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Feb. 8, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:38
Edition 105 - America's Loch Ness Monster

This show features New Zealand-based American researcher Robert Bartholomew - who has lookedinto "monster sightings" dating from the 1600s to the present at America's Lake Champlain.

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your recent emails.
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Thank you very much for being part of this show.
This time around, we have for you a classic cryptozoological tale.
You are going to love this.
It is the story of America's own version of the Loch Ness Monster at Lake Champlain, way high north in America on the Canadian border, an area of myth and mystery.
And this is certainly a mystery like no other and seemingly on a much bigger scale than the Loch Ness Monster.
Many, many stories dating back 400 years or more of sightings of this thing.
Going to be talking to Robert Bartholomew.
He's an American broadcaster, researcher, sociologist, based in New Zealand at the moment, who's written a fantastic book, A Champ, The Untold Story, about this monster phenomenon.
I think you'll really enjoy the book if you do get to see it.
And you'll definitely enjoy the conversation with Robert Bartholomew that we're about to have.
Like I say, thank you for your email.
Thank you for your support.
If you're listening to this show on a device, mobile or otherwise, you don't automatically have to go to the website, but it's very important for me that you register a hit on the website.
So if you can, please make a moment, go to www.theunexplained.tv and just leave a click, a hit on the website.
Very important for us.
Right, let's cross to Auckland, New Zealand now to talk about Champ, the monster, or not as the case may be, with Robert Bartholomew.
Robert, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Howard, thank you for having me.
Now, first question, Robert, and a delight to talk to you for a whole variety of reasons.
What's an American guy doing in Auckland, New Zealand?
Well, my background is in anthropology, sociology, and I'm very interested in different countries and cultures and belief systems and just wanted to go someplace different.
Well, from what I hear, and I've always my whole life long wanted to go to New Zealand.
I've been to many other countries.
You can't get more different than New Zealand.
And the things that you're interested in, I would think you're in a very good place to research those.
Yeah, New Zealand is a fantastic place for six months out of the year.
The other six months, it's usually cloudy and drizzly and cool, but there's more things in life than the weather.
Have you been to England then, Robert?
I haven't, but I've flown over it.
Okay, all right.
Well, if you want some cloudy and cool weather, we can give you lots here.
We have plenty.
We had a weird summer where we had some sunshine, but mostly it was sort of cloudy and wet.
So I think we have a lot of sympathy with the New Zealanders and their climate.
But as you rightly said, you can transcend all of that, and countries can often have an awful lot more going for them than just the weather.
Now, we're going to be talking about a phenomenon here, and this is the phenomenon of America's version of the Loch Ness Monster.
And reading into this in your excellent new book, Champ, which is the name of this monster named after Lake Champlain, this phenomenon has been around for a hell of a lot longer than the Loch Ness Monster.
I thought the Loch Ness Monster was the daddy, and I was wrong.
Yep.
Yeah, well, sightings of Champ, as it's called, date back to the Indians in the region, the Native Americans, who told stories of a horned serpent that was said to reside in the lake.
And near Split Rock, which is on the New York side, about halfway up near the village of Essex, New York, it was believed to be the home of this giant serpent or lizard that lived under the rock.
And right off Split Rock, it's the deepest part of the lake, about 400 feet.
And when the Native Americans would paddle their canoes by Split Rock, they would place food, tobacco, or pipes onto the water in hopes of appeasing this great ghost fish that was believed to live under the rock.
So they were aware of it back then.
We have to locate this properly for people in the UK or other parts of the world, or perhaps even in New Zealand.
I've got listeners there.
Lake Champlain is in a fascinating area way north, isn't it?
Straddling the U.S.-Canadian border.
That's correct.
Lake Champlain is 109 miles long.
It's interesting.
You know, reality is interesting in how you view it.
When I was researching this, I saw in a book that the lake was like 112 miles long.
And then there's another one that says 109 and 107 and 114.
I'm thinking, what's going on here?
And it's all on where they're starting their measurement from at the base of the lake, which is quite swampy.
And I guess in any given year, depending on how much rain they've had, you could start the lake a few miles down even further.
But the physical features of the lake, the surface area is 440 square miles.
The shoreline is 587 miles and 109 on average miles long.
So you're talking a very big body of water, which at its deepest point off Split Rock is 400 feet deep.
Which we know that Loch Ness is huge in Scotland, but this thing you're talking about is the size of a large British county.
To put it into some perspective, it's that kind of dimension.
It is.
And you know what's interesting?
A few years ago, some researchers at Middlebury College in Vermont were doing some scans of the entire lake, and they uncovered something that no one was aware of.
And that is that there's actually an ancient channel, an ancient ravine that runs up the spine of the lake as you get up toward the northern part of the lake.
And There are also reports of divers seeing large caverns underneath the water as well.
And of course, the St. Lawrence Seaway to the north, there's speculation that those caverns may lead out to the Atlantic Ocean.
So if ever there was a breeding ground, here is one.
I mean, those sorts of things have been said about Loch Ness before, that it has caverns and there's connection with the ocean and all the rest of it.
