Lake Monster Mysteries (23 page)

When interviewing eyewitness Sandra Mansi at length about her sighting and photograph, I was particularly intrigued by her description of the process by which she came to the conclusion that what she saw was the reputed monster Champ. After all, the famous photograph she took is not obviously Champlain's lake denizen. It might be, but as J. Richard Greenwell has noted, it isn't necessarily a lake creature, or even a living object.

Some accounts of Mansi's encounter suggest that she saw the lake monster, identified it as Champ, and took a photo of it. But according to Mansi, that's not what happened. Part of the problem with this description is that it starts with the answer; the assumption is made that what she saw and photographed was a lake creature. But another, more accurate (and scientific) approach is to stick to the facts and simply report that she saw and photographed an unknown object that was later thought (by others) to be Champ. Some may argue that this is an irrelevant detail, but I disagree; reporting that Mansi saw and photographed Champ grossly oversimplifies what happened, and, as is often the case in investigations, the devil is in the details. The fact is that the best eyewitness to a lake monster didn't identify it as such until cryptozoologists convinced her that that's what it was.

The details of Sandra Mansi's encounter with Champ are related in
chapter 2
. But her progression from eyewitness to Champ advocate is interesting and instructive. She went through three distinct stages of belief about what she had seen:

1.  At time of the sighting, Mansi wasn't sure what she was seeing. She thought that it might be an optical illusion, but not the Lake Champlain monster. She was duly skeptical at first, well aware that perceptions can be deceiving and that the light, water, and lack of
contextual cues can be misleading. (Mansi said, “I thought it was maybe the sun.… The lake can do funny things—it really can.”) It could have been, she says, a trick of the light or a large fish. As for the local lake monster, although Mansi had heard stories of Champ as a girl, she didn't take them seriously; Champ was the creature that would eat little children if they didn't behave. Before this, Mansi thought of Champ “kind of like the Tooth Fairy,” she says. “Champ came into my mind, but I totally dismissed it… we convinced ourselves it was probably a fish or whatever and we sent it to the Photomat.”

2.  When the photograph was developed and she saw the image on the print, Mansi was certain that it wasn't an optical trick but some physical object (not necessarily Champ) actually in the water. She now considered the possibility that what she had seen was Champ, but she wasn't certain. Even several years after the sighting, Mansi hadn't conclusively settled on Champ as the definitive explanation. (When Mansi offered the photo to an expert for analysis in 1980 or 1981, she told him, “I'd like for you to look at it and tell me what the hell I saw—because I don't know.”)

3.  Mansi didn't identify the object as a lake creature until cryptozoologists convinced her that that's what it was. In 1979 Mansi and a friend brought the photo to the attention of Champ researcher Joe Zarzynski, who had been searching for the creature for years and was convinced of its existence. Other cryptozoologists, including Roy Mackal and Richard Greenwell, were eventually contacted as well. Mansi soon became a true believer: she'd seen and photographed Champ. “You'll never convince me otherwise,” she now says. Only after Mansi had contact with (and started reading books by) cryptozoologists—those with a preexisting inclination to believe in the reality of the Champ monster—did the identity of the object become cemented: it was Champ. They provided her with background information on Champ, told her about Samuel de Champlain's sighting (now proved never to have occurred), and so on. Taken scientifically and ethnographically, these pieces of evidence are highly suspect. But to a relatively unsophisticated layperson new to cryptozoology, it must have seemed very convincing.

Several cryptozoologists, and Zarzynski in particular, immediately accepted Mansi's photo as obvious and strong evidence of Champ (one notable exception was Greenwell, mentioned earlier). But just as we can look at clouds or shrubs and envision faces, we can look at ambiguous objects and see what we expect or hope to see. Zarzynski was clearly convinced that Mansi had taken a picture of Champ. His comments in a 1992 interview are revealing: “When I opened it up, I thought it was too good to be true. After putting in so many years of researching and field work, and then finally there was this color photo that clearly depicted a head and neck sticking out of the water. It was almost as if all my Christmases came to me at once.”

