The big buzz in the cryptozoology community right now concerns a piece of footage taken on May 31st 2009 at Oakledge Park in Burlington, Vermont, and on the shore of Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain is famous in the world of lake monster research as it's alleged to be home to a large, long-bodied animal of some sort: for a previous discussion see my article on the Mansi photo (easily the best known image purporting to show a large, unidentified animal in the lake). The new film was taken by Eric Olsen on his mobile phone: the original version is viewable here on youtube, but can no longer be embedded. Here is a stabilised version produced by John Donald Carlucci, also available via youtube. The footage, and the events behind and around it, have been extensively discussed by Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo, and as usual with events of this sort (e.g., Montauk monster) I'm coming in late to the game.
This looks like a fairly long-bodied animal with a short neck and short or absent tail, and its poor performance in the water makes it look like a terrestrial mammal that, quite frankly, is struggling and possibly in trouble. The water in this area is apparently 2.4-6 m deep, so it's unlikely to be an animal that is walking along the lake bottom as has been suggested. Many people have suggested that it's a swimming deer, with young moose being one of the most frequency mooted identifications. That would appear to be the most likely option, but the head looks very short for a deer: there's little chance that this is a moose for that reason, and a state moose specialist in Vermont is on record as saying that this is, indeed, not a moose. In fact, in closeups like the one below (borrowed from Cryptomundo, thanks Loren), the head is surprisingly small, way smaller than I'd expect for a deer, or indeed for a dog, seal or any any likely candidate. Could it be an injured or very ill waterbird, like a swan or goose? The head and neck are very much the wrong shape for this.
One final thought: is it not an animal at all, but a floating log? The way it seems to erupt from the water surface at the very start of the footage, and the lame way in which it appears to bob around and drift (rather than actually propel itself) does make it look log-like. Recall that other animal-like objects seen in the lake have been identified as floating logs too.
Olsen doesn't know what it is and hasn't made any sensational claims about it. For the time being, I admit that I really don't know what it is either. What is it? Your thoughts would be appreciated.
For previous Tet Zoo articles on lake monsters see...
- Really: photos of the Loch Ness monster
- The sad death of the Lake Khaiyr monster
- Best lake monster image ever: the Mansi photo.
- Filming Migo, the monster of Lake Dakataua
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I think it's a log.
I wouldn't call that "drifting around": the object makes good speed through the water. There seems to be little or no wind. Is the lake known for strongish currents?
Lake Champlain is very long and deep. It has a seiche that develops when sustained winds die down or switch directions (and a stronger internal seiche that develops on the thermocline, but that probably wouldn't affect the surface of the lake). I don't know what the seiche was doing at that time; Tom Manley at Middlebury College has had students working on it for a long time, and might know the status of the currents on May 31.
Perhaps it's a black bear.
.
"Faked, Summerlee! Clumsily faked!"
It's a model which someone concealed on shore is pulling with monofilament line.
I'm willing to stipulate that the photographer is not in on the prank but is being hoaxed along with the rest of us.
(And again, note no scalebar. I mean, how much trouble would it be to hand your camera to the person next to you, jump into the lake, swim over to the presumed bizarre unknown creature, and hold up a metre rule? Bloody amateurs...)
Is there any way to get repeated closeups of the profile (like the inset above) and then look for changes in the angles formed by the "head", "neck", and "body"? A rolling inanimate object will show variation, but it seems like a swimming/struggling animal will exhibit these patterns. Specifically it will move to try and keep its head up when submerging and its profile should change with strokes.
The head makes me think puma more than anything else - body is awfully long though (for ahything I can think of) could sum of that be the beginnigs of its wake?
Obviously that should be "could some of that" and the rest of the comment should be spelt correctly. If proof were needed that I shouldn't try to comment here and work up spreadsheets at the same time there it is.
It's rather stiff. A bit too much to be an animal, I think. Wouldn't an animal move it's neck a little bit? I vote for the log.
I am by no means an expert but what is the possibility that this is faked? One thing that struck me as a little strange is that the water does not seem to react around the moving head and body. Part of that my be due to the low resolution but the "creature" just looks added in to me.
The log or injured mammmal seems likely to me - in the one shot we get of the head it looks truncated and square, like a young cow, but maybe this is just the angle...