It is, it's mysterious just from the description.
In the foreword of your book, there's a very nice sentence that seems to encapsulate just about everything we're about to talk about.
And those words are, and they have to be said in an appropriate accent, I think, in an appropriate way.
So I'm not going to get this right, but there are some very strange things in this lake, which I think could well be the strapline for a movie.
Absolutely.
It's certainly worth researchers having a look at.
If they are going to look at other lakes and other anomalies, it's certainly well worth the effort to see if we can't uncover the possibility that there is some type of prehistoric undiscovered creature in Lake Champlain in the northeastern United States.
More than four centuries of sightings, in fact, a lot more than four centuries of sightings, as you rightly say.
And yet we are still at the stage where we need to do more research, just as with Loch Ness and the Loch Ness monster.
It's been a long and tortuous history one way or another, hasn't it?
And I have to get the pronunciation of the lake right.
I've tended to say Champlain, and of course it is Champlain, as in Champagne.
Our story begins, it seems to me, from the reading of your book in 1609.
And that was the very first sighting by the man who gave his name to the lake, yeah?
That's absolutely right.
In 1609, Samuel de Champlain had a sighting, reported sighting on the lake.
And it was an authentic sighting in the sense that, you know, he saw something.
He was reported to have said he saw a snake-like creature about 20 feet long with a head like a horse.
This story has been repeated in books and TV documentaries and magazine articles for years and years.
So I went back and I checked the original log and it's not there.
He did not see the Champlain monster.
What he described seeing was a big fish and it's a textbook description of a gar pike.
There's even a sketch of it.
It looks just like a gar pike.
But here's what's interesting.
Prior to 1970 and a description of this snake-like creature, the horse-like head coming out from Samuel D. Champlain, it was in a magazine article in the U.S. called Vermont Life.
Prior to that article coming out in 1970, there were zero sightings of Champ with a horse-like head.
Not a single report.
After the article, everybody, it seemed, was seeing Champ with a horse-shaped head.
And in this sense, it's a case of mass psychology.
They're seeing something on the lake.
And the human mind does not work like a video cassette recorder taking in information.
It interprets information as it takes it in.
And it has influenced these sightings.
I think that's certainly reading, and I've got a note here in my copious notes on the book, that it does seem that sightings of CHAMP spike around times when somebody reports that they've seen something or there's a little bit of an impetus given to the story.
Like at one stage, the great showman P.T. Barnum offered, was it $50,000 for capture of this creature?
Because back in those days, they were talking about hunting it and catching it more than analyzing it as we do today.
So it has been an amazing story with spikes in it.
The graph has many spikes in it, doesn't it, down the years?
That's right.
The Barnum reward offer was back in 1873 during a huge flap in the southern part of the lake.
What's interesting, the point that you raised, is the fact that the Champlain monster, for whatever reason, goes in cycles and intense flap periods where you have a lot of sightings, interspersed with down periods, and all of a sudden it comes up again.
Now, I would speculate that on the one hand, this could be a phenomena that's part of the creature itself, part of its habits.
On the other hand, it may be a reflection of the media reports in two different ways.
It may be that the media generates interest and then people start misperceiving objects on the lake.
Or it may mean that the media generates interest and people scrutinize the lake and see the creature that's been there all along, yet they haven't been focused on the creature.
So, as you say, double-edged sword can be a good thing and a bad thing.
I want to take you to the Captain Crumb, wonderful name, Captain Crumb sighting of 1819.
And the description that you reproduce is very much of the period and almost needs to be read in Dickensian terms.
It describes a 15-foot monster moving with the utmost velocity.
Yes, and, you know, that sighting almost certainly is a hoax.
That was a reflection of the Gloucester sea serpent off Cape Ann, off Massachusetts.
And there have been a number of sightings off the northeastern coast of the United States of lake monsters.
And, you know, while we raise this, it's really interesting how during the 1700s and the 1800s and the early 1900s, there were sea monster reports by ship captains, very credible reports, all over the world.
Now, it's a very rare occurrence.
And I'm not sure why that should be other than the fact that, you know, just like fairies, people used to see fairies all over the place.
And nowadays, they don't see fairies, but they see Bigfoot and they see these other creatures that are more credible today.
But that citing by Captain Crumb, As I investigated that, it's almost certainly a hoax.
And there are references to the Cape Ian sea serpent in that case.
So I'm confident that that is a hoax.
And my whole purpose of researching this was to try to find out, besides Indian lore, when the first credible sightings were.
And they were in the early 1800s.
You talk about early reports.
You know, the early pioneers had some scattered sightings, but we have to remember, they were very busy people.
They were dodging Indian raids.
They had smallpox and the flu.
If we get the flu, we just go to the doctor and get antibiotics.
Back then, you know, it was a life-threatening event.
So researchers have talked about the 10% rule, and I think that's a very interesting idea that perhaps 10% of all sightings actually get reported for various reasons.
I mean, you have to first tell somebody and you might feel ridicule.
And a lot of these early pioneers, they couldn't pick up the telephone and call somebody.
And they didn't get to civilization very often or talk to a newspaper editor or journalist.
