaming "We don't want to go!" When the world snapped back, the sky was fully dark, time was missing, and Janet was groggy beside him.

Then came the silence. The two never reported it, went their separate ways after camp, and said nothing for about ten years, until recurring nightmares drove Michael to the Center for UFO Studies. Investigator Walter Webb spent roughly five years on the case, regressing both witnesses under hypnosis, separately, after a decade with no contact between them. Their recovered accounts matched on the small, strange details, and Webb tracked down other former camp staff who remembered unexplained lights over the lake that same night. He published the full investigation in 1994.

Jinkies, and that's only half the episode. This one is also a time capsule of the world Kim was born into: the Doors on the radio, Cream taking over the album chart, Rosemary's Baby and 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters, six-cent stamps, and a country that spent the summer of 1968 staring at the sky.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The world on August 7, 1968, from the number one song to the news that night

Two teenagers, an empty camp, and a light that fell like a leaf onto Lake Champlain

The beam, the missing time, and ten years of silence

Walter Webb's five-year investigation and the separate hypnosis sessions that matched

Where the case stands today, and what the skeptics say

Happy birthday, Kim. The universe apparently threw you quite a party. Join the gang for the case, the time capsule, and the question nobody has answered in fifty-eight years.