Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: There were sightings and the story spread. People gathered around
Speaker 2: the lake to search for the monster. Newspapers carry the
Speaker 2: story around the world. A fifty thousand dollars prize was
Speaker 2: offered to anyone who could kill or capture the beast.
Speaker 2: And all of this a half century before NeSSI would
Speaker 2: have become the world's most famous lake monster right here
Speaker 2: in America. The Story of Champ.
Speaker 3: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4: A giant, hairy creature.
Speaker 2: Part eight party masts.
Speaker 5: In Luckness, a twenty four mile long, bottomless lake in
Speaker 5: the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 4: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster. MONSTERTA.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 2: Blake Smith and in this episode Ben Radford and I
Speaker 2: will talk with sociologist and author Robert Bartholomew about his
Speaker 2: new book, The Untold Story of Champ. You may think
Speaker 2: you know all about Champ, but I learned several interesting
Speaker 2: bits of information in this episode, and hopefully you will too.
Speaker 2: Robert takes us on a very thorough journey through the
Speaker 2: history of Champ. Sightings on that through modern times and
Speaker 2: draw some interesting conclusions about what's driving these sightings in
Speaker 2: Lake Champlain. A quick note, Will you be in the
Speaker 2: Atlanta area on Saturday, March sixteenth, twenty thirteen. If so,
Speaker 2: please join us at Manuel's Tavern for an Atlanta Skepticamp fundraiser.
Speaker 2: The entertainment will include John Snyder of American Free Thought,
Speaker 2: Derek Colandano of Skepticality, and myself in a role I
Speaker 2: was born to play, that of Blake Smith, the mischievous podcaster.
Speaker 2: If you make it to the fundraiser and listen to
Speaker 2: the show, be sure and stop by and say hello.
Speaker 2: I love to meet you folks in real life.
Speaker 1: Moremstertle.
Speaker 2: Today we're going talking to Robert Bartholomew, who is a
Speaker 2: sociologist teaching at Botany College in South Auckland, New Zealand.
Speaker 2: He's author or co author of many books that would
Speaker 2: be of interest to Monster Talk listeners, covering such topics
Speaker 2: as mass hysteria, UFOs, extraterrestrial encounters, and pertinent to this interview,
Speaker 2: the Untold Story of Champ, a social history of America's lockness.
Speaker 2: Monster Welcome, Bob.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you.
Speaker 3: I'll try to speak loudly as I'm here in New Zealand,
Speaker 3: thousands of miles away.
Speaker 1: That's right, You're coming through very well.
Speaker 2: He said Champ of the Lake Monster. I think we'll
Speaker 2: be familiar to most of our listeners, but I doubt
Speaker 2: they've gone as deep with Champ as you have. Can
Speaker 2: you tell us a little bit about your book and
Speaker 2: why you wrote it?
Speaker 3: Sure, this is one of the great untold stories of
Speaker 3: American history. During the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, the
Speaker 3: Champlain Monster, or Sea Serpent as it was no at
Speaker 3: the time, was the equivalent of the Lochness Monster. It
Speaker 3: was a household name across the United States. The reason
Speaker 3: I wrote the book is to separate fact from fiction
Speaker 3: from speculation, because when you look in the media and
Speaker 3: at the various claims out there, it's hard to know
Speaker 3: what to believe. There are all kinds of claims out there.
Speaker 3: There's a woman who claims to be able to hear
Speaker 3: chant making sounds under the water. The famous Mansie photo,
Speaker 3: supposedly the greatest lake monster photo ever taken near Saint Albans, Vermont.
Speaker 3: Supposedly there are some strange things about that photo. And
Speaker 3: when I look back the other major book that's been
Speaker 3: written on Champ was by Joe Zarzinski, who wrote a
Speaker 3: book called Chant Beyond the Legend back in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: and I knew Joe very well, and having read that
Speaker 3: book as a child, and I did some research on Champ.
Speaker 3: What I realized was that there was a lot of
Speaker 3: information that was not in that book, like the entire
Speaker 3: history of Champ prior to nineteen fifty. Virtually all of
Speaker 3: that information is maybe fifteen hundred words in his book,
Speaker 3: about thirty thousand in my book.
Speaker 4: I felt it's.