So because of this, I think a lot of the early reports never got reported.
And those that did, I'm fascinated at the way that those reports got disseminated.
I can only assume that, for example, in 1826, there's the tale of a couple of fishermen who saw something that this time was apparently 30 foot in length.
I presume those things, of course, they're spread by word of mouth.
So the story is told to one person, perhaps in a tavern somewhere, and then retold to somebody else, and then retold to somebody else, and then maybe gets back to the original tellers of the story.
And by the time it gets back there, bearing in mind that there is no internet, no digital photography, no computers to write things down quickly, by the time it gets back to its source, the story has changed a bit.
That's right.
It's always important to go to the original newspaper report if you can find it or the original interview because stories do get distorted over time.
What's the old saying?
The older I get, the better I was.
I find that works for me.
In 1870, this is where things start to get really interesting.
And there's a nice illustration in the book here.
Something was seen from a steamship.
So we're talking about more than one person and something large spotting this thing.
That's right.
And you get this whole cluster of reports starting in the early 1870s.
And what's interesting is there are some remarkable, some compelling reports from the time period of the 1870s and 1880s.
For example, in the summer of 1883, there was one of the most incredible, incredible sightings in the history of the Champlain monster.
The sheriff of Clinton County, the sheriff, the top lawman for the county, his name was Nathan Mooney.
And he reported seeing this large snake-like creature off Plattsburgh, New York.
So you're talking the northern New York end of the lake.
And he was on this steam yacht with another witness.
And he said he looked out, it was about five o'clock in the afternoon, and he saw this black object protruding about five feet out of the water, about as big around as a stovepipe.
It was about 100 yards off.
So it's about a football field away.
It could be anything.
He says it dips down under the water again and then pops up just 20 yards away.
And he has one of the most detailed descriptions of this creature.
He said it was an enormous snake or water serpent and that he was so close to it that he could actually see the muscles in its neck contracting.
Now, for my mind, this is either a hoax or it's real.
There is little margin for misinterpretation or misidentification if a creature like that is just 20 yards or 20 meters away and you can actually see the muscles in the neck contracting.
Right.
Now, that is the point, isn't it?
It's very hard to distinguish in a case like this whether it is a fake or whether it's real, you know, whether it's Memorex or whether it's live kind of thing.
What would militate and mitigate against it would be the fact that, as they always say, liars tend to give more detail than is necessary.
I suppose, to me, it seems like a very credible sighting by somebody who didn't need the publicity.
Right.
So this comes down, doesn't it, to the credibility of the viewer, the credibility of the witness in this case.
And obviously, you've researched the person who made this sighting and what motivation might they have to make it up?
Well, you know what's interesting is there have been several reports of champ from the 1870s right up until recent times, where the creature has been seen very snake-like, pops up out of the water, then goes back down and comes right towards a boat, some of these rather large boats, 25, 30 feet long, and slams into the side of the boat.
There are eight or nine reports like this.
Very credible.
Multiple witnesses.
I mean, one of those was a former professor of mine who is also in the book, Dr. Phil Raines from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
He was in this boat that was nearly 30 feet long, and it was his own vessel.
And this thing slammed into the side of the boat and really rocked it back and forth.
And he was really taken back by this.
So the question, I mean, that's not a misidentification.
That's not a misinterpretation.
There's something tangible in the lake that slams into the sides of boats, some of them very large.
And it's not Possible from those accounts, and I did see those accounts, that the craft concerned may have been just smashing themselves into agglomerations of weeds, perhaps?
Well, no, because in a number of these reports, they actually see a creature coming at them and then slamming into the vessel.
In 1937, there was a gentleman named Charles Langloy, and he was very well respected in Ross's Point, the northern end of the New York side of the lake near the Canadian border.
He and his wife told this wild story of encountering the serpent while they were in a motorboat in broad daylight on a very calm lake.
And they said they saw these ripples appear in the lake and head straight for them, kind of like something out of the movie Jaws.
And they said that suddenly the creature just rammed into the side of their boat.
It was at least 15 feet long.
It was black.
There were no scales.
And they were very, very frightened.
In fact, Mrs. Langloy was physically ill for the next several days from the stress of this.
So there's no misidentification there.
You got a very credible witness, multiple people seeing this.
Now, for me, this is one of two things.
It is A, either an unidentified, undiscovered prehistoric creature in Lake Champlain, or B, it's a sturgeon, a fish that can live to be over 100 years of age and is found in the lake, although it's quite rare, and it can grow up to hundreds of pounds.
And it's also been known to ram into boats.
But we're talking about, we have those things here.
We're talking about a sturgeon of a hell of a size to be able to disturb a boat and the people on it in that way, aren't we?
Well, Phil Rains' vessel was about 30 feet long.
This was a major vessel, and he said it rocked it back and forth.
So is it possible, do you think from the research you've done that, for example, a sturgeon fish could have lived, because there's nothing to disturb it in a lake that size, and it's at the top of the food chain, isn't it, could have lived to get to that kind of size and be that dominant and be that aggressive?
I think not.
I think that it would have to have been exaggerated in terms of the size of the creature.
