The measure of a Monster: investigating the Champ photo - Lake Champlain

The most famous photograph of a monster in Lake Champlain was taken in 1977. The photo sparked the modern age of Champ investigations and renewed national interest in the creature. Recent field experiments, however, reveal that the "creature's" size is less than monstrous and the main eyewitness is mistaken.

Lake Champlain forms the border between Vermont and New York, stretching down from Canada at its northernmost point south to Whitehall, New York. It is also, many people believe, home to America's version of the Loch Ness monster. "Champ," as the creature is called, has allegedly been seen by hundreds of witnesses. The lake (and therefore the monster) is named for explorer Samuel de Champlain, who is often--but erroneously--said to have been the first to report the creature. Sought after by P.T. Barnum, featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and "officially" protected by both the New York State Assembly and the Vermont Legislature, Champ remains a modern mystery. A big part of that mystery lies not only in the cold waters of the lake but also in a small photograph taken by a woman named Sandra Mansi.

Mansi's account of her family's 1977 encounter with Champ is the most complete and fully documented of any lake monster sighting in history. With the most famous photo of the Loch Ness monster (the "surgeon's photo") revealed in 1993 to be a hoax, the Mansi photo stands alone as the most credible and important photographic evidence for a lake monster in Champlain-- anywhere else. John Kirk, in his book In the Domain of the Lake Monsters, writes that "The monster of Lake Champlain ... has the distinction of being the only lake monster of whom there is a reasonably clear photograph. It. . . is extremely good evidence of an unidentified lake-dwelling animal" (Kirk 1998, 133). Joe Zarzynski, author of Champ: Beyond the Legend(1984), calls the photo "the best single piece of evidence on Champ." Another writer says that "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" (Clark 1993, 67).

Despite its notoriety, and inclusion in most books of cryptozoology ("hidden animals"), there has been little skeptical investigation of the monster since the early 1980s. In July 2002, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mansi photograph, Senior Research Fellow Joe Nickell and I undertook an extensive investigation of this mysterious monster. His overview of Champ and our search begins on page 18.

Eyewitness Accounts

Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, most of the evidence for Champ's existence rests on eyewitness testimony. As I have noted elsewhere (Radford 2002), such accounts are notoriously unreliable and a poor substitute for hard evidence. One writer (Rabbit 2000) listed over a dozen factors that can reduce the accuracy of such accounts, including observer's fear and stress; poor observation conditions; slippage of memory; seeing what the observer wants or expects to see; changing details to conform to other witnesses' accounts; reluctance to admit ignorance; filling in nonexistent details, and so on.

Lake creature sightings are complicated by the fact that it is very difficult to judge distances and sizes on bodies of water. As Paul LeBlond of the University of British Columbia's Department of Oceanography points our, "A problem which commonly arises in the interpretation of unfamiliar objects on water is that of determining their size. In the absence of nearby reference features, the eye cannot estimate absolute dimensions reliably" (LeBlond 1982). On land, the human eye and brain can judge spatial dimensions fairly well, comparing an object to a nearby tree, home, or other structure. An unfamiliar object against a visual field such as sky or water, however, can produce wildly inaccurate estimates of size and distance.

People often see what they want--or expect--to see. In the case of Champ, the monster's likeness and legend are well-known in the area, and the knowledge that a monster is said to reside in the lake could easily transform an unusual sighting of "something in the water" into a Champ sighting.

The Mansi Encounter

Eyewitness sightings of Champ are relatively rare, and sightings accompanied by good photographs are even rarer. The Mansi family had the remarkable fortune to not only get a good long look at the creature but also photograph it (see figure 1).

According to Sandra Mansi, her family's encounter with Champ took place on Tuesday, July 5,1977. Sandra and her fiance Anthony Mansi, along with Sandra's two children from her 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 their 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 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" (Mansi 2002).