Its hard to look at it without wanting to see
something definative and spectacular. I agree that the
proportions seem wrong for a moose or deer. ( And I have
seen plenty of the latter down here in Texas )I have seen
it suggested that its a construction of some kind, and
thats plausible ( if a bit elaborate ) and it could be
simply being winched toward the shore by someone off-
camera to the right. There does appear to be some
animation to the head, especially in the latter part
as it nears the shore, but again, that may be just
something I want to see.
That's a damn log. If it was an animal, it would have to be considerably afflicted with rigor, and then, logically, it's LEGS would be up in the air and not it's head. It's a damn log.
What concerns me about the thing is that it is moving about quite a bit, but the water remains almost undisturbed throughout and the water surface is sufficiently calm that you'd see any ripples the thing left. There is some sort of wake or something extending back from the thing's direction of travel, but this doesn't seem to move very much at all.
In all the time you see the thing move, you see very little detail save for the silhouette of something, and no other detail in the scene at all.
All in all, I reckon this is faked footage and would want to have a look at the original file that the phone produced to see if that produced any interesting details...
I don't see anything precluding this from being a log. Unfortunately.
I'm not sure I saw it move at all. It just seemed to come up and then sink again.
My best guess is that it is inanimate.
It's a bloody log.
IF it's an animal, it seems to look most like a large cat, and I'd second the suggestion above that it may be a cougar. Although it may (or may not) be out of its natural range. On the other hand, I think it's most likely to be a log moving in the current. It's a little maddening that the photographer didn't walk the short distance to the right to meet the object as it neared shore.
Copycat!
There SEEMS to be some slight head movement there, especially around 0:30 to 0:40, when the "body" lowers into the water. It appears that the "head" is remaining level with the water, while the "body" changes angle as it sinks. Could be an illusion caused by the silhouette of a log rotating as it sinks, or an artifact of the film, or just my imagination.
It looks like somebody crawling in shallow water and sticking the arm out, or maybe pulling something on a string from the opposite side of the bay.
COMING THIS SUMMER - MAKE YOUR OWN NESSIE!
Funny beach game which involves people crouching underwater and popping strange things above the surface.
it's a special effect.
see "the wizard of speed and time"
preferably the feature length version, much more subtle...
I think higher resolution would probably show scuba bubbles. To me it clearly is a log, bent with an elbow, that when rocking or rolling seems more lively than it is. A diver towing it from below could cause this, as well as the not-impressive forward speed.
It was made with a cell phone video camera. I am not persuaded that the form was added through manipulation. The resolution and pixelation seems to mess up the view at the contact between the creature and water. I expect real lake monsters to be faster and more acrobatic.
Why do these things always cause such a stir? It's so pointless. Where is the body? This is a typical lake blobster- can't tell what the darn thing is so let's waste time speculating...
In a way the thing looks loglike, but in another way it really doesn't. It certainly doesn't look like any terrestrial mammal I've ever seen (And poor preformance in the water? Looks fine to me). In a way it looks like a VERY big turtle (softshell???), but certainly not any kind of turtle that lives in Lake Champlain. It doesn't seem to match perfectly anything I can think of. However, it DOES resemble the Sandra Mansi photo pretty well (dark, roundish body, shortish neck etc.) I wonder what's wrong with just saying that this really is a living, unidentified animal, the whatever-the-heck that people have been seeing in this lake and have named "Champ". That seems like the best explaination to me.
Spermatophyte indet.
The behavior matches perfectly.
It doesn't look like it changes shape at all. All the angles and planes stay the same relative to one another. Bobs, rotates a little on its long axis, but no flexing.
Verdict: it's a log.
Dunno why all the lake monster enthusiasts expect these things to hold their heads out of the water like a swimming horse. I don't know, off the top of my head, of any underwater swimming, air breathing beasties that piss away that much energy just to get a breath. Seems like its only the eyes, nose and any anatomy that would stick out in getting those just above the surface.
Why didn't they get any closer to it? It appears from the rocking of the video that they're on a boat. If it was something so spectacular, wouldn't they just drive up to it and get a better look?
