I guess Loch Ness is the most well-known, but apparently there are other lake monster myths from all around the world.
Many stories are “supported” by witness accounts, blurry photos and shaky videos - but from my understanding, everything so far has been a hoax or inconclusive.
I remember watching a TV show on this subject, and they mentioned that they actually found real remains of an unidentified dinosaur-ish water creature, many years ago. They showed some footage of it too. I forgot the details on that but I found it intriguing. (What’s up with that?)
So anyway, I know it’s mostly a ploy to attract tourists and that it’s probably all fake but I still want to know. What is the most convincing piece of evidence that any such creatures exist anywhere in the world? Has anything even remotely persuasive been discovered?
If there’s a single convincing piece of evidence for Lake Monsters, it hasn’t been shown. There were claims about explicit movies of the Loch Ness Monster made many years ago, but when examined, these claims pretty much evaporated. (These were claims of above-water motion pictures actrualy showing details of the head. Tantalizing to think about, but they never materialized. All we have are shots of dots moving in the distance, still photos of heads above water that appear to be faked, and the underwater strobe photos that are now seen to be more reconstruction than reality.)
Basically the story was that the founder of the Le Dynasty in Vietnam had a magic sword given him by the Golden Turtle God, later at Hoan Kiem Lake the Turtle God took it back.
In 1967 it turned out there were some giant turtles living in the lake. A dead turtle was discovered that was over 6 feet in length and weighed over 400 pounds. Three live turtles have since been discovered, two are now living in zoos in China and the third is in a zoo in Vietnam.
The lake itself is rather small and shallow so nobody had previously expected to find giant turtles living there.
I find the Mansi Photograph, purportedly of “Champ” the mythical creature of Lake Champlain, interesting, though it certainly doesn’t prove anything & is not without it’s debunkers.
I live near Silver Lake, NY which is the alleged home of the Silver Lake Serpent. It was supposedly sighted back in 1855.
Now ignore for the minute the implausibility that an unknown species of sea serpent is living in a lake that’s only three miles long and less than half a mile across.
The reality is that two years after the Serpent was sighted, there was a fire in a local hotel. And when firemen were putting out the fire they found a big mechanical sea serpent in the hotel’s attic. Which, as the hotel’s owners subsequently admitted, had been used to drum up some publicity for the town.
Now at this point, rational people would say the case was closed. But irrational people still claim that the Silver Lake Serpent is real. They insist that we should believe the original reports from 1855 while questioning the 1857 reports of the debunking. They sit there with a straight face and claim that they’re too skeptical to believe any story about a fake mechanical sea monster.
The most pervasive evidence of the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot (my point is coming) is those blurry photos we’d seen in the 1970’s, rich with film grain artifacts and all. They were the best photos possible, and the looked authentic – they had some film artifacts that you might have found when the Zapruder film is paused for example, or some astronomical photos taken, from Earth-bound telescopes – pre-Hubble, I’m talking about. Their graininess and blurriness were part of their appeal – the target in question is so crafty, super-human in it’s fitness for the environment, that only the best monster hunter can get this grainy photo.
Somewhere in my archives I have the coolest photoshop ever for this topic. It’s Bigfoot riding Nessie the the famous Loch photo. The graininess and blurriness match perfectly. The kids today look at it and go, “Meh, pretty cool 'shop.” But they fail to realize, that photo quality would have been in a 1970’s book as incontrovertible evidence, of “something”. I may seach for it if someone else doesn’t find it first.
It’s been mentioned before, the ubiquity of good quality digital cameras has killed ufology, no one accepts blurry evidence anymore. When before, like I said, the blurriness was accepted, even held to prove the truth of the image.
I’ve been to Loch Ness. The museum there is filled with fuzzy pictures, fuzzy movies, and anecdotal stories. It’s enough to make you really want to believe. Of course I don’t, but I looked over the loch for a period of time, wistfully wishing I could catch a glimpse of something: anything!
After all these years and hundreds of thousands of tourists with cameras (not to mention sonar sweeps of the loch) there not one solid piece of evidence.
I don’t believe in the famous lake monsters but there is one creature that could be considered a lake or river monster if they weren’t so common and people didn’t know what they were. Alligator gar are a giant species of prehistoric fish that live in the muddy waters of the Southeastern U.S. and look like true monster with big teeth and all. They can also swim with their head above water. They would make a fine monster sighting if there were only a few of them scattered around.
Ha, I am originally from Perry =) and my mum currently lives in Caledonia =)
The lake isn’t really big enough for much of a critter, it maxes out at 3 miles long and 2/3 mile across. I used to swim across and back every morning with my dad as exercise when I was younger. I think the deepest it gets is like 100 feet deep or something. And on the odd sort, it has the inlet and outlet at the same end [though it does have a number of small springs at the other end making a lovely swamp]