Speaker 3: Very important to thoroughly document the early history and sightings
Speaker 3: of Champ up until about nineteen fifty, and then there's
Speaker 3: a lot more information from nineteen fifty to president I
Speaker 3: also put in information about that as well. But this
Speaker 3: is a legitimate part of American history. It needs to
Speaker 3: be preserved and people have a right to have the
Speaker 3: full information about Champ. For example, I had access to
Speaker 3: a lot of correspondence with Josarzinsky with doctor Phil Rains
Speaker 3: at State University of New York at Plattsburg, who was
Speaker 3: a monster hunter in the nineteen sixties and seventies looking
Speaker 3: for Champ. And when I looked at those documents and letters,
Speaker 3: I realized that Josarzinski had left a lot of information
Speaker 3: out of his book, and some of that information wasn't
Speaker 3: exactly complementary toward Champ, so we kind of skewed it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's I thought the same thing again. I've I've
Speaker 5: read I've read your book The Untold Story of Champ,
Speaker 5: having done some research on my own, and and just
Speaker 5: being interested of course in Lake monsters and Chants specifically.
Speaker 5: It was it was just really nice to see a
Speaker 5: much fuller treatment. As you pointed out, I mean I'd
Speaker 5: read Joe's book years and years ago, and and you're
Speaker 5: exactly right. I mean he sort of gives very short
Speaker 5: shrift to anything before really the nineteen seventy seven Sandramancy
Speaker 5: photo published in eighty one. He's sort of that sort
Speaker 5: of that to him is sort of the main starting point.
Speaker 5: And I think I think you did a great job
Speaker 5: in terms of putting the historical context of Champ in
Speaker 5: these claims, and so it was it was really cool
Speaker 5: for me to sort of see somebody taking a scholarly
Speaker 5: approach to sort of filling in the gaps, and I
Speaker 5: think you did that really well.
Speaker 4: Well. Thank you. Very much.
Speaker 3: To be able to make advancements and sciences and the humanities,
Speaker 3: you have to stand on the shoulders of giants and
Speaker 3: what's come before you. And one of those books was
Speaker 3: your book with Joe Nicol Lake Monster Mysteries, that was
Speaker 3: very helpful. Now, in that book you had different chapters
Speaker 3: on different lake monsters, and one of those was Champ.
Speaker 3: And the research that you had done was very helpful
Speaker 3: and enlightening for me because it helped me to formulate
Speaker 3: more specific questions as I was delving into this. Most
Speaker 3: books on Champ claim that Champ is some sort of dinosaur,
Speaker 3: either a zugliodon or a plesiosaur, a former primitive whale
Speaker 3: being a zuguliodon, a plesiosaur being this kind of stout
Speaker 3: creature with flippers and a long neck. But as I
Speaker 3: looked into this, those possibilities to me became less and
Speaker 3: less realistic because these are mammals and they have to
Speaker 3: come up for air, and hypothetically you would be seeing
Speaker 3: a lot more sightings than you are now. And then
Speaker 3: there's the whole problem of how Champ would be breathing
Speaker 3: in the wintertime, And people say, well, maybe Champs adopted
Speaker 3: to be an air breather and it can stay under
Speaker 3: water for a lot longer. And well, yes, but Lake
Speaker 3: Champlain has only been there for about ten to twelve
Speaker 3: thousand years.
Speaker 4: It's a glacial lake.
Speaker 3: People come up with all sorts of speculation, like, you know,
Speaker 3: what if George Washington had an electric blender at Valley Forge,
Speaker 3: would we have won the war quicker or something. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's all kinds of speculation, and you can speculate about anything.
Speaker 3: I mean, champ is part of this world where like
Speaker 3: Bigfoot and UFOs or other cryptozoological creatures, you have sightings,
Speaker 3: you seem to have some physical evidence at times, but
Speaker 3: then nobody has any concrete evidence to take into a
Speaker 3: laboratory and say, yep, that's the Champlain Monster or the
Speaker 3: Lochnest monster, or that's a Bigfoot. We all know about
Speaker 3: Bigfoot and how people have those claims and it never
Speaker 3: seems to pan out well in the one sense. I mean,
Speaker 3: there are people out there saying, well, maybe the Lake
Speaker 3: Champlain monster is like Bigfoot and it's some type of
Speaker 3: paranormal creature that has the you know, goes into another
Speaker 3: dimension or something. And as a scientist, oh, that's interesting
Speaker 3: and you can speculate about just about anything. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe there's interdimensional creatures out there.
