There have been the inevitable false alarms. From the town of Alma Ata in Kazakhstan in December 1985 the Soviet news agency Tass cabled the results of an expedition mounted by the Soviet Academy of Science’s Institute of Evolutionary Morphology and Ecology of Animals. For years, a monster had been sighted in Lake Kol-Kol. Some eyewitnesses said it was like a dinosaur; others reported that ‘a twisty body about 20 metres long emerges above the lake surface time and again’.
In reaching their conclusion, the scientists refused to be distracted by the colourful accounts of the locals. The lake is connected to underground cavities by mud-covered cracks,’ they reported. ‘When the mud is washed away and water rushes down, large whirlpools appear on the water surface – the traces of the unknown beast.’
In West Germany in July 1982 bathers in a flooded gravel pit near Augsburg were horrified to realize that they were sharing the water with a writhing serpentine creature. The police were duly called and arrested a boa constrictor. How had it got into the pit? Answer: It was a very hot day and the snake’s thoughtful owner had simply brought his pet along for a swim.
The case for the existence of a monster in Lake Champlain in the United States of America, was boosted in 1984 by the publication of a book called Champ – Beyond the Legend. Its author, Joseph Zarzynski, has collected more than 200 eyewitness reports which suggest that a mysterious creature may live in the lake. There is certainly plenty of room for a monster to hide: Lake Champlain is 109 miles long and runs from the Canadian border through Vermont and down to New York State.
Zarzynski has assembled an impressive number of nineteenth-century sightings. For example, a Captain Crum claimed to have seen ‘Champ’ from his boat in Bulwagga Bay in July 1819. He said it was almost 200 ft (60 m) long and held its head more than 15 ft (4.5 m) above the water. In August 1871 passengers on the steamer Curlew off Barber Point watched through a telescope as a huge and mysterious creature ploughed through the water ‘at railroad speed’. Ten years later a steamboat pilot, Mr Warren Rockwell, took a pot shot at an ‘animal’ from the rear deck of his vessel near Swanton, Vermont. The creature made itself scarce. In 1880 a Dr Brigham of Bedford, Quebec, and a friend had spotted ‘portions of a strange monster’s body fully 20 ft long, head as large as a flour barrel, eyes with greenish tinge’ in Missisquoi Bay.
In the 1960s Avril Trudeau and a friend reported seeing something with ‘an ostrich- or duck-like face’ off Maquam shore, Vermont. This is just one of many accounts from this century. Earlier, in 1951, Mrs Theresa Megargee shot at something ‘more 30 ft rather than 20 ft long’ opposite Valcour Island, New York. She was not convinced it was an unknown creature – it might have been an Atlantic sturgeon – but she let it have the full force of ‘an old, octagon-barreled .30-40 Winchester rifle’ just in case. She told Zarzynski: ‘At the time, I thought my beautiful baby might one day be a tempting “hors d’oeuvre”, and I was a protective young mother.’ In August 1981 Claude Van Kleeck and others were in a boat in Bulwagga Bay when they apparently saw a creature ‘not less than 50 ft long, at least as wide as a 55 gallon barrel’, while in May 1984, Anna Gagne was treated to more than one sighting off Popasquash Island.
From his collection of eyewitness reports, Zarzynski has built up a composite picture of the monster:
Champ is approximately 15-30 feet in length … It is dark or black in colour with some colour differentiations possibly due to age or sex. Champ has a snake-like head with two horns or ears, a mouth and teeth, and a possible mane or fringe/ridge on its head and neck. Due to the infrequency of land sightings, there is no indication as to any or the number of flippers, but several eyewitnesses have observed a tail off the body. Champ has the ability to dive and swim at considerable speeds and can hold its head erect for a lengthy time. Weight is difficult to estimate; however, based on size descriptions, a body weight of several tons wouldn’t be out of reason.