As for Mansi, once she met with Champ researchers and advocates, she found a context that neatly fit her sighting and her photograph. The monster writers and cryptozoologists had scant hard data and virtually no photographic evidence, while Sandra Mansi had a personal sighting and a clear photograph of what seemed to be a living monster in the lake; they had the theories, credentials, and books to tell her what she had seen. It was, for both Mansi and the Champ proponents, a perfect fit.

Skeptics are often accused of being closed-minded to the possibility of unusual phenomena, yet it was Zarzynski who was closed-minded to the possibility that Mansi had photographed anything
but
the Lake Champlain monster. The bias toward belief is just as damaging as the bias against it. Science is an objective pursuit of the truth, and Zarzynski's immediate conviction that Mansi's photo was of the beast he had spent years searching for (“clearly a head and neck”) was based more on hope and desire than on good evidence.

I'm not saying that Mansi's photo can't be of the Lake Champlain monster; I'm saying that it shouldn't have been latched on to immediately as such strong and definitive proof. It was—and remains—just an ambiguous form in the water, and serious investigators and researchers must not turn the photo into something it's not.

The fact that Mansi only later identified the object as Champ is significant; it demonstrates how ambiguous information can be reinterpreted according to changing influences and circumstances. If what
she saw on July 5, 1977, was clearly a living lake monster, why wasn't she convinced of that from the first moment she saw it? Ironically, Sandra Mansi herself was the original skeptic in this case.

This case—considered by many to be the best-documented lake monster sighting—serves as a cautionary tale for all investigators and researchers. We must be careful to approach evidence objectively and not influence eyewitnesses with our own preconceptions. We all bring our own assumptions and biases to the phenomena we investigate, but we owe it to ourselves (and to the integrity of cryptozoology) to do our best to minimize them.

The circumstances of Sandra Mansi's sighting and photograph of the Lake Champlain monster have been published in dozens—perhaps hundreds—of books, magazines, and Web sites. As I researched Champ, I was repeatedly struck by what appeared to be discrepancies between the published accounts and what Sandra Mansi had told me. In fact, I found at least a dozen significant differences. The basis for comparison is my interview with Mansi herself—not a second- or thirdhand source, but the original eyewitness. Some accounts contradict each other, for example, the version Mansi described for
Unsolved Mysteries
and the one that appeared in Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe's
Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep
(2003). These different versions may be the result of journalistic errors, creative flourish (some mystery writers have a tendency to overdramatize for effect), or Mansi changing her story, but in any event, there are significant discrepancies among them:

1.  Coleman says that Mansi “finally realized it was the grayish-brown head and long snake-like neck of a creature breaking the lake's surface.” As I described earlier, Mansi didn't believe (or “realize”) that it was a creature until several years later. At the time, she most emphatically did
not
think that it was a monster: “I thought it was maybe the sun.… Champ came into my mind, but I totally dismissed it.”

2.  Coleman states that Mansi was “scared to death.” Mansi told me
(and
Unsolved Mysteries)
exactly the opposite: “I wasn't even scared, I'm just trying to figure out what I'm seeing.”

3.  Coleman claims that Mansi “rushed to get her Kodak Instamatic camera from her car.” According to Mansi, she didn't rush to her car at all; in fact, she didn't leave the spot: “Tony [her fiancé] had gone back to the car to get the camera” to photograph the children. He returned with the camera as she was watching Champ and handed her the camera to snap the photo.

4.  Several sources say that Mansi, following a divorce and several relocations, lost the photograph's negative. For example, Jerome Clark, in his chapter in
Mysteries and Monsters of the Sea
(Spaeth 1998), says that the family “misplaced the negative.” Mansi says that she never lost the negative—she threw it away, which is what she does with all photo negatives, even to this day. Clark also states that Mansi's children were “unaware of what was happening in the water behind them [and] never saw the creature.” Mansi says that all of them saw the creature and that her daughter had some difficulty dealing with the experience.

