Does ogopogo exist ?

Question

Does ogopogo exist ?

Answer 1

Ogopogo means different things to different people. This does not automatically relegate the beast to myth,but the differing versions do suggest that a real understanding of Ogopogo requires a broad view

Answer 2

Ogopogo is the name given to a lake monster reported to live in Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada.

Answer 3

Ogopogo does not exist and neither do any of the other lake monsters in other parts of the world; for example the Loch Ness monster. It goes against all biological reasoning. For a large animal to exist there has to be a breeding colony and a huge food supply. There need to be bones and other evidence. What is ogopogo meant to be? A reptile or a mammal or a fish?  If either of the first 2 then it has to come to the surface often to breathe and has to come on land to breed. if it is a fish, it would be caught in nets or on lines, or at least seen fairly often.

These lake monsters have never been photographed or detected on sonar or other detection equipment. There are no bones or other remains.

Answer 4

isn't ogopogo  a latin dance step?

Answer 5

Yes

Answer 6

no.

Answer 7

have you seen one in person? i cant say there is not i have seen to meny things to say its impossibel i belive there is....

Answer 8

Probably to the ones that have seen him!

Answer 9

Giant sea creatures have fascinated and terrorized mankind for centuries. In fact, seeing one used to be so common that the Ancients made the monsters part of their folklore, calling them names like the Kraken and Leviathan and blaming the creatures for everything from misfortune to good luck. Today, water monster reports are less common with the result that many skeptics still believe the giant sea creatures exist only in the fossil records, having died out with the last dinosaur. But fossil records are misleading, as witnessed by the discovery in 1938 of the coelacanth, a large fish thought to be extinct by the fossil records for millions of years. It was trawled up from the ocean depths off the Comoro Islands near Madagascar, and since it was first caught, more than eighty have been found.

In 1976, a previously unknown shark nearly fifteen feet long was hauled out of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. It was called Megamouth, later classified as Megachasma pelagios, though it feeds on plankton. A second specimen was netted off California in 1984, proving that unknown creatures of very large size are awaiting discovery in the oceans. But just as sea monsters

may be unknown, or called "extinct" species until caught, so too, might be the lake monsters. One such monster seen with regular frequency is Ogopogo, the lovable unknown sea serpent residing in the depths of a deep Canadian lake.

For the last century, renown scientists and amateur investigators have grappled with the mystery of a Loch Ness-type monster---that elusive lake creature in Scotland sighted more than 3,000 times over the last fifty years, but never adequately explained---living in British Columbia's Lake Okanagan. The lake is a remnant of the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago, and lies on the Pacific slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It is seventy-nine miles long, two-and-a-half miles wide, and in places, more than 800 feet deep, providing more than ample room for any large water beast, which the eyewitnesses claim resembles a huge snake.

As early as the 1700s, the Okanagan Indians knew of a water beast living in the lake. They called the creature N'ha-a-itk, meaning "snake of the water," and their Native superstitions demanded certain traditions before entering N'ha-a-ith's domain. One of the traditions was the ritual sacrifice of a small animal as a peace offering before crossing the lake. Tying their horses behind their canoes, they would paddle out to where they believed the serpent lived in a cave beneath the water---known as Squally Point---and make their offering, thus insuring that their horses would not be dragged under and drowned by the monster.

In 1890, Captain Thomas Shorts was steaming on the lake when he saw a finned creature about sixteen feet long with a head like that of a ram. The creature promptly disappeared when he turned his ship in its direction, and virtually no one believed him when he reported it. But other reports soon followed at two or three a year, and people began to examine the lake in more careful detail. Today, the local population fervently believes in the creature's existence. They call it Ogopogo, and have named the island where its traditional home is Squally Point, Ogopogo Island.

The creature's name can be dated precisely to 1926, when W. H. Brimblecombe sang at his Rotarian Club's lunch party a song he had composed about the monster based on an original British nonsense song featuring a half-earwig, half-snail called Ogopogo. The original ditty goes:

I'm looking for the Ogopogo. The funny little Ogopogo.

His mother was an earwig,, his father was a snail.

I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.

I want to find the Ogopogo while he's playing on his banjo.

The song became a favorite in Great Britain, and for some unknown reason, crossed the Atlantic. It finally arrived in the town of Kelowna, British Columbia, on the shores of Okanagan Lake. At the luncheon, Brimblecombe decided to give it a distinctly local twist. "At the time," he wrote, "there was considerable talk about the mysterious creature in Okanagan Lake, and the possibilities of making a little fun were recognized."