I believe this is probably showing a floating tree. My thoughts can be read at my blog so I won't re-write them here. However, the newer stabilized version seems to indicate that the object was not moving as fast as the original video suggested. Whether this is the result of a change in perspective, I can't say.
Regardless, this video will prove nothing and is nothing more than another "blobsquatch" for the cryptocrowd to hold up as "proof". Too bad the media is scientifically illiterate and doesn't point out cryptozoology failings.
no reflection. It's a fake, and a bad fake at that.
And I say this as a born and raised "Vermonter"
There had been some research done by a guy who studies the lake not too long ago where he postulated it was actually a tanystropheus, which is a land adapted animal. Short legs like a croc but with an ungodly long neck and tail. It would move, in theory, like this in water... very slowly, allowing fish to move close and striking at some point. It would need to breath air, and would live both in and out of the water (making it harder to find).
The body in this is too long to be a seal or a dog... and most dogs would come towards a human if they saw one. It is moving WITH the current which seems to point towards "log" but hmm...
Log.
Maybe... an otter? The long thick tail blending with the length of the body?
In my opinion it is what is shown in the Mansi photo and the "Good Morning America" footage. If you haven't seen the "Good Morning America" footage dig it up, it's worth a look if you can find it - I couldn't. Especially these screen captures that were posted on Cryptomundo [here].
Also, in my opinion what is shown in the new footage is just a portion of the head and neck, not head, neck and torso. The section of neck is being held parallel to the surface so it appears to be torso. See this model.
It's too stiff to be an animal. I say it's a crashed alien spaceship.
it is clearly a swimming gorgonopsian. That is what they looked like when in the water!
It may well be a log - but the way it's moving looks to my admittedly inexperienced eye like it's at least somewhat flexible.
Hmmm, short head - could it be an injured/ill otter, not healthy enough to swim correctly? I don't see any size comparison that would rule out an otter-size critter rather than a deer/moose-size one.
sinuous_tanystropheus is right on the money, I say.
Nothing in the video seems to specifically indicate it's anything other than an inanimate object. There just isn't much detail for anything to really be inferred other than it seems to be something floating in the water.
What about this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEf4xNu3h2k&feature=related
It's a deadhead, as we always called a half-waterlogged floating log.
I spent my entire childhood and half my teen years looking out on an inlet always well-provided with deadheads; that's exactly the way they bob around, almost, but not quite, looking alive.
And yes, at times they seemed to be going somewhere. It depended on the tide or the wind.
R-e-D: Otter.
I agree with the log contingent, probably being pulled toward shore by some person. It looks like a waterlogged log that when pulled floats to the top and when the puller slows down the speed it sinks back down, short pulls just makes the high tip break the surface. When you can see the whole thing bobbing at the start the motion is 'seesawish' rather than 'animal-swimmingish'
I still like "otter" as an identification, especially after seeing the video @#40, but another thought that occurred to me was that it might at first be an otter standing on a mostly-submerged waterlogged log floating in the current -- and then it slips off so that we see it swimming on its own, with its head occasionally bobbing in the water.
Maybe.
Why does the video end when it does?
Did the 'creature' sink/submerge not to be seen again?
Did it reach the shoreline, exit the water & walk off?
Any answers?
Well, having been in Burlington in June I can tell you whatever it is isn't very large. Larger than one of the many Cormorants but no where near a moose.
I agree that the way it's moving is not at all like what one would expect to see for a living animal. I'm going with the log identification.
Now I'm kind of sad I didn't get a "log sighing" during my visit to the lake.
Looks like a log to me, and I've seen plenty living along an old logging river.
Hilarious inputs from you all, they really do match the average usual negtive scornful comments at Cryptomundo breaking news, though not this time.
Why not analyzing what the footage shows? Does it have to be a mundane terrestial animal or a prank? What if it represents an unknown animal? What if ...?
What if? That is not analysis. We can "what if" anything.
What if the Pope is actually a cunningly built robot? What if the moon is green cheese.
The burden of proof in a case like this is clearly on those who posit mysterious origins, since by definition an unknown animal has never been seen before. Just as evidence would be required for those positing robotic Popes and cheesy moons.
So Erik, show why it probably IS an unknown animal, rather than witlessly suggesting the implausible.
It looks like a large turtle to me.