When you say the words, is it possible?
I say anything's possible.
We should look at it and consider anything.
I'm a scientist, and I don't have an investment as to whether the creature exists or not.
Say, well, do you believe it exists or not?
Well, it might exist.
It might not exist.
I don't know.
But if I were to bet, as I say in the book, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, if I were to bet $100 whether a champ exists or not, I'd put $10 on its existence.
I'd put $40 that it doesn't exist.
And I'd take the rest and I'd put it in my pocket because kill the mystery.
There's something about the Loch Ness monster.
There's something about the Champlain monster.
I think human beings, we need our mysteries.
There's something nice about it.
And over the years, there have been such characters connected with this.
I think certainly in that early period, the period that is the most magical for me, is that early period where the documented sightings are so well written up and so colorfully written up.
And there are characters who appear.
Is it William A. Wilkins who announces a hunt for a monster?
And I think there's a poster that goes along with that, but there's the beginning of the era of wanting to hunt this thing down.
That's right.
And he was the editor of the White Hall Times of Whitehall, New York at the time.
You've got E.T. Barnum there in the mix offering the reward, which caused a lot of people.
I mean, $50,000 at the time was a very large sum of money, be worth more than a million dollars today.
So people were scouring the lake for this creature.
And then over the years, there have been a lot of first-class characters, I would describe them as, who have muddied the water, so to speak.
I mean, in contemporary times, you've got this woman.
I call her the champ whisperer in the book, Elizabeth von Muggenthaler.
And starting in 2003, she was hired for a documentary on TV to see if she couldn't detect underwater sounds made by a creature in the lake.
And lo and behold, she claims to have detected a large creature at least 15 feet long using biosonar to get around the lake, kind of like on land, like a bat would to bounce sounds off objects to get around.
And so I thought this was fascinating.
And I did some research into this.
And the more I researched, the more skeptical I became.
Basically, most people aren't experts in biosonar.
So as a reporter, what I do is I interview experts on biosonar.
And to a person, several of the world's top experts who I interviewed on marine biosonar said that they did not take her research very seriously.
And when I asked her for her findings, she sent me an abstract from this paper she had supposedly presented at a scientific conference, this Acoustical Society of America.
So I contacted the person who organized the conference and she said, oh, I remember her.
She never showed up.
Her paper withdrawn.
So I looked into her background and essentially all she had was a background, a bachelor in psychology.
So my question is, why did this TV documentary use this woman and not one of the many real recognized experts on marine biosonar to do this documentary?
And the answer I come up with is that documentaries are businesses with the goal of making money and getting ratings and an audience.
So if you can put together a nice, sexy case, then the chances are people may, look, you know, we both come from a media background.
We know this.
They're going to buy into that big time, whereas they might not ordinarily do that.
This Mugantana person, is this the person who described in the book, I think, or you describe in the book as having claimed to have had a relationship with this thing like they had with Flipper?
That's right.
Kind of like a lassie type of relationship with.
And, you know, it's really unfortunate because there is compelling evidence.
There have been some tremendous sightings.
And in some ways, there was a consistent description over time of a large snake-like creature that undulates through the water and has anywhere between two to five humps or loops that come out of the water.
So I hope that people who hear the story of Elizabeth von Muggenthaler don't say, oh, geez, you know, yeah, I agree.
I think that's a bunch of malarkey.
So I don't believe in Champ.
Champ may exist independent of the human element.
You've got this guy, Dennis J. Hall, who founded this group Champ in the 1990s.
And during the early 90s and up until about 2007, this guy was on countless TV shows and in newspaper articles as the public face of Champ.
Now, this, we just had a little bit of a digital dropout, but that was called Champ Quest.
And I think there was a 1-800 number for people to report sightings connected to it.
That's right.
And so when I did research into this guy who was the public face of Champ for over 15 years, I mean, he was in just about every documentary, every newspaper article that was done on this between the early 90s and about 2007.
And when I did research on him, I found out that he had had 23 sightings.
As a child, he claimed to have held a baby Champ in his arms.
And he also claims that Champ nearly became extinct because the Indians were hunting Champ and actually eating the meat.
And he reminds me of that woman in New Mexico, the housewife who a number of years ago was cooking in her kitchen and burned a tortilla on her skillet and thought she saw the face of Jesus.
No doubt that when this guy shaves in the morning or takes a bath in his bathtub, that he's seeing Champ there as well.
Not very credible, you think?
It's not very credible because, look, if you claim to have taken a cradle to baby Champ in your arms, then they claim to have taken this creature.
Him and his father took the creature up to the University of Vermont, I believe it was, one of the major universities.
And then it ended up getting lost.
Well, I'm sorry.
I just don't buy it.
I mean, here is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
And they end up losing the thing.
Where's the photograph of it?
Well, I was going to say, where's the photograph of all of this?
Because people had cameras in this era, so you can't say it's not easy to do that.
And the university, from the moment that thing was brought in, presumably would want to document it, would want to photograph it, write down a great deal of detail about it.
Records of that kind don't get lost.