Zarzynski’s prize piece of evidence is a photograph purporting to show Champ, taken on 5 July 1977. Anthony and Sandra Mansi were at the lakeside near St Albans, Vermont, when, they claim, a dinosaur-like head popped out of the water. Anthony quickly passed a Kodak Instamatic to Sandra before rushing off to rescue her two children who were paddling nearby. Sandra managed to take one snapshot. The picture is puzzling. It apparently shows a hump and what Zarzynski terms ‘an appendage’, presumably either a neck and head or a tail.
Analysis by two scientists failed to resolve all the questions. Dr B. Roy Frieden of the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona, was satisfied that the photograph had not been tampered with and that it was neither a montage nor a super-imposition. Examination, using the latest technical methods, including computer enhancement, told him virtually nothing more. But he did have doubts.
A woman who had once lived near the lake pointed out a curious brownish streak in the picture. Was it, she wondered, a sand bar? Frieden took another look. ‘I think it’s a real detail in the picture,’ he concluded. This had ‘interesting implications’, for, if the streak was a sand bar, ‘then there is a distinct possibility that the object was put there by someone, either by the people who took the photo or by the people who were fooling them, because you could simply walk out on such a sand bar and tow the object behind you and hide behind it as you made it rise out of the water and so forth.’
Dr Paul LeBlond, an oceanographer from the University of British Columbia, offered a quite different interpretation. He looked carefully at the waves on the water shown in the photograph and wrote:
As waves travel into shallower water, they slow down, steepen, and eventually break. If the paler area corresponded to the presence of a shallow sand bank, one would expect the waves to be modified, and particularly to break more often there than elsewhere. This is not the case, and it seems more reasonable to attribute the different appearance of that part of the lake surface to reflection of light from the overhead clouds.
Resolution of the argument is hampered by the fact that the Mansis, who were strangers to the area, are unable to remember exactly where they were on the lakeside when the picture was taken.
In the meantime, the indefatigable Zarzynski continues in his quest, gathering further eyewitness testimony, probing the depths with sonar and underwater video, in the hope of establishing once and for all that the creature he has pursued for more than a decade really does exist.
Not everyone gives him much chance. Michel Meurger of the Institut Metapsychique International in Paris, and Claude Gagon, Professor of Philosophy at Montreal University, began to collect claimed sightings of monsters in Canadian lakes in 1981. Meurger told readers of the Fortean Times that, by February 1983, their work had revealed ‘the surprising number of fifty monstrous lakes, and we had only covered a small part of our map!’ A detailed examination of the eyewitness reports left the two investigators unconvinced. The descriptions given seemed so inconsistent:
In vain we seek coherence in the details; we have a choice of features for each part of the body – head, neck, back, tail and appendages. Depending upon our cryptozoological theories, we can recognize fashionable mammals, acceptable saurians, and, for the more conservative, comprehensible fishes. The only problem is that everything is available.
Even in small lakes at least four different types of monster had allegedly been spotted: in Saint-Francois, for example, there were the ‘upturned boat’ variety, the ‘giant fish’, the ‘living trunk’ and the ‘horse-like head’. Comments Meurger:
The lake monsters themselves taunt us with elusiveness in their bodies as well as their habitats. Their forms melt away like jelly or the fauna of dreams. It seems impossible that four (or more) quite different and totally unknown types of large animal could co-exist in some Quebecian lakes, many of which are of only average size and depth. It is difficult to believe that such lakes could sustain a viable breeding population of each – even the resources of the giant Lake Champlain would not be sufficient!’
And he concludes: ‘Certainly, my fieldwork in Quebec seems to indicate that it would be more promising to study the inhabitants on the shores of a lake than to probe its murky waters.’
The watchers on the banks of Loch Ness have now been under scrutiny for a full half-century, and they can have drawn little comfort from a book published to mark the anniversary in 1983. It bore the bold but simple title, The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Authors Ronald Binns and R.J. Bell are veterans of monster investigations in Scottish lochs, but the revelations in their book make it abundantly clear that they no longer believe in the existence of such a creature in Loch Ness.