Anyone who knows Rotarians, know they love to sing at their club meetings. Although many songs are patriotic, they are also just as apt to be hymnal, club oriented or just plain nonsense. Some clubs even take popular tunes and change the words to fit the needs of the club. Rotarian Brimblecombe's parody went:

I'm looking for the Ogopogo.

The bunny-hugging Ogopogo.

His mother was a mutton, his father was a whale.

I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.

I'm looking for the Ogopogo.

The reference to mutton was an allusion to the statement of several eyewitnesses that the "mysterious creature" had a head like a sheep.

The Rotarians loved the song, and news quickly leaked to the press. The day after the luncheon, the Vancouver Daily Province, declared Ogopogo to be the official name of the "Famous Okanagan Sea Serpent," and the name stuck.

The year 1926 also seems to have been a bumper year for Ogopogo sightings. Throughout the summer and well into the fall months, the sightings continued. So did the attempts at hoaxing with the result that most people began to laugh at the idea of a sea creature living in the lake. Matter-of-fact, the whole idea of sea monsters sent people into giggling fits, and Ogopogo was treated as a joke.

But in November of that year, the situation took on subtle, serious undertones when the creature was observed to be cavorting by no less than sixty people attending a baptism on the lake. With all the false Ogopogo's perpetrated by hoaxers, most of the observers at the baptism thought they were looking at another fraud---until the creature dived beneath the surface and revealed its true nature.

Also in December, the Vancouver Star reported that Okanagan had iced over and Ogopogo lay dead on the ice. It was a rumor quickly dispelled when the Kelowna Daily Courier wired the Star, "No ice on lake. Ogopogo invisible. Somebody should sober up---Christmas is over." In its retraction, the Star stated, "LAKE SERPENT STILL LIVING. Investigation fails to support theory of death."

The story appeared to be someone's idea of a practical joke on the Star, since Lake Okanagan never freezes. As with most glacial lakes, it is too deep to freeze, but it also never gets very warm in the winter either. In fact, the water temperature hovers around thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, which is several degrees colder than Loch Ness where the water temperature is forty-two degrees Fahrenheit and where scientists now believe that an unidentified monster does exist.

Not surprisingly, Lake Okanagan's relative position with respect to that of Loch Ness has some scientists believing that the presence of an unidentified sea creature living in the depths of the lake is not as outlandish as it seems. Nessie, the famous Loch Ness monster, also thrives in a deep glacial lake, and some zoologists actually theorize that Loch Ness may be connected by underwater channels to the sea---that the Loch Ness monster is, in fact, a sea serpent of some kind traveling back and forth between the lake and the ocean. They also claim that hundreds of other lakes located in the same approximate latitude bands as Loch Ness could have similar connections to the sea and could be the home of mysterious sea creatures.

There have been reported sightings of creatures like the Loch Ness monster in approximately sixty other lakes around the world...places like Lake Storsjon in Sweden, Lake Rybinskoye in the Soviet Union and Lake Tsuchiura in Japan. All these lakes fall into the same latitude band as Loch Ness in Scotland, as does Lake Okanagan. But finding the creature, or the carcass, has proved elusive. Most monster lakes are far too large to be systematically searched, and many, like those in Scandanavia, are far too remote and rarely visited.

It is clear that a lot of people have seen something in Lake Okanagan that they suspect is a water monster, but what is it exactly that they are really seeing? Scientists know there are several species of fish which, when left undisturbed, grow to enormous size. The best example is the sturgeon, which averages ten feet in length, but has been known to grow much larger. In 1956, two Indians fishing in a canoe in Lake Seton, British Columbia, saw a sturgeon twenty-two feet long. Ten years later, another couple on the lake in a twenty-five foot boat sailed alongside a sturgeon that was ten feet longer than the boat. In Russia, a sturgeon was caught in the Volga River that was twenty-four feet long and weighted 3,241 pounds. And scientists also point out that there are eels of enormous size, too.

In July 1949, a group on a party boat saw what they thought to be Ogopogo at a distance of 100 feet. It was partially submerged with its head underwater as if feeding, and it had a "forked" horizontal tail, characteristic of whales, and moved its snakelike body in an undulating fashion, uncharacteristic of reptiles. About thirty feet of smooth, dark skin of its back was visible. Other reports carried much the same information.