Some may reply that these are minor, irrelevant details, but I emphatically disagree. Details are important, especially in monster investigations. In a field so reliant on anecdotes and sightings, with information that is often fragmentary and incomplete, details can be absolutely crucial. If these details are wrong (or have changed significantly over time), what other details might be wrong? Identifications and sightings often hinge on a few important details, and it's essential that the accounts be as complete and accurate as possible. One example of an important detail omitted from
every
published account of Mansi's sighting is the fact that the supposedly living creature was as deaf as a post. A large, presumably complex aquatic creature that's insensible to sound? This is a detail that I came across only by getting the full and complete story from the source.

The Mansi sighting and photograph constitute perhaps the most important eyewitness account in cryptid research. It is unique in cryptozoology and is touted as the best evidence for lake monsters.
Surely greater attention to detail is called for in such an important case.

I'm not singling out these writers as sloppy scholars; in fact, I regard them as among the best and most responsible writers on cryptozoology (which is why we were pleased to have Coleman write the foreword to this book). I have found far worse problems with other authors. It's precisely because I hold these authors' work in high regard that I'm disturbed by these inconsistencies.

I asked Coleman about the discrepancy involving whether Mansi's fiancé went to the car to get the camera or she went and got it herself. He states, “I take the above merely as evidence that Sandra Mansi has told three versions of where and how she obtained the camera.” Yet if her recollection is really so bad or the story has changed so much—that is, she doesn't know whether she left the spot, crossed a field, retrieved a camera from the car, and came back—her story is in trouble. That's a pretty big detail.

As for the other discrepancies, Coleman stands by his account: “The basis of the summary of the Mansi account remains my firsthand interview and listening to Sandra Mansi telling her story as well as examining what she said at the beginning.'” Fair enough; it is well established that memories change over time, and mistakes can creep into eyewitness accounts. Still, Coleman is only partially correct about reporting what Mansi said “at the beginning,” since she told her story to researchers not hours or days after the sighting but four years later. I don't doubt that Mansi's story may have changed in some respects, but without firsthand access to other early interviews, all I can go by is what she told Joe Nickell and me.

The reporting problem is compounded when future writers use incomplete passages as a valid and accurate account. It is no secret that shoddy scholarship is prevalent in paranormal writing, making accurate and responsible investigations difficult. In a column in
Fortean Times
contributor Nick Warren (1999) commented on the often lax scholarship found in paranormal and believer literature: “One of the most irritating features of fortean studies is the tendency of the same material to be copied from book to book, or periodical to periodical, without any
of the authors troubling themselves to check on the citations origins. Now that so many branches of this endeavour like to accord themselves the status of ‘sciences' (UFOlogy, cryptozoology, cereology) this tendency is becoming nothing short of scandalous. Whenever the exercise is actually undertaken, it often happens that the ‘mystery' mysteriously disappears. … If we wish to be regarded seriously, we must use serious methods of enquiry.”

Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 2003.
The field guide to lake monsters, sea ser
pents, and other mystery denizens of the deep. New York: J. P. Tarcher.

Meurger, Michel, and Claude Gagnon. 1988. Lake monster traditions: A cross-cultural analysis. London: Fortean Tomes.

Spaeth, Frank, ed. 1998. Mysteries and monsters of the sea: True stories from the files of Fate magazine. New York: Gramercy Books.

Warren, Nick. 1999. Checks and balances. Fortean Times 119:47.

On January 21, 2004, I came across a small news item about a father and son in Florida. It was a tragic story involving a man named Dennis Plucknett and his fourteen-year-old son Alex. Plucknett, his two sons, and a friend went hunting at a camp in northeastern Florida. It was early morning, and the members of the group had become separated. Alex was sitting in a ditch about 225 yards away from his father when someone yelled, “Hog!” The elder Plucknett grabbed his .308-caliber Ruger rifle with scope, steadied his aim, and fired one round at a boar in the distance. Within minutes, Alex was dead of a massive head wound, killed by his father's shot.