- CHARLOTTE -- It's a flat,
dead-calm summer evening on Lake Champlain, the kind of night when the
water's surface looks like a gigantic mirror. Vermonters Dick Affolter
and Pete Bodette, Affolter's 34-year-old stepson, are fishing for salmon
just west of the mouth of the Ausable River on the New York side of the
lake.
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- They're in Bodette's boat -- a 21-foot Bayliner Trophy
-- and as the two experienced fishermen begin putting their lines in the
water, they notice something on the surface, out some distance from them.
It's Monday night, July 11, and no other boats are in the area. At first,
Affolter, a retired Essex attorney, thinks he's looking at a floating railroad
tie. No, he realizes, it's too long. Maybe it's a tree trunk.
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- Then it moves, in a serpentine manner, they say, leaving
a sizable wake -- a series of patterned ripples like corduroy -- on the
smooth surface. The two fishermen know they are not looking at a railroad
tie. Or a tree trunk.
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- But they don't know what it is. Later, when they see
it again and capture digital images of it -- they know no more than before.
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- In the days following, as they talk to others and show
their videos, the question emerges: Was it Champ?
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- Any unexplained, unique or unidentified sighting on Lake
Champlain, of course, brings to the fore the legend of Champ -- the mythical
Lake Champlain creature that has been subject of debate and speculation
for almost 400 years. Some people have photographed what they claim to
be Champ, and in 2003 a team of scientists recorded a series of high-frequency
sounds similar to those made by sea mammals coming from the lake's depths.
But the presence of a large marine animal unique to Lake Champlain is more
folklore than fact.
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- Affolter and Bodette do not claim that they saw Champ.
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- "We saw something on that lake we've never seen
before," Bodette said. "Is what we saw the same thing other people
saw, and they called Champ? I don't know."
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- When the pair first noticed something on the lake's surface,
Bodette and Affolter thought it was a fish.
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- "I said to Dick, 'Just troll over to that thing,'"
said Bodette, a Charlotte resident. "As a joke I said, 'Watch that
thing take off when we get close to it.' Sure enough, we got to about 20
or 30 yards and it just slowly submerged."
-
- Bodette remembers telling Affolter, and maybe he dropped
a cuss word in there: "That's a humongous fish. Humongous."
-
- The two seasoned anglers could not identify what species
of fish it might have been -- especially one they estimated to be 15 feet
long that was breaking the surface where the lake is close to 200 feet
deep.
-
- They continued to fish for salmon. A half-hour later,
maybe more, they saw activity on the surface again. This time Affolter
piloted the Bayliner close enough for Bodette to use his Canon digital
camera. Bodette snapped pictures and recorded several short movies. He
saved the images on his home computer, naming the files various versions
of "Pete's Serpent."
-
- The digital recordings clearly show something of significant
size moving just under the surface. It does not appear to be a boat wake
or a school of fish or cormorants. In one frame it almost looks as if the
head of an alligator-like animal breaks the surface, the setting sun reflecting
off what could be an eye.
-
- In the short digital movies, which were shown to a reporter
and editor, the camera zooms in and out of focus at one point and Bodette
can be heard asking Affolter: "What in hell is that thing?"
- More lore
-
- The modern legend of the lake creature known as Champ
dates back to 1609 when French explorer Samuel de Champlain described a
fish with "dangerous teeth" that the native peoples said grew
to 10 feet in length. Champlain might have been describing a gar, but his
shortcomings as a naturalist laid the foundation for hundreds of years
of second-guessing.
-
- Strange sightings on the lake can be written off as a
number of unusual natural phenomena -- from large lake sturgeon basking
on the surface, to a school of large fish chasing bait, to a family of
otters swimming. Yet throughout the years, hundreds of people -- boaters,
picnickers, swimmers -- claim to have spotted Champ. Some snapped photographs
of what they saw, some relayed their stories to the newspapers.
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- In the late 1800s, showman P.T. Barnum penned a letter
to a small New York newspaper on the south end of the lake offering a $50,000
reward for hide of the "Great Champlain sea serpent." The Burlington
Free Press has reported creature sightings throughout the years, often
running the accounts in daily coverage.
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- One of the most famous sightings took place in 1977 when
New Hampshire's Sandra Mansi, spending a day on the lakeshore with her
family near St. Albans, snapped a photograph that seems to show something
emerging from the water. In 1992, NBC television ran a Champ story on its
then-popular television show "Unsolved Mysteries," using Mansi's
photograph in the discussion.
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- Another sighting was reported this week: WCAX-TV aired
a story about a 75-year old man near Vergennes who reportedly took a recent
picture of a creature on the surface of Lake Champlain.
- Science weighs in
-
- Steve Smith, director of facilities at ECHO at the Leahy
Center for Lake Champlain, has seen Bodette's and Affolter's digital images.
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- "I don't know what it is," Smith said. "The
majority of the video is very indiscernible. In one frame, he seems to
feel there's an eye coming out of the water, but to me, I thought I was
looking at an otter's nose. I've never seen anything that definitively
proves the existence of Champ, and that video doesn't, either."
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- Affolter dismisses the otter theory: "It looks,
maybe, like a big otter ... if an otter was 15 feet long."
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- Bodette's story made its way to Elizabeth von Muggenthaler,
a former Charlotte resident living in Hillsborough, N.C., where she's president
of Fauna Communication Institute, a firm that studies how animals communicate.
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- In 2003, von Muggenthaler spent nearly a week on Champlain
for the Discovery Channel, searching for Champ with highly sensitive sonar
equipment. The crew of scientists recorded a series of rapid, high-frequency
clicks and ticks that sounds whale- or dolphin-like to the trained ear.
The pitch was seven times out of the range of the human ear, von Muggenthaller
said, and cannot be attributed to any fish species in Champlain.
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- The equipment von Muggenthaler's crew used two summers
ago determined the creature that emitted the high frequency sound was 15
feet long.
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- The 2003 recording of the sounds has been reviewed and
scrutinized by other acoustic scientists, von Muggenthaler said. Von Muggenthaler,
who arrived in Vermont last week, has seen Bodette's video and pictures.
She can't say with certainty that this is the creature she heard in 2003,
but in her mind the sounds she recorded that summer and these images captured
by a fisherman are linked.
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- "Clearly," von Muggenthaler said, "this
deserves serious investigation."
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- Mary Watzin, director of the University of Vermont's
Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory, said to her knowledge UVM researchers
haven't seriously studied the Champ phenomenon. With the right hypothesis,
Watzin said, perhaps Champ would be deserving of further inspection.
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- "I'm always open to the possibility of seeing something
new on that lake," Watzin said. "I'm very skeptical of the theory
there is some long-lost dinosaur swimming around, but I'm certainly open
to the idea there's something we haven't seen out there."
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- In the past few weeks von Muggenthaler and Bodette have
been approached by the Travel Channel for a show about sea monsters. A
California-based production company offered money for the film, but Bodette
turned it down after he saw where the television show was going.
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- "This just doesn't belong in the same category as
crop circles or a Sasquatch sighting," von Muggenthaler said. "It
needs to be treated as real. You don't want to minimize the scientific
importance of this."
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- _____
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- For more of Liz von Muggenthaler's remarkable research:
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- http://www.animalvoice.com/lakechamplain.htm
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