April 25, 1946 — Anima-Nipissing Lake, Ontario. The Cameron family watched a dozen small discs land, spin, and depart through the trees over two hours — a story first published eleven years later, in 1957.
1946: April UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
April 1946 carries a single entry, but it’s one of the more frequently cited early Canadian UFO cases in ufological literature: a family of ice fishermen on a remote Ontario lake watching a dozen small discs land, spin, and lift off without touching a single branch as they departed. Don Cameron’s account has been cited in multiple UFO catalogues since. What those same catalogues also make clear, and what this revision states plainly, is that the case wasn’t published anywhere until 1957 — eleven years after the date it describes.
Date: April 25, 1946
Location: Anima-Nipissing Lake, five miles west of Latchford, Ontario, Canada
Time: 7:45 PM
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Don Cameron, his wife, and their children were on the lake cutting a channel for their boat when they saw between 12 and 14 small, disk-shaped objects come down at a 45-degree angle roughly 75 feet in front of them. The objects, appearing about twice the size of a dish, descended onto the ice, spun, rose about two feet, and repeated the motion. The family watched for approximately two hours. As Don Cameron walked toward them, they rose at the same 45-degree angle and departed through trees on a nearby ridge without touching the branches, leaving black marks on the snow and ice. Cameron said the objects descended in a chain “making a rattling sound.” The family did not report the sighting to anyone at the time. Cameron later stated: “I couldn’t see any windows on the flying saucer. It was circular but changed to disk shape according to the angle it was seen from.” [Full Report]
Source: Jan Aldrich; Feindt, Catalogue (2010), p. 146; Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS); originally published in the Latchford, Ontario Northern News, January/February 1957 — eleven years after the reported date, per Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia (1998), p. 935
Editorial note: No contemporaneous 1946 documentation of this case has been located by any source consulted. The account first appears in print in a 1957 newspaper article. Case Status adjusted to Insufficient Data to reflect the eleven-year gap between the reported event and its first known publication, though the named witness and family, and the level of specific behavioral detail, keep this account well above an anonymous or vague report.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
April 1946 — A Family, a Frozen Lake, and an Eleven-Year Silence
The Cameron family’s account is one of this archive’s more behaviorally specific early postwar cases — a dozen small discs landing, spinning, lifting, and repeating the sequence for two full hours in front of four witnesses, then departing in formation through trees without touching a branch. It’s also a textbook example of why this archive treats “when was this first documented” as a separate question from “when did this happen.” Every source consulted for this revision — Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia, Feindt’s catalogue, CUFOS’s own records — traces the account back to a single 1957 Northern News article, not to any 1946 record. The family, by their own account, told no one at the time. That doesn’t make the story false; a two-hour close encounter with something you can’t explain, followed by deciding to just go home and not mention it, is a documented human response. But it does mean this case rests entirely on an eleven-years-later retelling, and this revision says so plainly rather than presenting the 1946 date with more confidence than the sourcing supports.
“We looked at it for two hours and are certain it was no figment of the imagination.”
Don Cameron, describing the April 25, 1946 encounter at Anima-Nipissing Lake, Ontario — as recounted eleven years later.
