Ask around Grand Isle and South Hero long enough, and eventually someone brings up 1973. The details shift a little depending on who’s telling it: a triangle the size of a barn hanging low over the water, or a cluster of glowing spheres that rose off the lake and shot straight up until they vanished. Nobody agrees on the exact night. But the shape of the story stays the same across the islands, and it did not come from nowhere.
Editorial note: No contemporary newspaper report, police log, or NICAP/MUFON case file for a 1973 Grand Isle or South Hero sighting has been located. What follows treats the story as island legend, set against a documented national and local backdrop.
The Night the Lights Came Down. Why 1973?
1973 was one of the biggest UFO years of the twentieth century nationally. That October, two Mississippi fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, reported being taken aboard a craft on the Pascagoula River, a case that made national headlines and triggered a wave of copycat and corroborating sightings across the country that same autumn, tracked at the time by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).
Vermont was not isolated from that wave. Whether or not any specific island sighting was ever logged with an investigating body, the timing lines up with a period when triangular and light-cluster reports were genuinely spiking coast to coast, which is likely part of why the islands’ version of the story settled on that particular year.
The Real Anchor: Buff Ledge, 1968
Five years before the year the legend points to, Lake Champlain already had its own documented, investigated case. On an August evening in 1968, two teenagers working a summer job at a camp on the lake saw a light drop out of the sky and break apart into several smaller objects moving over the water; one of them reportedly went under the surface and came back up near where they were sitting. Neither one mentioned it to anyone for ten years. When one of them finally got in touch with a UFO research group, an investigator ran separate hypnosis sessions with each witness, and their two versions of what came next lined up without either knowing what the other had said.
Buff Ledge is arguably the strongest documented UFO case tied to Lake Champlain, and it is easy to see how a lake with a case like that on the record, plus a resident lake monster in Champ, became fertile ground for a second story to take root five years later, this time set among the islands themselves rather than on the mainland shore.
Local Lore That Feeds the Legend
The Champlain Islands already carry a layer of lake-strangeness that predates and surrounds the 1973 story. Writers documenting island folklore, including the Obscure Vermont blog’s survey of Champlain Islands mysteries, have collected reports of glowing orbs rising out of the water and unexplained lights near the smaller, largely private islands south of South Hero, alongside the more familiar Champ sightings. That same body of local lore is the water the 1973 story swims in: a lake already known, in the islands’ own storytelling tradition, for things that come up out of it and things that hang low over it.
The pattern has not stopped. In recent years, NUFORC has logged a sighting from the Champlain Islands area describing a low, silent, black triangular craft with a light at each point, moving toward Burlington before appearing to draw a response from aircraft in the area, a modern echo of the same triangle-over-the-lake shape the 1973 story describes.
The Truth is Out There?
These days, there seems to be no shortage of strange objects in the sky. In South Hero, there are a number of odd shape objects spinning around in the night sky over Ferry Road and other locations. One of them, seen quite easily on a cold, clear winter’s night is shaped like a Christmas tree and lit up with blinking lights. It has been seen over the Sandbar and other places, as well.
Most likely drones, weather monitoring devices or some other government hardware. Which in itself is a scary premonition that “Big Brother” is truly watching “every move you make, every breath you take”.
Perhaps in that case, alien visitors from other worlds may not be quite as frightening. Maybe they’re just here for “Papa Ray’s” famous apple pies or Allenholm Farm’s apple cider?
Maybe a clear night at Snow Farm, to enjoy music at the vineyard with the rest of us?
