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

Appendix 4. Ogopogo Film And Video Analysis

ApPENDIX 4 OGOPOGO FILM AND VIDEO ANALYSIS Our primary source for images of the Lake Okanagan creature, Ogopogo , was Arlene Gaal, an invaluable resource and a tireless researcher. Gaal has collected photographs, videos, and sighting reports since she moved to Kelowna, British Columbia, in 1968. During our investigation , she shared her photos and videos with Joe Nickell, John Kirk, and me, as well as with the National Geographic producers, explaining picture by picture what each image suggested to her. In 2004 several Ogopogo films were professionally analyzed for the SciFi Channel show ProofPositive. Although it was the most thorough and sophisticated computer analysis done to date, each film failed to provide good evidence for the monster. In one case, when the image was stabilized and compared to fixed objects in the background, the investigator concluded that the dark humps that appeared to be moving weren't moving at all. In another, the Ogopogo humps were misaligned in the water and therefore couldn't be from the same creature-suggesting waves or several small animals (perhaps beavers or otters) instead of one large monster. One video was interesting because of the eyewitnesses ' disagreement about what it depicted; what one person described as "three very distinct humps," another saw quite plainly as waves created by "something pushing the water up." One widely seen Ogopogo video shot by a man named Ken Chaplin became a local joke, with viewers pointing out that the "mystery creature" was obviously a beaver swimming with its head raised-the tail slapping the water was a telltale sign. John Kirk was "flabbergasted at how Chaplin could possibly have thought he captured Ogopogo on 168 ApPENDIXES tape. He had categorically stated that the animal was between nine and twelve feet long, but what we were seeing on the screen was obviously nowhere near that size." One Kelowna resident told me that many local folks were embarrassed when the film was broadcast because it made them look like they didn't know a beaver when they saw one. (I pointed out that it was probably an honest mistake, and besides, it was an American TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, that had paid $30,000 for the most expensive beaver footage in history!) Most films, of course, are more ambiguous, and some misidentifications are to be expected. The poor quality ofthe majority ofOgopogo images means that they yield little information, but Gaal offered a few as the "cream ofthe crop." None had been thoroughly examined, and she was pleased to have our expertise and the National Geographic crew available . Here I highlight our analyses of two of the best Ogopogo films. THE THAL FILM On August II, I980, a tourist group near the Bluebird Bay Resort Motel in downtown Kelowna saw a dark green creature about sixty feet long out on the lake. The object was said to be about a hundred yards away, moving at twenty-five miles per hour. The object passed back and forth in front of the group four times and was observed for about forty-five minutes. One Vancouver resident, Larry ThaI, had a Super 8 movie camera with him and managed to capture about ten seconds of the activity. Gaal owns the unedited 8mm film, but no projector was available; the best we had was a VHS transfer done many years earlier-not by a paid professional but by "a friend who had some sophisticated equipment ." This was, Gaal said, the first time this film had been examined by experts. As we watched, several dark humps moved around briefly out in the water. Gaal estimated that each protrusion "appeared to be two feet or more out of the water" and three to five feet long. Yet the footage shows nothing of scale nearby, so distance and size are impossible to verifY. It did appear to be one or more live creatures-not a log or a wave-but they could have been a number of known animals. ApPENDIXES As we watched, with Gaal narrating and the TV crew looking on, the segment looped twice, then an image ofa dark, vertical object froze on the screen. Gaal described a head and neck in the freeze-frame. In her book Ogopogo (I986, 54) she wrote: "One frame clearly shows a prehistoric-like image, similar to the sketch drawn by the Wong family during their I976 bridge sighting. The next frame really caught my attention. The mouth...