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.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO | UAP SIGHTING REPORT
1946: The Anima-Nipissing Lake Discs — Don Cameron
A family cutting a boat channel through lake ice in remote northern Ontario watched a dozen small discs land, spin, and lift off in front of them for two hours — then went home and told no one. The story surfaced in a small-town newspaper more than a decade later. It has been cited in UFO catalogues ever since as a 1946 case. This report treats both halves of that honestly: what the Cameron family described, and how long it took anyone outside their family to hear about it.
Date: April 25, 1946 (as reported); first published January/February 1957
Sighting Time: 7:45 PM
Day/Night: Dusk
Location: Anima-Nipissing Lake, approximately five miles west of Latchford, Ontario, Canada
Urban or Rural: Rural/remote — a frozen lake in northern Ontario
No. of Entity(s): Not Applicable
Entity Type: Not Applicable
Entity Description: Not Applicable
Hynek Classification: CE-II — Close Encounter of the Second Kind. Multiple objects landed at close range and left physical trace evidence (black marks on snow and ice), meeting the standard definition for this classification tier.
Duration: Approximately 2 hours
No. of Object(s): 12 to 14
Description of the Object(s): Small, disk-shaped objects, described by Cameron as roughly twice the size of a dish and circular, though appearing to change to a disc shape depending on the viewing angle, with no visible windows. They descended at a 45-degree angle, landed on the ice, spun in place, rose approximately two feet, and repeated this landing-spinning-rising sequence over the course of the sighting. On departure, the objects rose at the same 45-degree angle and passed through nearby trees on a ridge without touching any branches.
Shape of Object(s): Disc/circular, apparent shape shifting somewhat with viewing angle per the witness
Size of Object(s): Approximately twice the size of a dinner dish, per Cameron’s comparison
Color of Object(s): Not specified beyond general appearance as “the flying saucer”
Distance to Object(s): Approximately 75 feet at first appearance; Cameron approached on foot before the objects departed
Height & Speed: Objects rose and descended repeatedly to a height of approximately two feet during the landing sequence; departure speed and altitude not specified beyond the 45-degree departure angle and passage through treetops without contact
Number of Witnesses: 4 — Don Cameron, his wife, and their children (number and ages not specified in the surviving account)
Special Features/Characteristics: The objects reportedly made a “rattling sound” as they descended in a chain formation; black marks were left on the snow and ice at the landing points, constituting physical trace evidence; the family did not report the sighting to any authority at the time it reportedly occurred; per the account, unspecified “filter officials” (likely a transcription of “further officials” or similar) later stated the date and circumstances corresponded to similar reports from other parts of the country, implying some contemporaneous corroborating reports existed elsewhere, though this archive has not independently located them; the account’s first known appearance in print is a January/February 1957 article in the Latchford, Ontario Northern News — eleven years after the reported event.
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Source: Jan Aldrich, Project 1947/CUFOS files; Feindt, Catalogue of UFO cases (2010), p. 146; Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (1998), p. 935, citing the 1957 Northern News article as the account’s origin
Related Cases: 1946: April UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
Detailed Report
On the evening of April 25, 1946, Don Cameron, his wife, and their children were on Anima-Nipissing Lake, roughly five miles west of the small town of Latchford in northern Ontario, cutting a channel through the lake ice for their boat. At 7:45 PM, as dusk settled over the lake, the family reportedly saw between 12 and 14 small, disk-shaped objects descend at a sharp 45-degree angle, coming to rest on the ice approximately 75 feet in front of them.
According to Cameron’s account, the objects — each roughly twice the size of a dinner dish — landed, spun in place, rose to a height of about two feet, and repeated this sequence, descending in what he described as a chain formation accompanied by a rattling sound. The family watched this behavior continue for approximately two hours. As Don Cameron began walking toward the objects, they rose together at the same 45-degree angle at which they had arrived and departed through the trees on a nearby ridge, passing through the branches without touching them. Black marks were left behind on the snow and ice where the objects had rested.
Cameron later described the objects in specific terms: “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.” He and his family reportedly did not report the sighting to any authority at the time. According to the surviving account, when the case eventually came to the attention of unspecified officials, they noted that the date and circumstances corresponded to similar reports filed from other parts of the country around the same period — though this archive has not been able to independently locate or verify those other reports.
Critically, the earliest known appearance of this account in any documented source is a January or February 1957 article in the Latchford, Ontario Northern News — eleven years after the date the story describes. Every subsequent citation of the case in ufological literature, including Jerome Clark’s authoritative UFO Encyclopedia, traces back to that 1957 publication. No contemporaneous 1946 police report, newspaper mention, or government filing describing this specific event has been located by any source consulted for this report.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
What Eleven Years of Silence Does and Doesn’t Mean
- On why the publication gap matters, stated plainly: This case is frequently cited in UFO literature as a 1946 sighting, and the description is detailed and specific enough to read as a firsthand account. But “detailed” and “contemporaneous” are different qualities, and this case only has the first one confirmed. Everything currently known about the Cameron family’s experience comes from a single newspaper article published in 1957. Without that article, or without locating Don Cameron himself or a family member for direct interview, there is no way to independently verify that the account was preserved accurately across eleven years of retelling, or indeed that the date itself (April 25, 1946, as opposed to some other spring day) is precisely correct rather than an approximation offered a decade later.
- On why “the family told no one” is itself worth taking seriously: A common skeptical explanation for late-reported UFO accounts is that the story grew or changed in the retelling, shaped by intervening exposure to popular flying saucer culture (which, notably, did not yet exist in April 1946 — Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the resulting media wave were still fourteen months away). If the Cameron family’s experience is accurately dated to April 1946, they would have had no cultural framework of “flying saucers” to shape their initial impressions or vocabulary, since the term itself wasn’t coined until June 1947. That timing detail argues, cautiously, against the idea that the account was retrofitted to match a later popular narrative — though it doesn’t rule out ordinary memory drift over eleven years.
- On the “similar reports from other parts of the country” detail: The account’s reference to unnamed officials noting the case matched other contemporaneous reports is intriguing but currently unverifiable — this archive has not located those other reports, nor confirmed which officials made this statement or when. This detail should be treated as an unconfirmed claim within an already-unconfirmed account, not as independent corroboration.
- On what would resolve the uncertainty: Locating the original 1957 Northern News article directly — rather than relying on later secondary citations of it — would be the most valuable next step, as it would establish exactly what was reported in 1957 without any further layer of paraphrase. Any surviving 1946 correspondence, diary entry, or local record from the Latchford area mentioning the Cameron family’s experience would be even more valuable, though none has been located to date.
A family watched something strange on a frozen lake for two hours, decided it wasn’t worth mentioning to anyone, and kept that decision for eleven years. When the story finally reached print, it reached print with enough specific, consistent detail to be taken seriously by the ufological researchers who have cited it since. Whether it also reached print unchanged from whatever happened — or didn’t happen — on that April evening in 1946 is a question this report cannot answer, and does not pretend to.
