Champ On TV
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 9th, 2006
Raymond A. Edel’s "TV best bets" for Thursday, March 9, 2006, is mentioning "America’s Loch Ness Monster" for viewing tonight, at 7:00 PM Eastern, on the Discovery Channel (in the USA).
Scotland has its legendary creature of Loch Ness, but Lake Champlain — between northern New York and Vermont — has its own alleged monster named Champ.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Watched it earlier, pretty good. The Hall video from 2003 was very interesting.
The tanystropheus theory, if true, would answer a lot of questions and reconcile a lot of the evidence from other lake monster sightings:
– The long neck and other features of the build are very similar to plesiosaurs. Many eyewitnesses say the closest thing to what they saw, out of anything else they have seen, is a plesiosaur. A tanystropheus-like animal could very easily be mistaken for a plesiosaur, especially if a witness is only seeing part of the animal.
– Both Champ and Nessie have allegedly been sighted traveling on land, something that would be difficult to impossible for a plesiosaur to accomplish.
– If the cryptid in Lake Champlain is a tanystropheus or a relative and can echolocate, and if the cryptid in Loch Ness is close to the same thing, this might explain why the sonar scans of Loch Ness have been unsuccessful. The cryptid would be able to hear the sonar coming and even leave the loch if necessary. It might even migrate from loch to loch and might not even be in Loch Ness when much of the scanning is being performed. That’s a lot of “ifs”, but not outside the realm of possibility.
– The Native American carvings from Battleboro, Vermont look eerily like a tanystropheus. The incredibly long neck and tail is dead on, and the similarity extends down to the detail of the hind legs being larger than the forelegs.
See the carvings here.
And a BBC drawing of what a tanystropheus would look like.
– The Mansi photo, if genuine, could portray a tanystropheus. What I find convincing about it in light of the tanystropheus theory is the highlighting on the twist in the neck. I don’t think hoaxsters would be able to hoax this accurately, or even think to hoax it in the first place. If someone created a sculpted model for a hoax I doubt they would or could bother to portrat a twist in the musculature of the neck.
In case you didn’t notice, I find the tanystropheus theory pretty convincing.
Regarding the Mansi photo, shovethenos writes, “what I find convincing is the highlighting on the twist in the neck. I don’t think hoaxsters would be able to hoax this accurately, or even think to hoax it in the first place.”
The “highlight” is in fact the sun’s reflection, and since it was not on the object itself, there’s no need to wonder about whether a hoaxer would have thought to make that detail, or whether it would be on a tanystropheus neck.
Any object that had just come out of the water (as Mansi said), at midday when the sun was coming from above and from the south (as Mansi said, and as is clear from the shadow), will reflect a highlighting streak. Try this yourself on the next sunny day at a lake: submerge a barky branch or tree stump, let it come up, and you’ll see an identical highlight at a low angle. If you haven’t seen my detailed analysis of the Mansi photo in Skeptical Inquirer and Fortean Times magazines, I suggest you become familiar with the details of the photo so as to become knowledgeable about it.
That’s true, but it does still seem to be twisting. The Loch Ness Tanys theory would shed doubt on the Spicer sighting, and many of the other land sightings seem more like a stray camel. I’d say that Nessie could be a plesio, but that means the Spicer beast was in serious trouble, and was about to suffocate under its own weight.
Right after ALNM, there was a BBC/Discovery show called Search For The Loch Ness Monster that basically said that because there is NOTHING in the loch, and the eyes can be fooled sometimes, plus the fact that their sonar search failed that that is CONCLUSIVE PROOF that Nessie does not exist. Well, I have 3 objections that make their “proof” look more like hot air.
1)There is A LOT living in Loch Ness.
2)Even if 500 Nessie sightings were either hoaxes or our eyes getting fooled, that still leaves real ones.
3)You would have to cover the entire loch and the connecting rivers all at once to ensure success.
P.S. I once saw a BBC/Discovery show claiming that the giant squid was a myth, so they are really losing credit with me.
Mr. Radford-
I know any wet object would be highlighted by the sun – I was emphasizing how the hightlighting really draws attention to how what appears to be the musculature of the neck is twisted. In my opinion this would be difficult to hoax, or even conceive of hoaxing in the first place. If someone wanted to hoax a lake monster photo they would sculpt something that looked like the head and neck of a plesiosaur – I doubt your garden variety hoaxster would or could sculpt the nuances of the neck twisted at an odd angle and reflect this in the underlying musculature. It’s possible, but not very plausible.
I will take a look at the article on the Mansi picture.
CryptoInformant-
I’m not sure that what would be necessary to cover all the angles for a conclusive sonar scan would be possible, if we’re talking about an animal that can detect sonar and is reasonably comfortable travelling on land. We’re talking about stationing hundreds of people all over the place to monitor various escape routes and hiding places.
Its been a while and I don’t know all the sighting accounts by name, so I’ll have to look up the Spicer account.