Speaker 4: But to me, the much more plausible.
Speaker 3: Explanation is that the human mind is very fallible and
Speaker 3: subject to error. The human mind does not take an
Speaker 3: information like a video cassette recorder. It interprets information as
Speaker 3: it takes it in. All you have to do is
Speaker 3: watch the Super Bowl and a couple of calls there
Speaker 3: could have met that San Francisco forty nine ers would
Speaker 3: have won. It's very You have referees and umpires who
Speaker 3: are trained observers, They have excellent eyesight, they know the rules,
Speaker 3: at least now they know the rules the pre pre
Speaker 3: season umpires, and I'm not sure if these are the rules.
Speaker 3: But and yet they continue, and they practice all the
Speaker 3: time to continue to make mistakes and get it wrong.
Speaker 3: And even sometimes tis the video replays, they make mistakes,
Speaker 3: like that famous game there before they hire the quote
Speaker 3: unquote real referees back. It's just the nature of the
Speaker 3: way human beings are in the way we function. I mean,
Speaker 3: I can remember as a child looking out on Lake
Speaker 3: Champlain and thinking, gee, maybe I'll swim to the other side.
Speaker 3: It looked about a football field long, but you start
Speaker 3: swimming out there and it's two or three miles long.
Speaker 3: Because especially on water and when you're looking on oceans
Speaker 3: and lakes, it's very easy to misidentify things and it's
Speaker 3: very easy to get a differing perspective there. And it's
Speaker 3: also important for people to realize that I keep an
Speaker 3: open mind, and it certainly is possible. I think, Ben,
Speaker 3: you've done research on the Champlain Sea Serpent, the Champlain Monster,
Speaker 3: and you have said that you know, you're open minded
Speaker 3: if the evidence is.
Speaker 1: There, sure, sure, absolutely, And.
Speaker 3: What people have to realize is not every light in
Speaker 3: the sky is a UFO, you know, Not every rustling
Speaker 3: in the woods is a Bigfoot. Not every temperature spike
Speaker 3: or energy spike on some electronic device in a so
Speaker 3: called haunted house is proof that there's a ghost there.
Speaker 3: And not every object spotted on Lake Champlain or Lockness
Speaker 3: is the Locknest Monster or Champ. And so we have
Speaker 3: to kind of keep it in perspective. I would say
Speaker 3: that ninety percent of the people that see Champ or
Speaker 3: the Locknest Monster or Bigfoot or honest sincere people, that
Speaker 3: few people are hoaxing. And by the same token, Lauren
Speaker 3: Coleman has suggested that perhaps ten percent of witnesses to
Speaker 3: something that they can't fully explain, like a bigfoot or
Speaker 3: a lake monster, ten percent of those witnesses actually actually
Speaker 3: come forward, and the other ninety percent stay quiet because
Speaker 3: of ridicule or they just don't care. So you have
Speaker 3: a phenomena here that you got a human aspect to
Speaker 3: it as well. Like if you go back in the
Speaker 3: early European sightings and there aren't many up until all
Speaker 3: the mid eighteen hundreds, why is that. Well, the Europeans
Speaker 3: around Lake Champlain at the time were dodging Indians, they
Speaker 3: were having problems with smallpox, the influenza outbreaks that would occur.
Speaker 4: I mean, you get.
Speaker 3: Influenza today, you go to the dock, usually not always,
Speaker 3: but usually you'll recover. Back then, I mean that was
Speaker 3: extremely dangerous, still dangerous today, but even more so back then.