When home movie cameras became popular, it appeared to be only a matter of time before Ogopogo would be captured on film. In 1968, that is exactly what happened, although controversy still surrounds the short footage, which was taken with an 8mm movie camera. The camera operator, a sawmill worker named Art Folden from Case, British Columbia, was reluctant to make the film public fearing ridicule, but he did show it over and over to family and friends for almost two years before his brother-in-law convinced him to turn it over for investigation. By then, the film wasn't in very good shape, and the image was most indistinct.

According to Folden, he and his wife were returning from an outing on the lake when he spied something odd in the water near the shore. He joking told his wife that it was Ogopogo, but when she looked, she thought it was just a bunch of ducks. It was late afternoon, but Folden decided to stop and film it anyway. Since he only had a trace amount of film left in the camera, he stopped filming each time the creature went underwater.

The film showed a dark object diving and reappearing in a sequence of moves that indicated it was moving out from shallow water into deeper water for a large dive into deeper water. Then it dove and did not reappear. Because the pine trees on shore were approximately twenty-five feet tall, the dark mass in Art Folden's film was estimated to be sixty feet long and about three feet in diameter---or about the same size as the creature in the Loch Ness sightings.

But to some skeptics, Folden's film also looked very much like a large wake of water. They theorized that the passing of a large boat stirred up the water enough to send a large wave shoreward. And, since the waves take as much as five minutes to reach the shoreline, the skeptics pointed out that what Art Folden thought was Ogopogo could have been normal water motion. Closer examination also appeared to dispel at least part of the theory. What could be mistaken for a wave could also be mistaken for the tip of a fin of a gigantic creature moving just below the surface of the water. So, what did Art Folden really film?

One year earlier, a sighting by twenty people described a creature having a "head like a bucket and spouting water." They claimed it was incredibly long, nearly sixty feet, and skinny like as snake. It began to appear that Ogopogo might be a whale, but it also seemed to be absurd. A freshwater whale in a lake miles inland from the sea? Preposterous...wasn't it?

By the mid-1970s, Ogopogo was an accepted fact, although determining its species was a debatable topic. A report in 1974, while offering more details, managed to shed more mystery than light on the situation. A teenage girl swimming in the lake reported a huge, heavy something bump against her legs. After reaching the safety of a raft, she peered into the clear water and saw a strange animal with a "hump or coil which was eight feet long and four feet above the water moving in a forward motion." Five to ten feet behind the hump, about five to eight feet below the surface, she could see the tail. She described it as being forked and horizontal like a whale, and four to six feet wide. As the hump submerged, the tail came to the surface until its tip poked above the water about a foot.

The girl further described the creature as a "very dull dark gray color" and it moved in an undulating fashion. She had the impression that the head joined the body without a neck, like a fish or snake. She said, "This thing looked more like a whale than a fish, but I have never seen a whale that skinny and snaky-looking before." Her description did, in fact, match a whale from the fossil record, but no trace of it has ever been uncovered any closer to the present time than twenty-five million years ago. The creature was supposed to be extinct.

In 1976, Ed Fletcher from Vancouver was with a group of friends on the lake when they saw Ogopogo. The creature remained in view for several hours while the party pursued it back and forth along the shoreline taking pictures. Fletcher turned over to investigators five photographs of a multi-humped creature. They claimed it had two erect ears on its head.

Twelve years after the Folden film, in 1980, a group of vacationers thought they had sighted Ogopogo. One of them, Larry Thal, had a home movie camera, and managed to capture the creature on film. Played in slow motion, the film reveals intriguing details.

"Larry's film showed how the animal swims and the massive waves that it creates," said Arlene Gaal, a researcher and author who has been investigating Ogopogo since 1968 and who has records on file of more than 200 sightings, including the Folden film. "It actually showed that it has some form of appendage that seems to pop up every now and then. But the interesting thing is that the animal Art Folden shot and the animal Larry Thal shot are basically the same size. They are very large creatures. In Larry's film we're seeing a creature at least forty to sixty feet from head to tail."

Nine years later on 18 July 1989, seventy-eight-year-old Clem Chaplin showed his son, Ken, an inlet where he thought he'd seen Ogopogo. The creature had been going to and from a boom of logs at the mouth of a nearby creek. Ken took his video camera, staked out the area, and filmed a creature that appeared to be hairless, greenish in color, and spotted. It was about fifteen feet long and less than half the size that was measured in the Folden and Thal films.

Ken Chaplin's video caused immediate sensation. Time Magazine, as well as several newspapers in the United States, carried the amazing story of what appeared to be a new Loch Ness monster. But closer examination by wildlife experts sparked a controversy that still rages.