And the actual thing itself, it stretches credulity quite a lot to think that it would go missing.
You know what does?
And you see these things, and it really frustrates you.
Then, on the other hand, you read that report back in 19—was it 38?
when some fishermen off the coast of Africa in the United States pulled up in their nets the strange-looking fish that people had not seen before in 60 million years, the coelacanth.
That was actually quite recent.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I remember reporting that on the news.
And there was a tremendous flurry about that, because the coelacanth had been thought to be extinct for a very, very, very long time.
It's the kind of thing that you read about as a kid in books when you're studying geology.
But here one turns up off the coast of South Africa.
That's right.
And, you know, you do have these interesting things that every once in a while, these new creatures are discovered or uncovered in far-flung parts of the world.
And so you get these new discoveries.
And just recently, you had a few days ago, in fact, for the first time, scientists were able to photograph a giant squid in its natural habitat.
Now, I think it was back in 2005, they pulled one of these up in the Gulf of New Mexico.
But they grow to up to 26 meters long.
That's a massive creature.
And but for the first time, they'd actually seen it in its habitat just a few days ago.
So if we allow for the fact that there are new discoveries all the time, we mustn't be too dismissive of the stories that we've heard over time.
All right.
Some of them are more credible than others.
But they've always been debunkers, haven't they?
There's a lovely cartoon very early on in your book.
But basically, I think, is it a newspaper ad?
But it's a cartoon that says those who claim to see this monster are under the influence of alcohol.
Yeah.
You know, you get a lot of that with all types of sightings, whether it's the Champlain monster or Loch Ness, whether it's UFOs, ghosts or Bigfoot.
I'm and you get a lot of people labeling it with delusions, alcohol, mental illness.
I believe that 85 to 90 percent of the witnesses of all these phenomena are honest, sincere people who have seen something they cannot explain.
Most people are not hoaxers.
The question is, though, what are they seeing?
Because as I said before, the human mind doesn't work like a video cassette recorder taking in information, interprets information.
All you have to do is see a soccer game or an American football game, and there are mistakes being made all the time by umpires and wrestlers.
referees who are trained observers they practice all the time they know the rules inside and out yet they continue to make mistakes and indeed you've only got to go to the scene of a robbery or a traffic accident which as young journalists we've both probably had to do and you talk to witnesses, and if you've got five witnesses, you might get three different accounts.
That's right.
How many people have been convicted and actually fried in the United States in the electric chair or the gas chamber?
And then later they find that they were actually innocent through DNA evidence.
And you know, there's a really interesting story that I've written about in the past that, and in the book, the 1938 Orson Welles radio drama, which fooled many Americans into believing the Earth was being invaded back in 1938 by Martians.
At Grover's Mill.
That's right.
Hadley Kintrill, the famous psychologist at Princeton University, where Einstein taught, he estimated that between 1.2 and 1.7 million Americans panicked or were frightened by the broadcast.
What's interesting is the broadcast told of these Martians firing heat rays.
People actually called police and said they could feel the heat rays as described on the radio.
The radio broadcast told of the poison gas.
People actually phoned police and they were choking on the other end of the phone because of the poison gas.
And the broadcast told of these giant Martians on these towering 25, 30 foot high machines wading through the waters of the Jersey Palisades.
Several people actually phoned the police and said they were looking toward the palisades and could see the giant machines.
The human mind is very remarkable in terms of it's very fallible and subject to making mistakes and misperceptions.
I believe that 85 to 90% of the sightings of the Champlain monster, as with the Loch Ness monster, with UFOs, with Bigfoot, are misidentifications of natural or man-made phenomena.
But there are a hardcore 10% of cases that I, as a scientist, cannot explain.
And I'm not a debunker.
I can't explain what those are.
For example, the Mooney sighting back in 1883.
Why would a county sheriff put his reputation on the line and come out with such a very detailed sighting with a witness?
It wasn't just himself alone on that vessel.
Why would he do that?
And to me, I don't know.
I simply don't have an answer.
My job as a reporter is to separate fact from fiction, from speculation, and let the reader decide for him or herself if there is sufficient evidence to believe or not believe.
And I simply don't know.
People press me sometimes to say, well, is it real?
Is it not real?
I don't know.
And we have to say that one of the arguments that is often made against the people behind the Loch Ness monster industry in Scotland is that they are trivializing the thing.
They're not helping the cause of science by turning it into a tourist attraction.
Now, there was a period, wasn't there?
And the book documents a period in the 90s where there was a real effort to turn this thing into a tourist attraction, t-shirts, mugs, big campaign to get people to come to the area.
And from your account of it, actually, that kind of backfired, that didn't draw more attention to the place and didn't bring more sightings.
It actually went the other way, didn't it?
That's right.
And they even have a sightings board.
And they would put the sightings up in this huge wooden board in the middle of the village of Port Henry.
But here's the interesting thing.
It's very clear now that Samuel D. Champlain wasn't the first person, the first European to sight the Champlain monster.
Yet they have him as being the first European to see the creature.
And it's right up there on the sightings board.
