Champ (sea monster)
Champ is the name of a sea monster or cryptid supposedly living in the US-American - Canadian lake Lake Champlain .
description
"Champ" is mostly described as a six-meter-long plesiosaur , or a kind of sea snake .
Sightings
The first documented sighting of an animal several meters tall that lived in the lake dates back to 1609. An estimated 300 sightings have been reported since then. In some cases, "Champ" turned out to be a large catfish .
Some of the main sightings:
- In 1609, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain , after whom the body of water is named, was supposedly able to observe the creature. According to legend, he describes it as a six-meter-long snake, as thick as a barrel, with the head of a horse. In fact, however, he only wrote in his diary: “ There are fish in abundance here, the largest of them measuring almost 3 meters, with a 60 cm long snout and two rows of sharp, dangerous teeth, protected by silver-gray scales that are not even a dagger would be able to pierce. "
- In 1873 railroad workers allegedly saw the head of a giant sea serpent with shimmering scales near the North American city of Dresden ( New York State ), which was stretching out of the water and watching the group. In the period that followed, numerous people in the area said that a monster lived at the bottom of Lake Champlain.
- In July 1883 claiming Clinton County - Sheriff Nathan Mooney that he had observed a seven to ten meters long water snake that kept her estimated about 1.50 meters long neck above the water surface.
- In 1945, a man reported the capture of a three-foot-long champ from Champ, which others believed was only a salamander .
- In July 1977, Sandra Mansi had what is said to be the most spectacular sighting of Champ to date. When she and her husband thought they saw something in Lake Champlain that looked like the head and neck of a giant sea monster, she took a picture with her pocket camera before the mysterious thing disappeared again. Since she stated that she had lost the negative and did not know where the picture had been taken, doubts quickly arose as to the authenticity of the photograph.
- On July 20, 1985, Bill Billado spotted a strange wave to his right at night, with calm sea and no spray , which he took for "champ".
- In 1987 Christine Auer Hebert spotted a green creature on land at night at her family's marina, north of Burlington, as it slowly emerged from the forest into the glow of a street lamp. Her two dogs barked and she looked. The creature looked around and disappeared into the darkness. A week later she - and this time her mother too - allegedly saw another creature, this time a smaller, brown one, also walking slowly across the street. She described the head as that of a dinosaur, similar to that of a plesiosaur .
- In 1997 ferry captain BJ Bombard, according to his own account, sighted the creature when he drove from Burlington to Port Kent , something was on a collision course. He turned the ferry across to see it better and found that it was moving like a submarine just below the surface of the water and about two meters long. In his opinion, it was neither a tree trunk nor was it made up of various individual objects. It also had no dorsal fin or anything like that.
- In July 2002, the bioacoustician Elizabeth von Muggenthaler located a click sound echo signal in the lake that is at least very similar to that of the killer whale and recorded it on tape. It was the only case that such a biological echo signal was found in a freshwater lake. The authenticity and informative value of this recording is also doubted by researchers.
Prehistory of the lake
According to geologists like Steven Bright, the Lake Champlain area once covered a larger body of sea known as the Champlain Sea. It is believed to have existed about 11,000 to 9,000 years ago, for about 2,000 to 2,500 years. According to Ellen Marsden, a biologist at the University of Vermont , it was possible for marine animals to reach today's lake; they were cut off from the sea when the sea link in Lake Champlain disappeared. They either adapted to the fresh water or died. Marine fish such as the sturgeon and Atlantic salmon can be traced back to Lake Champlain.
Native American legends
The Iroquois and Abenaki live on the shores of the lake and tell of the legend of such a sea monster. The Abenaki call it Tatoskok . Another Indian name of the creature is Chaousarou .
natural reserve
Champ was put on the Endangered Species List in 1982 by the Vermont House of Representatives and the New York Senate , which would immediately put an unknown animal found in Lake Champlain under conservation .
literature
- Harald Gebhardt, Mario Ludwig: Of dragons, yetis and vampires - on the trail of mythical animals. BLV-Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-405-16679-9
- Ernst Probst : Sea Monsters - 100 Monsters from A to Z . GRIN-Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-656-50349-1 .
- Benjamin Radford, Joe Nickell: Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World's Most Elusive Creatures . University of Kentucky Press, Louisville 2006, ISBN 978-0813123943 . (Basic scientific study that examines the "Champ" case, among other things, and here, as in other cases, cannot identify any reliable evidence of the existence of sea monsters.)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Champ History - From Ancient Times ( Memento of February 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).