A guy looking for a lost snowmobile found a muscle car instead. Jason Smith was piloting an underwater drone through Maine’s Sebago Lake when the camera picked up something sitting on the bottom that was decidedly not a Ski-Doo. It was a 1974 Chevrolet Camaro Z28, resting in 55 feet of water in the channel between Frye Island and the mainland, looking far better than anything submerged for decades has a right to look.
Smith had been back on the lake following up on a snowmobile he’d spotted on a previous dive. The Camaro was the bonus round nobody expected.
Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputies moved fast. The car was pulled from the lake, damaged in the recovery unfortunately, and a partial VIN was scraped off the wreck. The local Bureau of Motor Vehicles filled in the rest. Investigators are now trying to track down the original owner, which after this many years is no small task.
The theories about how a second-generation Camaro ended up buried in a lake are exactly the kind of thing you’d hear debated at a Maine diner over eggs and coffee. The first guess was the Frye Island ferry. Maybe the car rolled off the deck.
Ferry operators shut that one down immediately. A vehicle going overboard would have been logged, recovered, and very much remembered. None of those boxes got checked.
Insurance fraud made the second round of speculation. Drive the car to a quiet spot on the shore, push it in, file the claim. It’s plausible. It’s also nearly impossible to prove with a half-century of distance between the crime and the investigation.
The explanation that carries the most weight is also the most plainly regional. Maine winters freeze lakes hard enough that people drive on them routinely, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, and yes, cars. The Camaro was almost certainly driven onto frozen Sebago Lake at some point in the mid-to-late 1970s, hit a weak spot, and went through the ice. Whether the driver got out is another question nobody has answered yet.
A 1974 Z28 is not a car you throw away lightly, even by the standards of the era when muscle cars were cheap and plentiful. The Z28 package that year came with a 350 cubic-inch V8, and while the emissions-strangled mid-’70s versions weren’t the fire-breathers their predecessors were, they’re legitimate collectibles now. Finding one at the bottom of a lake is the kind of discovery that makes both car people and history buffs twitch.
The underwater footage Smith posted to Facebook shows the body largely intact, the shape unmistakable even under silt and corrosion. Cold freshwater is a surprisingly effective preservative. But whatever the lake kept, the extraction took some of it away.
Nobody has come forward to claim the car or its history. The Sheriff’s department is still running down the VIN, and until a name surfaces, the Camaro’s backstory stays at the bottom of the lake with whatever else Sebago is hiding. Smith went looking for a snowmobile and pulled a time capsule out of the dark instead. Maine has a way of doing that, burying its secrets under ice and water and waiting for someone curious enough to send a drone down.
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