And when local newspaper reporters continue to do reports about the creature, they keep saying in their articles that Samuel D. Champlain was the first European to see the creature when we know that he wasn't.
And so why do they do this?
For me, it's an attempt to create what I call Champ Incorporated.
It's the selling of a monster to draw in tourists.
But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Which interesting to see is a saying among journalists both sides of the Atlantic by the sounds of it.
I want to bring you up to the 1970s because here we have another bit of a flurry.
And the peak of this flurry is a photograph.
And this is Sandra Sandy Marcy's photograph that was debated and poured over and ultimately caused her enormous problems in her life.
Yeah?
That's right.
That's the famous 1977 Mianzi photo.
And because of that photo, it was quite humorous.
You got a professor at State University of New York at Plattsburgh, Dr. Phil Raines, and then Joe Zarzinski, who had been hunting down the monster for years.
You got them in this big tip over the photograph.
And it reminds me of the grumpy old men, that movie with Walter Mappow and Jack Lemon.
It's really quite humorous and quite sordid behind the scenes.
So it ended up like the odd couple.
That's right.
It really was the odd couple.
And it all stemmed from the Mianzi photograph.
Now, Sandra Mianzi, the woman who took that photo, that photograph since 1994 has been touted as the greatest lake monster photo ever because in 1994, the famous surgeon's photo in Loch Ness was discredited.
Now, maybe that was a real photo, but one of the people who was involved in that came out and said that it was a hoax.
And so since that time, it's been seriously discredited.
And the Mansi photo in books, in documentaries, continues since 94 to be touted as the best lake monster photo ever taken.
But Howard, there are some very strange things about that photo that have never been reported.
Just bizarre.
Okay.
Can you tell me some of them?
Well, there are over a dozen, but here are a few.
And the thing that gets me is, and the previous book that was published, Champ Beyond the Legend, by Joe Tzarzynski in 1984, he was aware of a lot of this information and he left it out.
And when I saw that, I said to myself, I'm definitely coming out with a book on the Champlain Monster because people need to know the full story to make up their own mind.
Sandra Manzi said she threw away the negative.
Now, just imagine a photo you believe to be a living dinosaur and you throw away the negative.
And the negative is the key part that can verify the photo because that's what you could use to blow it up and to get a lot more detail.
Absolutely.
Why on earth, why did she do that?
Has she told anybody why she did that?
She said she routinely threw away negatives.
Now, she would be an unpercentile.
I unfortunately, and perhaps yourself as well, come from an era where we used to have negatives and people used to always keep the negative because you could use it again.
You could make copies.
And it just doesn't make sense.
But wait, there's more.
Mr. Manzi, her husband, later told a naturalist for the state of Vermont that they didn't throw out the negative, that they either burned or buried the negative in their backyard.
Kind of like that Coke bottle in the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, the Evil Thing.
It's very strange.
He interpreted it as a very negative experience.
But you know, I've known a lot of people over the years who've taken a lot of photos, but none of them ever burned or buried their negatives in the backyard.
The more you know and learn about the Manzi photo, the stranger it gets.
I mean, the object was in view for five minutes and she snaps just one picture.
Now, we've got to say, because this is obviously audio, it's radio, people can't see that photograph, but this is the archetypal Loch Ness monster style photograph.
It's a creature with a big head.
It's serpent-like.
It's humphed.
It's there in the water and it's very, very clear.
That's right.
And what's interesting about the photo is, on the one hand, it supports the history of Champ because Champ has historically been described as a large snake-like object between 15 and 40 feet long, which undulates through the water.
And here you have an object that looks very snake-like and eel-like almost coming up out of the water.
So it's a very credible photograph.
I do not believe that that is a hoaxed photo.
And people listening can just type in M-A-N-S-I photo and it'll pop up there under images.
I don't believe it's a hoax.
If it is not authentic, I think it's that she may have taken a picture of a piece of driftwood or something like that on the lake.
And then the picture is one in a million.
It came out just right at the right angle and looks like a serpent-like creature on the lake.
But I don't think she went out and actually hoaxed the photograph.
But the photo is, in many ways, too good to be true.
I mean, if you're looking at it, if you've seen a Loch Ness monster photograph, well, this is the best Loch Ness monster photograph you will ever see.
It was, wasn't it, analyzed by Kodak Laboratories, the photo people.
What did they say?
They said they did not want to comment on the photograph because they weren't in the business of commenting on lake monster photos.
I think they said something to that effect in the letter that got back when they tried to do that.
Okay, well, that takes us down to Blind Alley.
I wonder why that would be.
There must be some commercial reason for them not wanting to get themselves involved in this thing.
I suppose if they say it looks like a monster, then that could make them look very silly.
And if they debunk it, then they're causing all sorts of other problems.
But in a way, I can understand the husband, Mr. Mancy, burying this negative as a thing that's caused the family all kinds of problems, because in the end, it did bring Sandra Mancy and Mr. Mancy a lot of woe.
It split the family.
They ended up getting divorced.
It wasn't a thing that brought them any joy, was it?
No, but here's the really weird thing, and it just gets weirder and weirder.
She said that she took the photograph and she pinned it to her bulletin board in her kitchen.