Speaker 3: And then you have people that can't get to a
Speaker 3: nearby town maybe once a month, so they can't pick
Speaker 3: up the phone and say, yeah, I just saw a
Speaker 3: sea serpent on Lake Champlain. So you have all these
Speaker 3: factors that enter into it. And then you have to
Speaker 3: assume that the nearby town has a newspaper as well,
Speaker 3: and then you're going to tell somebody who's going to
Speaker 3: actually report it in the paper. So there are all
Speaker 3: these factors that enter into it as to why you
Speaker 3: have the sightings when you do have the sidings, Because
Speaker 3: of course, the main flap and I know you know
Speaker 3: this bend in eighteen seventy three, that was when the
Speaker 3: first major wave of sightings occurred on Lake Champlain. And
Speaker 3: that's really an interesting motif that starts to develop here
Speaker 3: because you get flaps. The history of sightings on Lake Champlain,
Speaker 3: like on Lockness, is the history of sighting flaps And
Speaker 3: why is it? And I'd like to know what you
Speaker 3: think about this as well. Why is it that you
Speaker 3: have dozens and dozens of sidings in eighteen seventy three
Speaker 3: and then say, in eighteen seventy six is virtually nothing
Speaker 3: and then all of a sudden you get a whole
Speaker 3: flare up of sightings Again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know, that's that's you know, exactly as
Speaker 5: you pointed out, you know, with with UFOs, of course
Speaker 5: they have you know, that's that's usually where people think
Speaker 5: of flaps. But but you know, there are these things
Speaker 5: go in sois and certainly.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 5: It is fascinating when you look at the different flaps
Speaker 5: cycles of of lake Monster sidings, whether it's og Pogo
Speaker 5: and Lake Okanagan or Champion Champlain. You know when I
Speaker 5: was when I was doing the research there with with
Speaker 5: with Joe uh in Burlington in Port Henry, New York
Speaker 5: as well. You know, they have a big champ board
Speaker 5: up there and it lists the sidings and and what's
Speaker 5: really interesting is that I've gotten off the top of
Speaker 5: my head, but I think that about half of the
Speaker 5: sidings that are listed on that board were clustered around
Speaker 5: two or three specific dates and and and not specific dates,
Speaker 5: but certainly a few years. And so you you don't
Speaker 5: have what you might expect to see, which is, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, if there, if there is a population of
Speaker 5: these creatures living in the lake, you would expect them
Speaker 5: to be more or less evenly distributed. I mean that is,
Speaker 5: you know, animals don't don't only appear in July and December.
Speaker 5: I mean they they have have to eat and move
Speaker 5: around and things like that, and so you would expect,
Speaker 5: obviously with some variation, but you would expect them more
Speaker 5: or less, you know, more evenly distributed whereas in fact,
Speaker 5: what you find, as you just pointed out, is a
Speaker 5: much more of a clustering flap effect. And in my
Speaker 5: best guest, frankly, is that is that you sort of
Speaker 5: have one sighting that spurs other ones, and so you
Speaker 5: have sort of a social contagion aspect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think definitely you have a media aspect here
Speaker 3: in terms of reporting. The other question is is this
Speaker 3: some type of phenomena that is related to the creature
Speaker 3: if it exists itself in terms of the sightings and
Speaker 3: why they would cluster as they do. It's interesting and
Speaker 3: that was very insightful when you were talking about the
Speaker 3: sightings board at Port Henry, when I read that in
Speaker 3: your book that most of those sightings were clustered around
Speaker 3: the time when the famous Mansi photo came out. And
Speaker 3: what's interesting there is a nineteen seventy historian Marjor Reporter
Speaker 3: wrote an article in Vermont Life magazine, very well known
Speaker 3: in the region, and she claimed in that article that
Speaker 3: in sixteen oh nine, Samuel D. Champlain wrote in his
Speaker 3: ship's log that he saw a snakelike creature about twenty
Speaker 3: feet long with a head like a horse. Now, this
Speaker 3: story has been repeated in books, on TV, documentaries and
Speaker 3: magazine articles for years and years now, checking back and
Speaker 3: looking for the original log, it's not there. The log
Speaker 3: is there, but that information that sighting is not there.
Speaker 3: He did not see Champ. What he described seeing was
Speaker 3: a big fish, and it's a textbook description of a
Speaker 3: garb pipe. But here's what's interesting. Prior to nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: in that Vermont Life article, there were zero sightings of
Speaker 3: Champ with a horse like head, not a single report.
Speaker 3: After that article, everybody was seeing Champ with a horse
Speaker 3: like head. It's a form of mass psychology. But then
Speaker 3: you ask yourself at the same time, why is it
Speaker 3: then that the village of Port Henry has that sighting
Speaker 3: board and still has because it's common knowledge up there
Speaker 3: that Samuel d. Champlain saw gar pike, that it wasn't Champ, right,
Speaker 3: So why is it they still have Samuel de Champlain
Speaker 3: as being the first sighting of Champ on that sighting's board.
Speaker 3: And why are newspaper reporters in that region still talking
Speaker 3: about new sightings of Champ or the annual Champ Day
Speaker 3: festival that they have every year when that article comes
Speaker 3: out they discuss it in terms of Samuel de Champlain,
Speaker 3: of course, was the first European to cite the creature
Speaker 3: on the lake. And I keep coming up with an
Speaker 3: answer that's green and it's trying to promote tourism.
