Port Burwell, Ontario, summer 1925 — a five-year-old witness's two separate reported encounters, involving distinct craft and entity types, at the same backyard location.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP | ENTITY ENCOUNTER REPORT
1925: Port Burwell Ontario: The Pre-Hill Double Abduction
In the summer of 1925, a five-year-old girl in Port Burwell, Ontario reported not one but two separate encounters at the same backyard location — the first involving a train-like craft and slender gray beings with large widely-set eyes who examined her aboard the vessel, the second, weeks later in daylight, involving a landed silver disc and wrinkled yellow-skinned beings who gave her a high-altitude ride before returning her home. Two craft, two entity types, one witness, one summer, one location — thirty-six years before Betty and Barney Hill, in a decade with no cultural template for either description, and this report treats the pairing itself as the case’s most analytically significant feature.
Date: Summer 1925 (two incidents, same summer, weeks apart)
Sighting Time: Undocumented (first incident); daytime (second incident, late summer)
Day/Night: Undocumented (first); Day (second)
Location: Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada (same location for both incidents)
Urban or Rural: Rural/small town — witness’s own backyard
No. of Entity(‘s): Several, both incidents (exact counts undocumented)
Entity Type: Incident One: small gray beings. Incident Two: beings with wrinkled yellow skin — two distinct morphologies
Entity Description: Incident One — slender build, whitish-gray skin, large heads, large bulging eyes set far apart, tight-fitting satin-like outfits. Incident Two — wrinkled yellow skin, otherwise undescribed in the available source
Hynek Classification: CE-IV (Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind — abduction), both incidents
Duration: Undocumented for either incident
No. of Object(s): 1 per incident (2 total, distinct craft)
Description of the Object(s): Incident One — a large “train-like” craft, emitting a loud whining sound, approached by a light the witness recalled floating toward. Incident Two — a flat silvery disc that landed nearby and later departed to very high altitude
Shape of Object(s): Incident One — elongated/train-like. Incident Two — flat disc
Size of Object(s): Undocumented for both
Color of Object(s): Incident Two — silvery. Incident One undocumented
Distance to Object(s): Close range, both incidents — witness taken aboard in both
Height & Speed: Incident Two — craft flew at “very high altitude” during the ride portion of the encounter; Incident One undocumented
Number of Witnesses: 1 (the same five-year-old girl, both incidents)
Special Features/Characteristics: Compulsion/drawn-outside sensation preceding Incident One; floating/levitation sensation on boarding; instrument-based examination in Incident One; a high-altitude “ride” rather than examination in Incident Two; two entirely distinct entity morphologies and craft types occurring at the same site within a single summer to the same witness
Case Status: Insufficient Data. Single child witness, both incidents undated to specific day, and sourced entirely through a secondary humanoid-encounters compilation rather than a contemporaneous investigation.
Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Encounters catalogue.
Summary/Description: In the summer of 1925, a five-year-old girl in Port Burwell, Ontario reported being drawn outside by an unexplained compulsion and observing a large train-like craft with a loud whining sound. A light approached her and she recalled floating up into the craft, where several small gray beings with large, widely-set eyes, whitish-gray skin, and tight satin-like outfits removed her gown and examined her with instruments before releasing her. Later that same summer, in daylight, she was lying in the grass when a flat silvery disc landed nearby; beings with wrinkled yellow skin emerged, brought her aboard, and gave her a high-altitude ride before returning her to the ground. The two incidents involve entirely distinct craft and entity types at the same location and to the same witness.
Related Cases: 1925: UFO|UAP & Alien Sightings Archive
Detailed Report
The Port Burwell case is documented through Albert S. Rosales’s Humanoid Encounters catalogue, a long-running compilation effort covering thousands of entity-contact cases across more than a century of reporting. As with much of Rosales’s earlier-era material, the underlying primary source — whoever first recorded this witness’s account, and when — is not identified in the surviving summary this archive has access to. That gap matters: without knowing whether this was recorded shortly after 1925 or decades later during the modern abduction-research era, this archive cannot assess how much retrospective vocabulary or genre-convention contamination may have shaped the telling.
What makes the case worth a standalone treatment despite that gap is the internal structure of the two-incident pairing. The first incident’s entity description — slender gray beings, large widely-set eyes, whitish-gray skin, instrument-based examination — maps with striking precision onto what would become, starting with the Hill case in 1961 and solidifying through the 1970s–80s abduction literature, the dominant “Gray” alien archetype. If this account genuinely dates to 1925 as claimed, it predates that archetype’s cultural formation by decades. The second incident’s entities — wrinkled, yellow-skinned, entirely undescribed beyond that — bear no resemblance to the first group at all, and the encounter’s character shifts from clinical examination to something closer to a sightseeing excursion. A single witness generating two internally consistent but mutually distinct entity/craft/encounter-type reports within one summer is either a remarkable double anomaly or a sign that at least one, if not both, incidents absorbed narrative material from a source outside strict memory — and this archive cannot determine which from the available record.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
Port Burwell — 1925 and the Double-Encounter Problem
- Classification Rationale: Both incidents are logged as CE-IV because both describe the witness being taken aboard a craft. They are kept as two distinct sub-events under one case entry rather than merged, since merging would obscure the very feature — two incompatible entity/craft pairings — that makes the case analytically interesting.
- Source Chain Assessment: Rosales’s catalogue is a credible long-running compilation, but this specific entry lacks a traceable original source — no named investigator, no publication date for the witness’s account, no indication of whether this was recorded in childhood, adulthood, or through later hypnotic or non-hypnotic recall. This is a meaningfully thinner chain than this archive’s better-sourced entries.
- Pattern Context: The first incident’s Gray-type entity description is the case’s most striking pattern element: if accurately dated to 1925, it represents an entity morphology appearing decades before that same morphology became the culturally dominant “alien” archetype following the Hill case and its aftermath. Repeated-contact-at-a-single-site narratives, as seen here, also become a recognized abduction-literature pattern in their own right from the 1980s forward — making this account either a genuine precursor or, alternatively, a case whose telling may have absorbed some of that later pattern’s shape.
- Evidentiary Weight: Single child witness, no named investigator, no confirmed original recording date, and two internally distinct incidents that cannot corroborate one another. This is among the weaker-sourced entries this archive treats as a standalone case, held here specifically for its morphological and structural interest rather than its evidentiary strength.
Port Burwell stands as this archive’s clearest example of a case whose narrative significance outpaces its documentation. The pairing of two distinct entity types and craft forms at one location, to one child, in one summer, decades before either the Gray archetype or the repeated-abduction narrative pattern became culturally established, is genuinely remarkable — and genuinely unverifiable on the sourcing currently available.
“Several small gray beings with large eyes, set far apart took her gown off. The beings were slender with whitish gray skin, large heads, and bulging eyes and were wearing tight fitting satin like outfits.”
Case summary, Albert S. Rosales’s Humanoid Encounters catalogue, describing the first Port Burwell encounter, summer 1925