Well, if this negative is being burned or buried in the backyard, why would she put it in the kitchen for all to see?
And then there were reports later where she said, oh, I took it, put it in an album, and I kept it hidden from everyone and didn't tell a soul.
And there's just more and more of these contradictions.
And I realize that everybody's memory fades and we can get confused.
But this is not long after the photo came out.
And then there's the other thing about they took this photo.
You take a photo of the Loch Ness monster or what you think could be the Loch Ness monster.
Are you going to wait two and a half years to come out with it?
I would have thought not.
I mean, look, it depends.
Who knows what goes on in families?
People may say, hey, that photograph, shouldn't we be doing something with this?
And then they get on with their lives.
But as you say, once again, this one stretches credulity for those reasons.
And so what I do in the book is I say, okay, well, it reminds me of an article I did years ago with this researcher in Canada, and I disagreed with his conclusions.
I'm thinking, how am I going to do this in the journal article?
But basically, I said, here's my position.
Here's his position, and leave it at that.
And that's the same way I handle this in the book.
Here's the case for the photograph.
Here's the case against the photograph.
And I have no vested interest.
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
I wish I were.
The only person that was there was a champ, perhaps, And he's not saying anything.
But I leave it up to the reader to decide.
Here is the information.
You decide for yourself.
Presumably, you're keeping in touch with the people at Lake Champlain.
As far as you know, are there any scientific expeditions being planned to put a new spin on all of this?
Every so often, somebody takes a boat out onto Loch Ness loaded with the latest scientific gear.
And they have a go at scanning the lake, and the findings are often not very good.
But I just wonder if anything like that is being planned at the moment.
Not that I'm aware of, but I've been trying to encourage people to do this.
And the people working at Loch Ness should also be encouraged to come to Lake Champlain.
It's such a large lake.
Of course, the problem with Loch Ness is you can go to parts of that lake and put your hand in there and you can't see it because of the peat in the lake.
It's very murky.
But in Lake Champlain, it's very clear and you can see for good distances under the water.
So that's a big difference between the two lakes.
And it's all the more reason.
I'm for more research.
Hey, it can't hurt.
Why not?
And then I guess the ultimate goal is if you were to prove that such a prehistoric creature existed in the lake, then you could try to get protection for this creature before it potentially becomes extinct.
And of course, there has to be some kind of breeding population.
Otherwise, you've just got one really old creature in the lake crickety and trying to undulate and keep going.
So that's unlikely, isn't it?
It can't be the same thing that's been seen for 400 years.
It has to be, you know, there has to be more than one.
If it's there, it has to be breeding.
There has to be a breeding population.
And, you know, most books claim that Champ is either a primitive form of dinosaur, a zugliodon or a plesiosaur.
A plesiosaur has a long neck and flippers and kind of a stout body.
That's what is commonly depicted as being in Loch Ness.
A zugliodon, on the other hand, is much more snake-like.
But I don't think it's possible that it's a Zugliodon or a plesiosaur.
Zeugliodon, I think, is more likely because of the snake-like descriptions.
But there's a problem.
And the problem is this.
Because they're mammals, they would have to come up for air.
And in theory, you would be seeing a lot more sightings than you are.
And then how do they breathe in the wintertime?
And then some people say, well, Champ adopted to be an air breather.
Well, probably not in the mere 10,000 to 12,000 years that Lake Champlain has been around.
And look, you can speculate about anything.
You could say, you know, what if George Washington had an electric blender at Valley Forge?
Would that have changed the war?
So you can come up with all kinds of speculation.
But at the end of the day, and then I think to myself, well, okay, that's what they think about what a zoogliodon looked like in a plesiosaur.
But up until just a few years ago, people studying dinosaurs never realized that a significant number of dinosaurs actually had feathers.
Now, that's actually been proven in recent years.
Maybe a third of all dinosaurs had feathers.
And that was a remarkable discovery.
And then you can change, but chickens are actually remnants of the dinosaurs.
And you can alter the DNA in eggs, and you can get dinosaur-like appendages growing out of some of these chickens.
I mean, it's been proven.
That's not speculation.
So in other words, our knowledge is changing all the time.
I found this fascinating, Robert.
Just to tie it all up and to bring it up to date, there is a researcher at the moment, isn't there, who is the current champion of CHAMP.
Is this guy called Scott Mardi or Mardis in the book?
Yeah, Scott Mardis has been doing research on the lake.
Very credible gentleman.
I have a lot of respect for Scott.
But he doesn't have the infrastructure behind him.
And I've been trying to encourage him to get a Marine Institute involved in doing research on the lake.
I really feel that there's a lot to be learned out there.
Science doesn't have all the answers right now.
And it's important to keep an open mind and not say, oh, yeah, this is a bunch of baloney or, yeah, the creature's there.
It's harder at times to walk down the middle of the road because you get hit by both sides.
But I walk down the middle of the road and say, maybe yes, maybe no.
Let's accumulate as much evidence as we can.
And then we can try to come up with an informed decision.
And at the same time, at the same time, we need to do more scientific research.
We do research on other things.