Speaker 4: It's not objective journalism.
Speaker 5: Now, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, that's an
Speaker 5: you know, part of it. I think it's just laziness.
Speaker 5: You know, people people don't want to know the truth.
Speaker 5: It's not it's not interesting or sexy to realize that no,
Speaker 5: Champlain did not actually see champ and so, you know,
Speaker 5: I think I think you're right. Part of it is
Speaker 5: is tourism and you might as well flog the story
Speaker 5: for all it's worth. And the other part is just
Speaker 5: people not They don't give a shit. They don't they
Speaker 5: don't care if it makes a good story, they're run
Speaker 5: with it doesn't matter what the facts are.
Speaker 2: The clustering of the sightings, have you looked to see
Speaker 2: if they correspond to any time period where there were
Speaker 2: being increased activity on the lake or or do they
Speaker 2: seem to just be all over the place.
Speaker 4: Well, no, h if you look.
Speaker 3: And in the book, I talk about Gary Manchacopra's research,
Speaker 3: a biologist in Connecticut, and Gary has plotted out all
Speaker 3: known sightings of champ up until a certain date, and
Speaker 3: I think it was in the middle of the night,
Speaker 3: in the middle of January or February. You're least likely
Speaker 3: to see the Champlain Monster because of course the lake's
Speaker 3: rolls over and not a whole huck of a lot
Speaker 3: of people are going to be out in the lake
Speaker 3: at that time. And then it's a certain day of
Speaker 3: the week in the middle of summer, in the evening,
Speaker 3: you're much more likely or most likely to have a
Speaker 3: sighting of a champ. Now, earlier, Ben mentioned the word
Speaker 3: you know, it's not too sexy to have a sighting
Speaker 3: and stuff like that. Well, speaking of sex, I thought
Speaker 3: i'd slipped that in there.
Speaker 2: Gary, that's going to help our ratings.
Speaker 1: Well, you just doubled five.
Speaker 3: Gary suggests that maybe the creature is some type of
Speaker 3: asexual creature can reproduce on its own. I would know
Speaker 3: about that myself. But what's what's interesting is, I think
Speaker 3: to have a creature, you don't.
Speaker 4: Have one old monster in the lake.
Speaker 3: What you have is if it's there a breeding community
Speaker 3: of between say fifteen and thirty five or forty creatures
Speaker 3: in the lake, and then that begs the question, well,
Speaker 3: how come you don't see you you have the smoking gun? Well, here,
Speaker 3: where's the floating body? But then again, there are sturgeon
Speaker 3: in the lake that are over one hundred years old,
Speaker 3: that can grow up to at least a couple of
Speaker 3: hundred pounds in terms of weight, and very very few
Speaker 3: people ever see a body of a sturgeon as well,
Speaker 3: or other fish floating on lakes. Just the whole thing
Speaker 3: with people looking for bigfoot saying, well, how many times
Speaker 3: have you seen a dead beer in the woods, or
Speaker 3: how many times have you seen dead deer in the woods?
Speaker 4: And that's true.
Speaker 3: I mean, on the other hand, you think throughout the
Speaker 3: entire history of humankind that someone would have gotten the
Speaker 3: creature and then you'd have the remnants of it there.
Speaker 4: But just doesn't seem to have happened. Yet.
Speaker 2: It did sound like, for what you said, that you
Speaker 2: wouldn't see them in the winter time. But on a
Speaker 2: nice summer evening, when you're sitting out by the lake
Speaker 2: and it's cool and you're looking out and your vision's
Speaker 2: obscure because it's partially dark, that's a much better time
Speaker 2: to see something like this. But let's back up just
Speaker 2: a little bit, because what you're gonna end up doing
Speaker 2: is making me want to stop talking to you and
Speaker 2: go research. That's which this is a horrible habit I have.
Speaker 2: What I'd like to do is you're uniquely positioned, I think,
Speaker 2: to set a scene that's rarely talked about, which is
Speaker 2: you can talk about what it was like in New
Speaker 2: York and Vermont during the heyday of this first champ flap.
Speaker 2: What was going on? I mean, were there people out
Speaker 2: of the lake with harpoons or or was everybody just
Speaker 2: watching or what happened?
Speaker 4: Then?
