DALE DRINNON: Perhaps the earliest Lake Champlain sighting...

It took a little searching through the archives to turn this up. It was incidentally the first report of any type I had heard about as coming from Lake Champlain.

In July 1937 some fishermen including Gene McGabe, Coots Gordon and Pat Harvey, reported a Champ near Whitehall New York. They saw it while fishing from a pier. They reported it as having a noticeable red mane, very large eyes and large drooping ears-and moose antlers. They estimated it as 50 feet long, and undoubtedly that includes at least part of the wake in the estimate.

The source is from a Syracuse NY newspaper dated July 22, 1937: The Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library had it as part of a compilation article at second hand, in their clippings file under "Sea serpents" at the Central branch as of the 1970s. That was far back enough that other items in the same file included announcements from the Loch Ness Phenomenon Investigations Bureau. And my reaction upon first seeing it was "You have GOT to be kidding!"