Lake Monster Mysteries (8 page)

The best photographic evidence of Champ—indeed, of any lake monster—is that taken by Sandra Mansi in 1977. Kirk (1998, 133) states, “The monster of Lake Champlain.… has the distinction of being the only lake monster of whom there is a reasonably clear photograph,” and he considers the photo “extremely good evidence of an unidentified lake-dwelling animal.” Zarzynski (1984a, 62) says that the photo is the “best single piece of evidence on Champ.” Another writer, Jerome Clark (1993, 67), says, “By any standard the Mansi photograph remains a genuine mystery and a serious obstacle to any effort to reduce the Champ phenomenon to mundane causes.”

With the 1993 revelation that the most famous photo of the Loch Ness monster was a hoax (see
chapter 1
), the Mansi photo stands alone as the most credible and important photographic evidence of the existence of lake monsters. Because the authenticity of the photograph is held in such high regard by so many writers and researchers, it seemed appropriate to take a fresh look at the evidence. Rather than relying on published accounts of the story, which are often fragmentary and contain contradictory details (see
appendix 1
), we went directly to the primary source, interviewing Sandra Mansi in detail and at length in August 2002.

According to Mansi, her family's encounter with Champ took place on Tuesday, July 5, 1977. Sandra and her fiancé, Anthony Mansi, along with Sandra's two children from a previous marriage, were taking a leisurely drive along Lake Champlain. They drove by some farmland and, around noon, made their way to a small bluff overlooking the lake. The two children went down to the water while Anthony returned to the car to get a camera. As Sandra watched her children and the lake, she noticed a disturbance in the water about 150 feet away. She thought at first that it was a school of fish, then possibly a scuba diver. “Then the
head and neck broke the surface of the water. Then I saw the head come up, then the neck, then the back.”

Figure.2.6
Sandra Mansi's 1977 photograph of a mysterious object in Lake Champlain. This image has been touted as the best evidence of the existence of lake monsters. (Copyright 1980 by Sandra Mansi, all rights reserved)

Mansi didn't panic: “I wasn't even scared, I'm just trying to figure out what I'm seeing. Then when Tony came over the field he saw it and started screaming, ‘Get the kids out of the water!'” The kids scrambled up the bank and headed toward the car. As Anthony helped Sandra up the bank, he handed her the camera. She knelt down, snapped one photo (
figure 2.6
), and then put the camera down to watch the creature. The Mansis estimated that the creature's neck stuck about six feet out of the water and was about twelve to fifteen feet long. The sighting lasted a remarkably long time—between five and seven minutes—during which the creature never turned to face the shore. Sandra Mansi described the neck and head as dark in color and said that what we see in the photograph is as much of the creature as she saw.

After several minutes, the head and neck slowly sank into the water and were gone. The Mansis then headed home. They didn't report the
sighting to anyone but took the unfinished roll of film to a local Photomat. The photo was tucked away in an album for four years. It then came to the attention of cryptozoologists (see
appendix 1
for details about how this came about) and was published in the
New York Times
on June 30, 1981, to great fanfare. Soon after, a well-publicized Champ seminar was held to discuss the creature and the photograph. In Port Henry, New York (the self-proclaimed home of Champ), the aforementioned signboard listing Champ sightings in the Bulwagga Bay area (see
figure 2.3
) provides a timeline of sightings, as well as insight into how Mansi's photo (rather than her actual sighting four years earlier) likely spawned other sighting reports. Almost exactly half of the 132 sightings listed on the board (as of August 2002) are dated 1981 or 1982, immediately after the photo's release and the resultant publicity. This fact strongly argues for the “bandwagon effect,” whereby widely publicized sightings lead to other reports, independent of an actual creature's presence or absence. Instead of an actual creature triggering other sightings, publicity about a “new” four-year-old photo triggered new sightings (this same effect occurred at Lake Okanagan; see
chapter 7
). It isn't much of a stretch to state that Mansi's photo launched the modern Champ phenomenon.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the Mansi photograph by itself is intriguing but holds almost no value as evidence. It contains little usable information; whether by accident or design, virtually everything needed to determine the photograph's authenticity (and subject matter) is missing, lost, or unavailable. For example, Mansi can't provide the negative, which might show evidence of tampering. She said she habitually threw away her negatives; they weren't lost, as others have reported. She also can't provide other photographs taken on the roll, which might show other angles of the same object or perhaps “test” photos of a known object from an odd position. Mansi is unable to locate the site of the photo, which would help determine a number of things, including the size of the object. And the photo has virtually no objects of known scale (e.g., boat, human) by which to judge the creature's size or distance. The fact that the Mansis waited four years to release the photo was also seen as suspicious. All we are left with is a
fantastic story in which the only supporting proof is a compelling but ambiguous photograph of something in the water.

Because of the litany of missing information and the high quality of the image, suspicions of a hoax surfaced almost as quickly as Champ. Such accusations were summarily dismissed by Mansi family lawyer Alan Neigher, who said that his clients “could no more have constructed such a hoax than put a satellite in orbit.” Though some have suggested that Mansi tried to get rich from the photo, she proudly points out that she turned down lucrative offers from supermarket tabloids to reprint the photo. It was, she said, an issue of credibility.

Richard D. Smith, a filmmaker who was producing a documentary on Champ, offered his expert commentary on the matter of a hoax: “As a photographer and filmmaker, I can speak with some authority as to what it would take to fake a picture of this sort. Assuming the remote possibility that the Mansi photo is a fraud, it would require fabrication of an excellent, full-sized model (highly expensive in terms of expertise and materials) which would have to be smuggled out to Champlain or another lake, there assembled or inflated, and successfully maneuvered around out in the water (most difficult, especially with a slight wind blowing), the whole thing accomplished without being seen or the slightest leak in security (unlikely)” (Smith 1984).