Speaker 3: Well, I wasn't there back in eighteen seventy three, but
Speaker 3: my relatives were, and I can remember stories being told
Speaker 3: by my grandmother of her mother and sightings out on
Speaker 3: Lake Champlain. It was an extraordinary moment and time. It
Speaker 3: was really remarkable.
Speaker 4: And then P. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum came in after they had these initial sightings on
Speaker 3: the southern end of the lake, and he offered a
Speaker 3: fifty thousand dollars reward for capture the creature or its carcass,
Speaker 3: which set off a frenzy of people looking for the creature.
Speaker 3: And what's interesting is, I think at that point you
Speaker 3: have people then scrutinizing the lake, and I think it
Speaker 3: sets the scene. Not to twist the question around here,
Speaker 3: but to me, it's a recipe. There's a certain recipe
Speaker 3: for lake monster flaps. And you have, as Ben had
Speaker 3: alluded to, you have this initial sensational case. And there
Speaker 3: was a case of railroad workers up in Dresden who
Speaker 3: had a spectacular report of this large snakelike creature in
Speaker 3: the lake and historically it's between fifteen and forty feet long.
Speaker 3: Fit that bill, very snakelike that got reported in the
Speaker 3: local paper, the Whitehall Times, and I think this prompted
Speaker 3: more local residents to go out onto the lake and
Speaker 3: scrutinize their surroundings for evidence of this creature, and they
Speaker 3: start redefining things that ordinarily they wouldn't think was chanp.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's a large turtle.
Speaker 4: In the lake.
Speaker 3: And then you get what I call retrospective interpretation. Two
Speaker 3: months earlier, somebody had seen something, they didn't think too
Speaker 3: much of it, and then now that becomes a champ.
Speaker 3: They start redefining those events that happened in the past.
Speaker 3: And you can put this same scheme to mothman, to Bigfoot,
Speaker 3: to a variety of monsters, the Jersey Devil. You got
Speaker 3: that initial sensational case that gets reported in the media,
Speaker 3: and then people start scrutinizing their environment for evidence of
Speaker 3: what they assume is there. And then what you throw
Speaker 3: into the mix that a lot of people don't realize
Speaker 3: is the fallibility of human perception. You know, eyewitness testimony
Speaker 3: is very fallible and subject to error. We have fried
Speaker 3: a number of peace people in the United States, fried
Speaker 3: them and then later found out through DNA evidence that
Speaker 3: they didn't rape or murder someone, and that's really unfortunate.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that I've noticed is toward the
Speaker 3: end of these flaps, whether it's UFOs, whether it's Bigfoot,
Speaker 3: or whether it's champlane Monster or lockedness Monster, you tend
Speaker 3: to get well. At the beginning, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: positive and interesting articles and exciting articles and speculation about
Speaker 3: what this might be. Toward the end of flaps, you
Speaker 3: get more hoaxes reported, more misidentifications that are laughed at
Speaker 3: and made fun of. So these things kind of have
Speaker 3: their natural cycle and then collapse under their own dead
Speaker 3: weight as well.
Speaker 1: MH.
Speaker 5: Well, Bobby, you're you're in a unique place. Even though
Speaker 5: of course you weren't around when when P. T. Barnum
Speaker 5: was offering his rewards. But you know, Blake, Blake and
Speaker 5: I didn't up around Lake Champlain, you know, hearing stories,
Speaker 5: and so I'm I'm curious because you did. I'm curious.
Speaker 5: I'm really interested to know.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: I kind of wish that I had grown up around
Speaker 5: a lake that had those stories. I wonder whether I
Speaker 5: would have just sort of accepted it as as a
Speaker 5: little kid, or if I would have you know what
Speaker 5: I would have thought about it. But can you tell
Speaker 5: us some of the some of the some of your
Speaker 5: first recollections about hearing about Champin and how it was characterized.
Speaker 3: Well, I can remember about the earliest time I was
Speaker 3: able to lift up binoculars and go toward the lake
Speaker 3: and hold them up and look. I was, you know,
Speaker 3: I was looking for the Champlain Monster because I'd grown
Speaker 3: up with those stories. And well, there were local people
Speaker 3: there in Whitehall, which is based of the lake in Dresden,
Speaker 3: and Putnam and Taekwondo Roga, and they would tell these
Speaker 3: accounts of seeing this large snakelight creature. And that's the
Speaker 3: interesting thing is you do have a wide variance of
Speaker 3: sightings over time in terms of what people have described,
Speaker 3: but overall there is a certain consistency and that is
Speaker 3: a large snakelike creature between fifteen and forty feet long,
Speaker 3: and they keep saying over and over again historically that
Speaker 3: this thing is very snakelike. So it was very exciting.
