The Loch Ness monster may get all of the cryptid love and top media coverage, but a video is worth a thousand blurry pictures of log-a-likes. A recent video and multiple recent sightings of another alleged lake monster puts Canada’s Ogopogo at the top of the cryptozoology heap, at least for a few weeks until some armchair explorer searching Google Earth finds another far-away-not-a-stump-but what-is-it Nessie photo without setting foot in Scotland.
At least brothers David and Keith Halbauer were standing on the shore of Lake Okanagan in British Columbia having a picnic with their families … yes, there was probably beer being consumed – it’s Canada … but there were other witnesses and a video of … something.
“When you’re sitting by the beach on a sunny day you don’t expect to see a dinosaur come out of the water. I saw this black form come out of the water — cylindrical — and then roll.”
It’s hard to tell from the video supplied to Global News but David Halbauer estimated the “giant snake” to be about 15 meters (50 feet) long and big enough that “I don’t think I could put my arms around it.” That matches the most common description of Ogopogo or Naitaka (an indigenous name meaning “lake demon”), the alleged monster in Okanagan Lake whose sightings date back to the 1800s. As their name suggests, the First Nations people considered the creature to be an evil spirit rather than an extinct (except for this one) local dinosaur like a Basilosaurus or Mosasaurus.
There have been enough Ogopogo sightings that, like Nessie, it warrants a local expert who runs a website and keeps track of its appearances. Bill Steciuk, a multiple-times witness himself, runs the site and told Global News that he hasn’t had this much work to do in years.
“There haven’t been a lot of Ogopogo sightings lately, which is the problem. Then all of a sudden you have three in three weeks — totally amazing.”
Steciuk is referring to two subsequent sightings of Ogopogo reported to his site – one by “Andrew S,” an amateur photographer who took a better-than-amateur photographer (See it here.)
“I was sitting on the shore of Bluebird Bay on a quiet Sunday (September 9, 2018). I am an amateur photographer and I love catching images on the lake. A large moving object suddenly reared out of the lake and moved quickly from left to right in my view. As you can see in my picture, there is a boat in the distance toward Squally Point, but nothing else, certainly no boats large enough to kick up such a wake.”
On September 18, “Martin” – who was “working on the 22nd floor of a new highrise condo” near the lake, had this experience:
“I noticed that there are not many boats in the water on a weekday and how calm the water was. I saw something in the water today that is very hard for me to explain. It looked like a giant snake breaching out of the water (barely) but enough to make pretty big waves in and around it. There were no boats in the area, and the water was very, very calm. I told a co-worker to look out at the water in the area in question and my co-worker was looking and seeing what I was seeing and was also dumbfounded.”
No photos, but two witnesses who estimated what they saw was “30-50 feet long” and surfaced for 2-3 minutes – apparently not long enough for “Martin” to pull out his cellphone. However, both he and “Andrew” commented that the lake was calm during their sightings and there were no boats or wind to create a monster-like wave.
So, what did all of these different witnesses see last month on Lake Okanagan? It was too big to be a sturgeon or muskellunge or even a swimming moose. Two of the three sightings had multiple witnesses and there were photos and videos. Bill Steciuk needs no further convincing that there’s something out there, especially since he runs the website and sells T-shirts. However, it’s far-fetched to believe either body of water holds a dinosaur.
How about a lake demon?