A drone search on Sebago Lake turned up a 1970s-era Camaro Z28 sitting about 55 feet down in the Notch, a car that had apparently spent years hidden under Maine water. Jason Smith said he was out on the lake with Glen Gisel when he spotted the shadow and realized he had found something far larger than the snowmobile he had been tracking.
Smith said the car was brought up with help from Greg Canders and is now under investigation by the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office. The Maine Warden Service was on the water during the recovery.
Detectives have ruled out one of the most obvious explanations. They said the Camaro did not fall off the ferry that runs between the peninsula and Frye Island, and officials said it was too far from shore to have been driven off a road or boat ramp. Their current theory is that the car went through the frozen lake one winter and was never reported.
The discovery fits the kind of odd finds Smith says have become part of his hobby. He said he likes dropping his drone into Maine's lakes and has previously pulled up smaller items, including a watch, a phone and snowmobiles. This time, he said, he was returning the drone to a snowmobile he had already found when the shadow of the Camaro came into view.
The car had rusted heavily after years underwater, and there was nothing inside except some old tent parts in the trunk. It had no license plate, but a partial VIN was visible and led investigators to identify it as a 1974 model. The Camaro had the larger aluminum bumpers, tail lights and other cosmetic updates introduced in the 1974 to 1977 refresh, but it lacked the wraparound rear window added in 1975. That matters because 1974 was the last year of the Z28 until 1977.
Authorities are still trying to track down the car's last owner from the partial VIN. For now, the sebago lake camaro discovery is less a finished mystery than a recovered one: investigators have ruled out the ferry, ruled out a road or ramp, and are left with the harder question of how a 1974 Z28 ended up resting for years on the bottom of a Maine lake.