Ogopogo
Ogopogo (also Naitaka , which means sea serpent ) is the name of a sea monster supposedly living in Okanagan Lake in the Canadian province of British Columbia . The Ogopogo is said to be an elongated animal between 3 and 14 meters long with dark green to brownish-black skin. Behind its sheep-like head it is said to have a flowing mane of hair. Humps and a split tail are also frequently reported.
The figure of the Ogopogo is likely linked to local Okanagan tales . They reported of a snake-like water demon named N'ha-a-itk who lived on Rattlesnake Island , a small island in Lake Okanagan. Its tail could make waves and capsize boats, its breath causing storms. During passages across Lake Okanagan, chickens and other small animals were therefore brought along as sacrificial animals in order to appease the demon. The lines of tradition between the Indian tales and the sea monster of the 20th century are, however, unclear in detail.
The "modern" monster was first sighted in 1872. However, the ogopogo sighting did not appear as a mass phenomenon until the 1920s. In 1924, the popular song The Ogopogo: The Funny Fox-Trot by songwriter Cumberland Clark was released. As a result, sightings of the Ogopogo became so common that ferries carried armed personnel across the lake to be on the safe side. In the decades that followed, amateur films and cryptozoological hypotheses documented a keen interest in the sensation. A film from 1968 shows a being more than twenty meters long swimming noiselessly through the lake. In 1989 a very detailed picture emerged, which later turned out to be a photograph of a beaver or an otter . Cryptozoologists explained the creature as a survivor of the extinct Zeuglodonten or a relative of the Cadborosaurus , a sea monster on the North Pacific coast.
The sightings have since fallen sharply, but the popularity of the Ogopogo remains unbroken. The character appears in the video game Final Fantasy IV and in the anime television series Reborn! on. In the 1990s, the monster served as a motif for a Canadian stamp series and as a logo for Microsoft Publisher 97. The local ice hockey team Kelowna Rockets uses it as a mascot. The shape of the sea monster approaches that of a dragon . Related mythical animals are the Igopogo in Lake Simcoe and the Manipogo in Lake Manitoba .
Web links
literature
- Benjamin Radford: Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World's Most Elusive Creatures . University Press of Kentucky, 2006, ISBN 0-8131-7130-X , pp. 134, 135.