Speaker 3: I mean, my brother and I would go out and
Speaker 3: we would interview people who claimed to have seen champ
Speaker 3: And of course we were able to talk to people
Speaker 3: where other people they wouldn't talk to because we grew
Speaker 3: up with them or went to school with them, and
Speaker 3: we had dirt on them, so they had to talk.
Speaker 1: So those blackmail involved. I like it. I like it.
Speaker 3: But the other thing is it's interesting because Whitehall at
Speaker 3: the basil Lake Champlain is also known for bigfoot sidings,
Speaker 3: and they were literally having bigfoot sightings almost in our backyard.
Speaker 3: And those were our friends as well and relatives and
Speaker 3: people we'd grown up with. So at the base of
Speaker 3: Lake Champlain there's a lot of activity. It's also known
Speaker 3: for UFO, so it's a real window area, as John
Speaker 3: Keith would say, in terms of UFOs bigfoot, And of
Speaker 3: course I wrote a book with some other people called
Speaker 3: Monsters of the North Woods, which looks at Bigfoot sightings
Speaker 3: in New York and Vermont. Not to change the subject,
Speaker 3: but there's a real interesting folklore at the base of
Speaker 3: Lake Champlain and all around Lake Champlain with Bigfoot, with
Speaker 3: UFOs and more recently ghosts and things like that. So
Speaker 3: that's all I can remember, really, And then I ended
Speaker 3: up being a journalist, a local reporter in radio. And
Speaker 3: when they had the conference, I believe it was what
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty one, the Champ Conference and Shelbourne, Vermont. I
Speaker 3: couldn't go because I was working on the radio, but
Speaker 3: I made sure I did some interviews. I think I
Speaker 3: interviewed Roy mackel, the former biologist at the University of Chicago,
Speaker 3: who said that he believed that Champ was a form
Speaker 3: of zugliodon, a very snakelike creature that's a form of
Speaker 3: primitive will, as opposed to what others have suggested that
Speaker 3: as a pleasiosaur, which is what's believe by many to
Speaker 3: be in locked nest plesiosaur, having that long neck, but
Speaker 3: also flippers. I'm aware of virtually no sightings on Lake
Speaker 3: Champlain of anything with flippers, so I would eliminate personally
Speaker 3: the idea that it is a plesiosaur and those babies
Speaker 3: had teeth if you go back and look, or as
Speaker 3: a Zugliodon. I think that had teeth as well, but
Speaker 3: it wasn't so defined as the plesiosaur. I have a
Speaker 3: hard time believing that it's either a plesiosaur or a zugliodon.
Speaker 3: But I'm not saying there isn't a some prehistoric or
Speaker 3: unidentified creature in the lake. It's certainly a possibility. But
Speaker 3: you know, if I were to bet money, to paraphrase
Speaker 3: Arthur C. Clark, if I had one hundred dollars to bet,
Speaker 3: I would take ten dollars and put it on Champ
Speaker 3: being real. I'd take forty dollars and put it on
Speaker 3: Champ not being real, And I'd take the other fifty
Speaker 3: dollars and I'd plunk it in my pocket because I
Speaker 3: don't want to kill the mystery. I think there's something
Speaker 3: nice about having a mystery there. Now when I think back,
Speaker 3: I'm still mad. I suppose about Santa Claus and about
Speaker 3: the Easter bunny.
Speaker 2: Boiler alert listeners, spoiler alert, spoiler alert.
Speaker 3: But you know it's there's something nice about that as well,
Speaker 3: because you realize the mystery and how intoxicating that was.
Speaker 3: But at the same time it's a good exercise in
Speaker 3: critical thinking. You know, how is it possible Santa could
Speaker 3: have gone around and delivered all those presents in one
Speaker 3: night or the Easter Bunny could have hopped around. You know,
Speaker 3: we used to throw you know, make a little what
Speaker 3: looked like little bunny tracks in the snow and throw
Speaker 3: a few eggs around. You know, kids were all excited.
