History of the Lake Champlain Sea Monster

Lake Champlain, named for French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who explored the area in 1609, is sometimes called New England's west coast, and sometimes called the Sixth Great Lake. It's an over 100-mile long freshwater lake, carved when the glaciers receded in the last Ice Age. It is 400 feet deep at its greatest depth, and reported, even since the 1600s, as being the home of a sea monster. According to the Lake Champlain Lake Trust website, over 300 of these sightings have been reported in just the last 100 years.

Modern-era sightings of Champ, as the mysterious creature is known by the locals, were made by passengers of ferry steamships in the 1870s, about the time of the first "Nessie" sighting in Loch Ness, Scotland. Long-time "Champ" searcher and author Joseph W. Zarzynski has produced a sonar image of a creature or something with the help of Rochester Engineering Laboratories, noted in the article by Mark Chorvinsky published on the Strangemag.com website.

But there is enough evidence of Champ's existence on T-shirts, mugs, key chains and U-Haul trucks. He's the official mascot of the Vermont Lake Monsters baseball team, and the star of at least one children's book. Busy guy. One of these days, when Champ appears in the flesh, he's going to be a millionaire with all that merchandising.

The search for Champ began in the late 1800s when circus promoter and entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, hearing stories of Champ, wrote to a New York newspaper in the Lake Champlain area to offer $20,000 for the capture of Champ, dead or alive. As noted by author A. H. Saxon in "PT Barnum: The Legend and the Man" (Columbia University Press, 1989), Barnum wanted to include it among his exhibits of the weird and wonderful.

Reportedly the Iroquois before European settlement told stories of a serpent, and Samuel de Champlain himself might have caught sight of something unusual. He never called it a sea monster and he never called it Champ. And it wasn't exactly in Lake Champlain, but up near the St. Lawrence River. What he described could have been one of the large garfish that inhabit the lake. "Champ" as a phenomenon and mascot came later. Reports of sightings in the late 1800s, including those published in the New York Times in 1873, were the most famous encounters until the 1970s, when eyewitness accounts gave way to a few somewhat blurry photographs.

The popular guess is that if Champ exists, he may be a creature called a plesiosaur, according to the Lake Champlain Lake Trust, which were marine reptiles with long necks, four fins and a long tail. They have been extinct for millions of years. Unless they're not.

Part of the skepticism surrounding the Champ searches, beyond the obvious fact that Champ is so shy and doesn't like publicity, is that, as noted by the LCLT, it would require usually about 50 adult specimens of this creature to have a breeding population for them to survive unto this day. For there to be at least that many, you'd think we have seen more of them once in a while.

Lake Champlain is similar to Scotland's famed Loch Ness, reportedly home of the famous sea monster, Nessie. Both lakes are long, very deep, narrow and cold. Lake Champlain also has an outlet through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean, so if Champ wanted to duck out the back door to avoid your Aunt Bessie with her new digital camera snapping photos from the deck of the ferry out of Burlington, he could. Or, he could have before dams were built. Lake Champlain's eel population has encountered a similar problem of getting in and out of the lake, as recently noted in an Associated Press article published on the MSNBC website.

Interestingly, not a lot of reports of sightings of Champ occurred before the mid-19^th Century, despite whatever the Iroquois or Samuel de Champlain might have thought about him. Possibly this is because not a whole lot of people lived in this area up until the late 1800s, and those that did had better things to do, like survive, than to look for sea monsters.

In the 1970s the Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation (LCPI) group was formed (now inactive), with Joseph Zarzynski as its head. In an article by Craig Heinselman, "The Denizen of Lake Champlain," published on the Cryptozoology.com website which discusses Zarzynski's contributions to the search for Champ, he also notes that the famous Mansi photograph taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera in 1977 has become probably the most famous image of Champ. Champ is estimated to be about 15 to 20 feet in length. Other Champ seekers have joined the hunt, or the bandwagon, since then.

The Lake Champlain Lake Trust is joined by the Lake Champlain Region.com website in its warm regard for Champ. The latter website notes Bulwagga Bay seems to be the spot where most of the Champ sightings are reported. Port Henry, New York sports a sign posting "Champ Sightings in Bulwagga Bay Area." An image can be found on the Lake Champlain Region website. It looks rather like a typical small-town "honor roll" that lists the fallen in war.

Floating logs have been mistaken for Champ, and a lake effect called a seiche, which is an underwater wave that sometimes occurs even though the lake surface is calm. Sturgeon in the lake, more endangered than evidently Champ, run about six feet in length but can grow larger. They are also sometimes mistaken for Champ.

Lots of sightings, but no real evidence, no absolute proof, and no discovery of bones or dead Champs. If these creatures live, they must die sometime as well, if only to give us a clue that they actually did live.

If Champ does exist, he has nothing to worry about from the likes of present-day P.T. Barnums. Both the State of Vermont and the State of New York, in 1982 and 1983, respectively, passed resolutions protecting Champ. If he's real.

Lake Champlain is actually home to the oldest coral reef in the world, the Chazy Reef, as noted by the Isle Le Motte Preservation Trust. It is a proven phenomenon, but one perhaps no less easy to explain.

Most of us love a mystery, and that perhaps is what keeps Champ alive.

A. H. Saxon in "PT Barnum: The Legend and the Man" (Columbia University Press, 1989)

Lake Champlain Region.com http://www.lakechamplainregion.com/content_pages/champyhome.cfm

Lake Champlain Land Trust http://www.lclt.org/Champ.htm

Craig Heinselman, article in Cryptozoology.com. http://www.cryptozoology.com/cryptids/champ.php

Isle Le Motte Preservation Trust. http://www.ilmpt.org/chazy.html

Mark Chorvinsky, article in Strangemag.com http://www.strangemag.com/champ.html

Associated Press as reported by MSNBC 12-11-07. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22208248/