Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World's Most Elusive Creatures

Appendix 1. Mysteries And Misinformation: How Cryptozoologists Created a Monster

ApPENDIX I MYSTERIES AND MISINFORMATION: How CRYPTOZOOLOGISTS CREATED A MONSTER Sifting through information on lake monsters is made somewhat difficult by sloppy scholarship. Many writers get details wrong, and reports are often contradictory. I encountered this most notably in my research of the Lake Champlain mystery. By far the most common misconception about Champ is that the creature was sighted by the person it was (indirectly) named for: explorer Samuel de Champlain. As is often the case, consulting original sources shed light on the mystery. Michel Meurger devotes an appendix in Lake Monster Traditions to reprinting the full, original account and sets the record straight: "Under the magic wand of sensationalism, the simple note of an inexperienced naturalist becomes 'rare testimony,' and the explorer becomes godfather to a monster he never saw!" (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 270). Whether due to ignorance, poor scholarship, or mystery mongering, this misunderstanding is pervasive in the Champ literature, repeated by everyone from Joe Zarzynski to Dennis Hall to the Champ sighting signboard in Port Henty to a 1998 Discover magazine article to Sandra Mansi herself. Nature doesn't interpret itself; that task is left to investigators and scientists. Data and information are simply sterile observations and quantifications until they are given meaning and context by those examining the phenomena. In cryptozoology, because the evidence is 153 ApPENDIXES often ambiguous (photographs, footprints, sighting reports), it's especially important to let the evidence speak for itself and not read too much into it. Conjecture and assumptions are fine, but they should be firmly grounded and not simply based on other unconfirmed assumptions and conjecture. To do otherwise risks building an argument on a house of cards. When interviewing eyewitness Sandra Mansi at length about her sighting and photograph, I was particularly intrigued by her description of the process by which she came to the conclusion that what she saw was the reputed monster Champ. After all, the famous photograph she took is not obviously Champlain's lake denizen. It might be, but as J. Richard Greenwell has noted, it isn't necessarily a lake creature, or even a living object. Some accounts of Mansi's encounter suggest that she saw the lake monster, identified it as Champ, and took a photo of it. But according to Mansi, that's not what happened. Part of the problem with this description is that it starts with the answer; the assumption is made that what she saw and photographed was a lake creature. But another, more accurate (and scientific) approach is to stick to the facts and simply report that she saw and photographed an unknown object that was later thought (by others) to be Champ. Some may argue that this is an irrelevant detail, but I disagree; reporting that Mansi saw and photographed Champ grossly oversimplifies what happened, and, as is often the case in investigations, the devil is in the details. The fact is that the best eyewitness to a lake monster didn't identifY it as such until cryptozoologists convinced her that that's what it was. The details of Sandra Mansi's encounter with Champ are related in chapter 2. But her progression from eyewitness to Champ advocate is interesting and instructive. She went through three distinct stages of belief about what she had seen: I. At time of the sighting, Mansi wasn't sure what she was seeing. She thought that it might be an optical illusion, but not the Lake Champlain monster. She was duly skeptical at first, well aware that perceptions can be deceiving and that the light, water, and lack of 154 ApPENDIXES contextual cues can be misleading. (Mansi said, "I thought it was maybe the sun.... The lake can do funny things-it really can.") It could have been, she says, a trick ofthe light or a large fish. As for the local lake monster, although Mansi had heard stories of Champ as a girl, she didn't take them seriously; Champ was the creature that would eat little children if they didn't behave. Before this, Mansi thought of Champ "kind of like the Tooth Fairy," she says. "Champ came into my mind, but I totally dismissed it ... we convinced ourselves it was probably a fish or whatever and we sent it to the Photomat." 2. When the photograph was developed and she saw the image on the print, Mansi was certain that it wasn't an...