As many have said, it's quite stiff: vote for log. But if I had to bend over backwards and say it was an animal of some kind, I'd say a weak black bear. But that's a stretch.
Or maybe a weather balloon, or swamp gas...
owzzzz!!!! its a horse!!!!! maybe they drowned the horse to
look like a prehistric animal..... what the..... its head looks like a horse......!>>>
More otters, to show how their profile in the water can change rapidly from one long log-like shape to something more sinuous, and because otters are fun to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzeqrOgi5dM
It's clearly a log, otherwise the cameraman would have chased after it. With newspapers paying thousands for a story these days, if there was any chance that it was a real lake monster the cameraman would have raced round the shore to get a better shot as it reaches the shallows at the end of the clip. The fact that the clip ends just as it gets interesting speaks volumes.
First: Looks in many ways (speed and such) like a moose swimming. Please search videos of "moose swimming" and watch a couple, before making up your mind.
Second: The image is fuzzed out and indistinct. So, any ears may not show up as details.
OR... this thought occurred to me. It could be an anterless moose or elk with an applied VIDEO AFTER-EFFECT. Again, the action looks real but the 'thing' looks sort of fake, indistinct, and fuzzy to me.
If a log pulled from shore, think about how long that rope or fishing line must be.
Do we know the platform on which the filmer was? A boat, the shore, a pier?
My inclination is an otter, fairly close to the camera but in no particular hurry. In the stabilized film I don't see the movement as suggesting distress. There are otters in upstate New York, but they aren't commonly seen. The post in the background suggests that the thing isn't very far away.
First time I saw this I instantly thought log, and my opinion hasn't changed. Thought too much of the "body" was sticking out of the water at the beginning. Or it's a living cousin of the montauk monster, hard to say.
c´mon..it´s an otter ...look how it swins belly up from time to time
as a long time boater i call tell you this looks much more like a partially submerged log than any sort of self propelled monster.
logs like this move in the current, and bob up and down as their mostly submerged and unseen parts hit other snags or obstacles underwater. if the photographer moves along the shoreline, it can give the appearance that the object is moving in the water. if the current pushes past the object, the waves formed can make it look like it is moving.
Re: proposing that this could be considered proof of champ... please be aware that websites which hope to sell books need a daily quota of hits, and anything and everything will be done to create excitement or interest in visiting that site. you yourself have guaranteed that crypto site more than its quota for today.
i'm sure they thank you.
Dr. Dan H mentions the wake, or something, stretched out behind it that doesn't move much.Could this be the rest of the log, almost breaking the surface and giving the visible, "Champ" end it's buoyancy?
The silhouette of the head is like remarkably like a sock puppet to me! Perhaps it's Lambchop out for a swim? :P
So, if one can't identify an animal in a lake, then it's either a prank or a log? Is that what we're saying?
I am not a scientist. And as such, I can tell you from an outsider's point-of-view that the world is dull and boring because of scientists' over-the-top skepticism toward every little thing that challenges their preconceived ideas about life.
Is the scientist's ego sooo big that one little, itty-bitty lake monster would reduce him to tears and tear apart his beliefs? C'mon, gentlemen and gentlewomen. Stop being sticks-in-the-mud.
After all, with the hundreds of allged "lake monsters" out there, the odds are that one is probably legit. Don't you want to be the scientist who doesn't look stupid for having repeatedly asserted throughout your careers, in your own ways, that "there ain't no such thing as lake monsters, stupid"?
Right now, all your scientist friends and bosses agree with you on everything. But two hundred years from now, your predecessors might reflect on you as rather ignorant. Who knows? Future environmentalists might think of you as having been the primary reason why the few lake monsters that really had existed never received governmental protection and went extinct just years before their remains were finally discovered; yes, your insistance that the world ignore such animals might very well increase the number of species that have or are vanishing from this planet.
Is your ego really that big? Now, I know the men's egos are (they're men). But, women of the scientific community, what gives?
How does that thing challenge anything?
Why shouldn't it be a log -- are any features of it incompatible with that identification? If so, which ones?
Also, I heartily recommend the book "Unweaving the Rainbow" by Richard Dawkins. The idea that the world gets less interesting and less fascinating when we learn more about it is just so wrong...