Robert Lincoln, a regional wildlife biologist, reviewed the film and declared that it was not a hoax. There was nothing to show that it had been fabricated in any way. He believed it was a live, living animal, but the discussion revolved around the two species most likely---the river otter and the beaver. Ogopogo could exist elsewhere in Okanagan Lake, he stated, but in his opinion, it was the video of a beaver.

Ken Chaplin was, understandably, not happy with that analysis. He estimated that he was 75-100 feet away from the creature and its features were definitely snake or lizard-like. It had no fur and no hair. The body was thrashing behind it. When it brought its tail section out of the water, he and his father were stunned into silence. Then his father turned and said, "You know, if that tail were to hit a man, it would probably kill him." And Ken agrees. Such was their impression as to size of the beast.

Ken Chaplin further pointed out that the largest recorded beaver in the Interior was four-and-one-half feet long. He just didn't see how he and his father could have been very impressed from a distance of 75-100 feet away. After careful study, he also noticed that a beaver, when slapping its tail, has the head either level to the water or it's already starting to go down. In his video, the head is arching up while the tail comes down. He believes he filmed Ogopogo and not a beaver.

The wildlife experts put photographs of a beaver with its tail in the held-vertical position just prior to a tail slap next to a still photograph taken from Chaplin's video. For the most part, the two photographs appear to be mirror images of one another. But closer comparison does appear to substantiate Ken Chaplin's point that the creature he saw raised its head prior to slapping its tail, whereas the beaver's head was at water level. Also, the creature Ken and his father saw was at least fifteen feet long and not four feet like a beaver.

"For those who want to call it a beaver, I'll say no way," said Arlene Gaal. "An otter? I can't buy it, either. A miniture Ogopogo...in all probability."

Is it possible that there are several creatures living in the lake, each of varying size, but all belonging to the same unknown zoological family? Certainly, agree supporters. For a monster to exist as an unknown species, there must be a breeding colony and not just a single specimen. It's also just as possible that there are several creatures of varying size belonging to different unknown zoological families. How else can the different eyewitness testimonies be explained? Experts may disagree on the Chaplin footage, but there is still no adequate explanation for the large creature seen surfacing in Art Folden's film or clearly churning up a wake in the Larry Thal footage. In addition, hundreds of other sighting over the years attest to something unusual in Lake Okanagan.

Since Lake Okanagan is connected to the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, speculation is that the creature, whatever it is, originally belonged to the seas. As the Ice Age melted and the sea water rose, it swam the river, entered the lake to feed on the lush plankton in the newly flooded valley, and become trapped as the water receeded---evolving over the millennia to adapt to its freshwater environment.

But as to what Ogopogo might be, science doesn't know. Most of the reports on the creature claims it to be serpentine, elongated with no centrally thickened body, and forty to sixty feet in length. The skin has been described as dark green to green-black with other colors ranging from gray, blue-black, brown, to brown-black. All sightings claim the skin is smooth and appears to be free of scales, hair, or fur, with the possible exception of the head which might exhibit sparse hairs or a mane directly at the back of the neck.

There are some who propose Ogopogo could be a plesiosaur, a long-necked water reptile of the Mesozoic era and presumed to be extinct for more than seventy million years. One type of plesiosaur, the elasmosaur, is believed to the Loch Ness monster. But others think that Ogopogo, because of its large vertically undulating motion, is a zeuglodon or a primitive toothed whale long thought to be extinct about twenty-five million years ago. And although whales are thought of as being exclusively sea animals, there is no reason why there could not be freshwater forms of more primitive types since it appears likely that adaptation to life in the sea proceeds through a freshwater phase.

Does that make Ogopogo real? Well, there are plenty of witnesses who claim to have gotten a good look, and they all describe a creature bearing no resemblance to any known species. Close-up photographs don't help. All are suspect. It seems that the clearer and closer a photograph is in the field of the strange and mysterious, the more likely it is to be dismissed as a hoax.

But the Canadian government is taking no chances. It has declared Ogopogo an endangered species, and hunting it is against the law. Most of the people who live on the shores of Lake Okanagan need no further proof. They've constructed a life-sized model of the creature, although it looks more like a dragon than a sea serpent, and have made it the star of an annual festival called, appropriately enough, "Ogopogo Days." For them, Ogopogo is very real indeed.

Answer 10

Find out for yourself,here's a great link.