Why not?
And it's important to preserve this creature if it does exist.
As you said, what about your research?
You sound like the kind of guy who won't let a topic go.
So this book is very comprehensive, but obviously will need to be updated at some point.
Will you be revisiting Champ?
Let me tell you, I am working the Manzi photo as we speak, and I am also getting more people who have read the book contacting me with information and sightings.
So I am continuing to work this case.
It is an open case, and it's an active investigation.
And I am hoping that by the end of 2013, we will know more about the Manzi photo and hopefully be able to render a decision as to whether it is an authentic photograph or something that was hoaxed.
And I really don't know the answer to that, but I am working this behind the scenes.
And, you know, I have a short paragraph from the book that if you would let me read it, I think really sums up the creature.
Do it.
And as I do, I just have to say that there is a researcher at Harvard University, E.O. Wilson, and he has suggested that people cite monsters of all sorts around the world because we have something in our DNA makes us alert to slithering creatures of the night because it helps, it's a survival mechanism.
It's in our genes to help us survive.
So, and then the rest is, it's not like we're hallucinating it, the rest has to do with misidentifications and things, and that's why we're fixated on the lake.
But here's an excerpt from the book.
The Champlain monster is many things to many people.
To some biologists like Wilson, it is part of our evolutionary heritage that pre-programs us to see mythical beasts.
To environmentalists, it's a green symbol.
To sports lovers, it's a baseball mascot.
To local politicians and shopkeepers, they view it as a symbol of economic revival.
For parents, it's a cautionary tale in a way to scare children.
Don't go down to the lake alone or Champ will get you.
For children, it is a comforting stuff toy, a friendly monster, and a dead set certainty.
For believers, it is an anti-scientific symbol, epitomizing the view that science does not have all the answers.
Whereas for skeptics, depending on their temperament, it is either a humorous legend or an annoying myth.
For everyone, Champ is a poster child of what may lie undiscovered because it is scientifically plausible.
Champ may be a new or long-thought extinct creature.
Someday, sophisticated technology will settle the debate.
And even if the answer is nay, the legend will endure because Champ is a legitimate part of our regional identity and national history.
Champ, the legend will endure.
I love that.
Robert Bartholomew, great pleasure to talk to you.
The digital connection between myself in London and you in Auckland, New Zealand, the first time I've ever talked to anybody on a digital connection over this distance, held up really well.
If people want to know more about you and your work, where do they go and what do they do?
Well, you can get the book on Amazon.
It's in most bookstores in the United States and I assume in the United Kingdom as well.
And I have a website, robertbartholomew.com.
That's my sociologist hat.
And to me, again, the thing about this or reality is that I want to know.
And in a sense, people have a, it's a search for certainty, isn't it?
I think that it's very interesting that creatures like the Loch Ness monster, the Champlain monster, and even Bigfoot and UFOs, I see them as anti-scientific symbols in a secular age in the sense that there's a great emotional appeal here.
Because people, every time somebody sees Champ or the Loch Ness Monster, it's a slap to the face of science because many people think, well, science says the Champlain monster doesn't likely exist, but John Doe just saw Champ.
Science got it wrong.
Well, if science got it wrong on Champ, maybe they got it wrong on religion.
But now we have to be very careful because if you look at something like ghosts, it's not just that somebody believes in the existence of ghosts because they saw a ghost.
It's existence of life after death.
There's an emotional appeal here.
And I really think there's a religious appeal here as well with each new sighting.
It undermines modern science, that science doesn't have all the answers.
And even though I'm a scientist, I don't have all the answers.
But there is some compelling information in the form of sightings over the years and sightings of a snake-like creature between 15 and 40 feet long that may exist as a prehistoric undiscovered creature in Lake Champlain.
Hey, stranger things have happened.
Why not?
True enough.
And let's bear in mind the fact, and I wrote this down first of all on my shorthand notebook here.
So many people have registered sightings over the years.
They can't all be faking or deluded.
Some of them must be right, statistically.
That's right.
But they could be wrong, even if they're right, in the sense that in the middle of the night, you know, not every log on a lake is a lake monster.
Not every light in the sky is a UFO from an extraterrestrial spaceship.
On the other hand, if you ascribe to the belief that only 10% of sightings ever get reported, then there are a lot more sightings out there and presumably a lot more credible sightings by people who are afraid of being ridiculed.
That's a good point to leave it.
We need to talk again, I think, at the end of this year when you've updated the book.
Robert, a great pleasure to talk to you.
Robert Bartholomew.
And we've been talking about the monster, apparently, that resides or may not in Lake Champlain in the United States Canadian border area.
Robert, thank you so much.
Thank you, Howard.
What a great story and so well told.
Robert Bartholomew at Auckland in New Zealand, American living there who's researched and will continue to research the story of Champ, the monster that may or may not reside in the deep depths of Lake Champlain on the American-Canadian border, has all the hallmarks of one of the greatest cryptozoological tales of all time, I would say.
And I think there's probably a movie in that as well.
We'll catch up with Robert, as we say, at a later date.
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Above all, thank you to you for being part of The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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