Why?
Seriously, why?
What is the evidence?
No.
I don't want to assert anything which I can't support with evidence.
Is that so hard to grasp? :-)
Ooh. Not on the topic I'm working on right now. In fact, on that one I'm even in a minority. Will you be in Bristol this September? Or in Berlin this July? You'll see some lively discussions, I promise!
Hey, everyone, look -- a sexist! Point and laugh!
*points and laughs*
I can think of plenty of WOMEN skeptics in science! Just off the top of my head, it was pretty balsy of Catherine Forster to suggest that the fifteen or sixteen species of Triceratops could be reduced to just two. Whoa. Talk about mind-blowing. I guess our world crumbled because suddenly Triceratops was far less inclusive than paleontologists thought. Dang, I know mine did.
Of course, now we have this wierd problem of sexual dimorphism, individual variation, and the bizarre ontogenetic changes that ceratopsians go through to deal with. One problem solved, three new ones pop up. Yeah, the world gets so much less complicated the more we know.
I know I'm feeding the troll, but it's hard to resist.
Furthermore, members of the scientific community, don't you think you're treating the small handful of legitimate scientists among you who *do* suspect these creatures' existence the same way that the Christians treated you back when you claimed the Earth revolved around the Sun? You guys got a really rotten deal back then just because you challenged popular thinking. I bet even the most Christian man among those unfortunate scientists got kicked out of the church just because he said the Sun was the center of the Solar System. From what admittedly little I can tell, it seems like you modern scientists now pick on people within your own ranks who hold on to things that challenge your own idealogies, such as a living dinosaur in New York (Champlagne runs along NY).
People who are interested in these creatures have nobody in the scientific community to help them. And I get why, too. Don't misunderstand. It's easy money if one can fake a lake monster. There have been and probably still are a lot of frauds out there. Just when the evidence looks great and a press conference is about to be held, the truth comes out and anyone in the scientific community who'd expressed any confidence in the hoaxed creature's existence gets laughed at by the big boys. I get it.
But look at what your fears of exploration within the forbidden zones of life (you guys used to be so great at venturing into the forbidden. if those early scientists i referred to had been as gutless as you all, just trying to make sure they didn't lose their jobs for making a taboo assertion, we'd still think the earth was the center of the universe. of course, they wouldn't have lost their jobs, which is the point.) have done. People who try to study these creatures from a legitimate perspective are constantly laughed at and made fun of by you big boys. And to add insult to injury, after you kicked them out of your little club house, the paranormal freaks and the creationists tried to hire them. That's pretty depressing. When the only ones who believe in your work are creationists, it's the bottom of the barrell as far as your reputation goes.
Anyway, don't be a bunch of pussies. Take chances. Risk your professional reputations like your academic forefathers did. Sure, you'll make mistakes. Yes, your immature (and rather cult-like, frankly) colleagues will probably point and laugh like the little boys they are, but you know what? In 200 years, some of their ideas will have been revealed to have been just as laughable. And they will have died without ever knowing that their masterpieces were later proven wrong.
But we already knew that there were living dinosaurs in New York (sixth photo down).
Besides, you're forgetting the possibilities of elephant squid. Or gigantic tullimonstra.
First of all, easy to say if it is not your scientific reputation you are staking (and some of us do have to think about eating etc.).
More importantly, you are suffering from the problem that looking back in history it seems as if many of the strange and cranky ideas posed at one time now are mainstream - but this is only because the others are simply forgotten. The number of possible exotic, excentric ideas is huge, as the internet shows, and only a very small minority of them will one day become confirmed.
So, you are asking us to take an incredible risk which in all likelihood will not pay off and end our careers. If you want to do that, feel free.
And finally, neber forget: To be the next Galileo, it is not enough to be laughed at, you also have to be right.
Aaah, the Galileo Gambit. It's a logical fallacy.
It's also a misconception that comes from counting the hits and ignoring the misses.
We don't have ideologies. Retract that insult.
Except if they've got the evidence.
Bring it on. We can take it. Look what our reputations are staked on:
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
Bring it on already! The video does not count, simply because there are much easier explanations for it than a lake monster.