Smith's account is nearly comical in its strained assumptions. He envisions an “excellent, full-sized model” of the Champ monster, which certainly is unlikely. But the Mansi photograph doesn't show an “excellent, full-sized model” of Champ; it shows a dark, featureless, ambiguous curved form of unknown size in the water. Surely such an object wouldn't be as difficult to fake as Smith presumes.

Other attempts to dismiss the possibility of a hoax are also strained. In his analysis of the photo (discussed in more detail later), B. Roy Frieden of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona suggested that it “would be very difficult to hoax the object,” due in part to the fact that “the water is cold, therefore you'd have to have a wetsuit on, real protection from the cold water” (Frieden 1981). The photograph, however, was allegedly taken in July, and Sandra Mansi's children were playing in the water, presumably without wetsuits. During our initial
experiments at Lake Champlain (discussed later), I had the privilege of taking measurements in the lake while my co-investigator stayed warm and dry on the shore (“Champ bait,” he called me). Although I was in fairly deep water, I was chilly but not uncomfortable, and I certainly didn't need thermal protection. (Though admittedly, when we re-created our experiments later for a Discovery Channel documentary, the water was somewhat colder.)

Jerome Clark (1983) asks, “If Sandra Mansi did help perpetrate a difficult, expensive hoax, why did she take only one photograph?” This simply begs the question: How do we know she took only one photograph? Just because she has shown only one to the world doesn't mean that there aren't others—perhaps ones that reveal more clues about the object. If Clark is willing to suppose for argument's sake that Mansi might lie about her story, why would he assume that she would tell the truth about how many photos she took?

One could just as easily argue that the taking of only one photo makes a hoax more likely, not less so. The one photo is intriguing enough to cause a flurry of interest in Champ but doesn't provide enough clues to allow a close analysis. The camera had more film in it; the Champ photograph wasn't the last one on the roll. In addition, Mansi says that the creature never even saw her family, so she was presumably in no danger of being detected, threatened, or chased if she had stayed to take more photos. Mansi claims that she took only one because she didn't think to take another; in hindsight, she says that of course she should have finished off the roll. But by that time, she and her family were out of the water, off the shore, and safe on a bluff 150 feet away.

However far-fetched some of the hoax dismissals are, I believe that they are fundamentally correct. In our discussions with Mansi, and after an exhaustive and detailed review of both her account and her photograph, I have come to the conclusion that she is probably an honest and sincere eyewitness reporting essentially what she saw.

Part of the reason I believe Mansi's story is that, like many real eyewitness accounts, it is flawed and partially contradictory; if Mansi had faked the whole encounter, her story would have been tailored to
be more consistent with other Champ sightings. Also, my assumption as an investigator is that, in general, eyewitnesses are truthful. Though cryptozoology is littered with hoaxes and faked evidence, I see no need to label someone a liar or a hoaxer absent strong evidence of deception. Assuming that both the account and the photo are truthful (though error-prone) records of something in the water, what can we conclude about it?

In 1981, B. Roy Frieden examined the photograph at the behest of Champ researcher Joe Zarzynski. Frieden's findings were outlined in his “Interim Report” and published in Zarzynski's 1984 book
Champ: Beyond the Legend.

Frieden believed the picture to be a valid print and found no evidence of photographic tampering. However, he did find a “suspicious detail” in the picture: “When I showed it to a woman who formerly lived at Lake Champlain, she immediately noticed a brownish streak going horizontally from left to right across the picture right up to the object in question. She right out said that it looked to her like a sandbar.” Frieden believed the streak to be “a real detail in the picture” and suggested that if it was a sandbar, “then there is a distinct possibility that the object was put there by someone.… the sandbar problem really has to be investigated.” Frieden also suggested that the photograph may not have been taken where Mansi said it was: “She [the former resident] was suspicious that the lake was so narrow at that point because Lake Champlain is colossal in width, and that this would have had to take place at what's called ‘The Narrows' by the natives who live around there for it to be a true photograph of the area. I say it's suspicious because if it is an uncharacteristically narrow portion of the lake, perhaps the picture wasn't taken at Lake Champlain but rather at some other body of water.” The general area of the sighting is relatively shallow, and to date, the sandbar explanation remains a possibility. No evidence has surfaced that the photo was not taken at Champlain.

Another analysis was conducted by Paul H. LeBlond of the Department of Oceanography at the University of British Columbia. LeBlond (1982) attempted to use the general appearance of the waters surface to estimate the length of the waves and then use that as a scale by which to judge the object in the photograph. After listing the many possible sources of error, LeBlond sums up: “The inescapable conclusion [despite all the unknowns] is that the object seen in the Mansi photograph is of considerable size.” He estimated its length to be between sixteen and fifty-six feet.

LeBlond used a complex formula involving wind speed, fetch, wave period, and wave height—all of which were estimated. LeBlond did his best with the scant evidence he had to work with, but no matter how good the math or the model is, with so many unknown variables, any result will be little better than a wild guess. LeBlond's analysis, by his own admission, was imprecise: “Sources of error may appear at many stages of the estimation method, and this must be kept in mind when interpreting the results.” Most writers who cite the LeBlond analysis fail to mention this important caveat and portray his results as conclusive and scientifically sound. One writer goes so far as to say that LeBlond's heavily qualified conclusions “destroyed the learned academic's [i.e., Frieden's] hypothesis that the animal could have been a fake” (Kirk 1998, 135). (Though again, I agree with Kirk that it isn't faked.)