Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

Two versions of CHAMP, a lake monster in Lake Champlain, New York and Vermont. (Richard Svensson/Fortean
Picture Library)
water. Sightings continued throughout the summer.
In 1945, Charles Langlois and his wife, of
Rutland, Vermont, got close to the animal in a
rowboat.
Orville Wells watched a 20-foot animal with
a long neck and two humps in Treadwell Bay,
New York, in 1976.
On July 5, 1977, Sandra Mansi and her family
were picnicking by the lake when they saw
the head and neck of a “dinosaur” some
100–160 feet offshore near St. Albans, Vermont.
She managed to take a color Instamatic
photograph of the animal before leaving hurriedly
in the car. The photo has held up under
scrutiny and apparently shows a gray-black object
at least 15–20 feet long at the waterline. It
has a long neck, a small head, and a hump. B.
Roy Frieden of the University of Arizona’s Optical
Sciences Center in 1981 determined that
the photo was not a montage and appeared to
show a separate set of surface waves coming
96 CHAMP
from the object that are independent from the
waves from the rest of the lake. A 1982 analysis
of wave patterns in the photo by oceanographer
Paul H. LeBlond gave an estimate ranging from
16 to 56 feet for the waterline length of the object.
Jim Kennard and Joseph Zarzynski picked up
a target using towed side-scan sonar on June 3,
1979, in Whallon Bay, New York. The object
was moving at a depth of 175 feet. However, a
school of fishes was not ruled out.
On July 28, 1984, Michael Shea, Bette Morris,
and about sixty other people watched
Champ for ten to fifteen minutes from the vessel
The Spirit of Ethan Allen off Appletree Point,
Burlington, Vermont. It was approximately 30
feet long and had three to five humps.
On August 10, 1988, Martin Klein, Joseph
Zarzynski, and others aboard an air-sea rescue
vessel between Westport, New York, and Basin
Harbor, Vermont, saw an animate object
thrashing on the surface of the lake.