The problem I have with the 'log ' identification is that
the object seems to be moving at a considerable angle
relative to the direction of the waves. They ARE both
moving in the same direction, which would support the idea
that its some kind of inanimate object.
I'd be interested in hearing further from Darren, though.
The water has a distinct 'bluriness' around the object, especially at the end of the video. It almost looks like mist on the water, but it doesn't show up on the treeline at the waters edge or in the sky. Perhaps that it because the cellphone took poor quality images, or sunlight is reflecting into the cellphone - I haven't seen any cellphone videos enlarged this way, so I don't know - but it DOES look like it has been doctored.
I doubt it is moose, deer, wildcat,etc. as I didn't see any splash marks at the front of the creature, as would be created as it 'dogpaddled' through the water.
Ya' see, J., that's how you do science. You examine the evidence critically. Scientists don't laugh at good research, just gullible fools who'll swallow anything that comes down the pike..........
KW (reply #57) said:
First time I saw this I instantly thought log, and my opinion hasn't changed. Thought too much of the "body" was sticking out of the water at the beginning. Or it's a living cousin of the montauk monster, hard to say.
--->The "too much of the 'body' was sticking out of the water at the beginning" bit struck me, too. Look at the early part of the video, and assume that the thing is a swimming moose: then the back is several inches out of the water all the way to the rump. My IMPRESSION (based on not much actual experience, but certainly reinforced by videos of assorted swimming beasts on the web the past few days) is that most terrestrial (and semi-aquatic: beavers, for example) mammals when swimming have most of their back at or below the water line.
It would help, if one were going to get seriously into the business of evaluating videos like this, to have a bunch of videos of IDENTIFIED animals swimming for comparison.
Take a chill pill, J. What have scientists ever done to you? Was your wittle brudder a scientist? Did he bite your arm and give you a boo-boo? Seriously, there is a TON of stuff I could say about those comments. But I'll just mention how many scientists HAVE risked everything by taking creatures like Bigfoot, for example, seriously. I mean, Grover Krantz? Jeff Meldrum? John Napier? The list goes on...
BTW, Robert Bakker has often risked his professional reputation by making very heterodox, often downright bizarre claims about dinosaurs. I am intent on becoming a paleontologist, and when I am, I certainly will not be afraid of risking my professional reputation. I, like Bakker, have some pretty non-mainstream veiws about dinosaur anatomy and biology, and they will probably get me in trouble some day. But I have evidence to back them up, and I don't care.
It sure looks like a log. The stabilized picture shows that it is merely bobbing; and when the angle of the "head" and "neck" change, the body changes too, by foreshortening, to the same degree, indicating that the head-neck joint is rigidM.
"The water has a distinct 'bluriness' around the object ... it DOES look like it has been doctored."
People say this about ANY video, anything that's not shot on film stock ... especially digital video, which is encoded with data compression, which always affects the image with various artefacts. On one side of the fence, cranks gather around these artefacts as evidence of this and that; on the other side, noob skeptics rally around them as evidence of fakery.
The video in question does not look "doctored" to me. It may still be, of course, but it's not obvious from looking at it.
whe you look at the photo it look as if there might be more than one
Log, I reckon. It looks like a long submerged basically straight item, with a kinked front end. Particularly toward the end of the video, the back (trailing) end appears on surface a few times too.
That is way too small to be a Plesiasour, or other large "lake monster". I would love to see real proof, but that looks like a beaver, or river otter to me.
champ is Awesome!!!
Hi Darren: I hope you still receive this, as I just now came across your film. I think it is very impressive, firstly. I have been doing some research into a supposed lake Monster we have here in B.C., Lake Okanagan's Ogopogo. Ogopogo has been described many times as log-like too. What's more, I think I am seeing this correctly in your film. It appears that well behind the head of the animal, there are indications of more of its body ie., disturbance in the water, and what looks like significant wave action (bigger than for any terrestrial animal). In any case, in my opinion you have captured on film, "Champie" Cheers, Rod
No doubt the video is of a live, swimming creature. My guess its a young moose. Read about my crypto discovery at: http://florida-backroads-travel.com/the-adopted-legend.html
This is obviously a four-legged animal like a deer or moose swimming toward the shore. Have you seen the video of the lake monster in Florida? It's a manatee!