RICHARD FREEMAN: CHAMP IN THE PICTURE AGAIN

Guest Blogger time for Richard Freeman again. It almost seems silly introducing Richard to you all once again when he makes an appearance as guest blogger several times a week. However our viewing audience/readers (whatever you like to call yourselves) is growing so fast that it is certain that some of you missed the last time I introduced him.

What may be the most significant evidence for ‘Champ’, the monster of Lake Champlain since the Sandra Mansi photo of 1977 has surfaced. A two-minute film taken via mobile phone shows a dark creature with a moderately long neck swimming across the lake. The creature seems to pause a couple of times. Much of its back is showing, the only the thing close to it in the water to is what looks like a buoy. If we could measure this then we might get a handle on the size of the creature. . The film was taken near Oakledge Park in Burlington last weekend.

Witness Eric Olsen, does not know if the animal he filmed is the legendary Champ and calls the film, now on Youtube, simply ‘Strange Sighting on Lake Champlain’.

Olsen said… “You can see that it is moving both horizontally, across the water, and vertically, going under the surface and coming back up,” he said. “It struck me as something that was long, that it didn’t have much girth.”

Does the footage actually show the creature known as ‘Champ’? Well firstly we don’t know what Champ is, if it or rather they exist. It looks quite different to the image in the Mansi photograph, lacking the long, serpentine neck. It does not appear to show the humps often associated with Champ sightings either. It does bear some resemblance to a few eyewitness sketches from Loch Ness however.

I have compared the footage to know animals swimming. It is not a seal, the neck is too thin and the head held too high. It doesn’t look like a bear either. Bears seldom show as much of their backs as this creature seems to whilst swimming. Once more the neck seems too slender for a bear.

Another possibility is a swimming moose or some other species of deer. An adult male would have noticeable horns but it could be a youngster or female. The neck looks much more like that of a moose or deer and these animals show more of their back when swimming. The stumbling point on this theory is that there are no visible, external ears on the animal in the footage.

Apparently the creature did not leave the water as would be expected if it were a moose or deer. As always we are left with interesting but inconclusive footage.