Speaker 3: You know, for them, these bunny was real. And for
Speaker 3: those people that see Champ and again the vast majority
Speaker 3: of them are honest, sincere people, and I don't believe
Speaker 3: they're hoaxing to them. Champ is reel. It absolutely happened.
Speaker 3: So you know, I call myself a sympathetic skeptic.
Speaker 2: I'm very.
Speaker 3: Empathetic to those people who have had sightings of something
Speaker 3: that they can't explain in Lake Champlain. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: we have to be very careful. Remember back in nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty eight, the famous War of the World's broadcast. It
Speaker 3: was estimated by Hadley Cantrell at Princeton University that between
Speaker 3: what one point two and one point seven million Americans
Speaker 3: were frightened or panicked as a result of that broadcast,
Speaker 3: people believing that Martians were actually landing on Earth. But
Speaker 3: what's interesting about that, and a lot of people don't realize,
Speaker 3: is that in the broadcast itself, the cast told of
Speaker 3: martians sprang this poison.
Speaker 4: Gas and firing heat rays.
Speaker 3: Well, a number of people actually called police and some
Speaker 3: of them were choking book they believed to be the
Speaker 3: poison gas. Some people said they can actually feel the
Speaker 3: heat rays behind their locked doors. And there was also
Speaker 3: a description of these giant machines about thirty feet high
Speaker 3: wading through the Jersey Palisades in the distance. Well, people
Speaker 3: looked at the distance and actually reported to police on
Speaker 3: the phone, and they got this written down in police
Speaker 3: reports that they could see these giant machines wading through
Speaker 3: the Jersey Palisades. So the human mind is really remarkable
Speaker 3: in terms of misperceiving. Things were very fallible. Whenever somebody escapes,
Speaker 3: there have sightings everywhere. Right now, there's a guy they're
Speaker 3: looking for in California, a former LA police officer. There
Speaker 3: have been site of him everywhere, and that's just a
Speaker 3: normal part of the human condition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a frequent topic here on Mons you're talking.
Speaker 2: I've actually got a little project I'm working on the
Speaker 2: side that I'm going to put in the feet at
Speaker 2: some point that that's about human memory and fallibility. But
Speaker 2: it is a constantly It's worth repeating because I don't
Speaker 2: think people realize just how weird the human mind is
Speaker 2: and how the reality we take for granted is being
Speaker 2: constructed in real time. Let me ask you a question
Speaker 2: about CHAMP and NeSSI. I noticed that the first setting
Speaker 2: of the first major settings of champ predate NeSSI by
Speaker 2: about fifty years. Yet NeSSI now is more famous. Why
Speaker 2: do you think Nessi's got more popularity?
Speaker 3: Colonialism, imperialism? And that's because between eighteen seventy three and
Speaker 3: about nineteen thirty three, the Champlain Monster was ranked number one.
Speaker 3: If it was a college football team, it would be
Speaker 3: ahead of Alabama. It was the number one lake monster
Speaker 3: in the world in terms of newspaper reports all around
Speaker 3: the world. And then there was the famous surgeon sighting
Speaker 3: and some literature and sightings developed at Lockness in the
Speaker 3: mid nineteen thirties. And what you had there was a
Speaker 3: ready made audience because there are what fifty three countries
Speaker 3: that right now were formerly in the Commonwealth, so part
Speaker 3: of the British Empire, and when those got reported in
Speaker 3: the United Kingdom, those newspapers had the transitlant cable by
Speaker 3: then and rapid communication internationally. They also got distributed in
Speaker 3: the Empire in their newspapers, so you have this ready
Speaker 3: made audience, whereas the Champlain Monster remained more of a
Speaker 3: phenomena that was confined to newspapers in the United States.
Speaker 1: We're all familiar with with some of the main parts
Speaker 1: of evidence, including of course the Mancy photo, and we
Speaker 1: can talk more about that later, various sightings, this and that.
Speaker 1: But there's a really interesting in what many people consider
Speaker 1: to be some of the best evidence, which is echolocation
Speaker 1: and sounds, particularly by a woman named Elizabeth von Muggenthalar.
Speaker 1: And again I wrote a little bit about that in
Speaker 1: in my chapter in Lake Monster Mysteries, but you have
Speaker 1: a pretty extensive section in there. And again it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a topic that I often hear you sort of
Speaker 1: brought up. It's like, well, there's this echo location evidence
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. But I've I've i haven't really seen
Speaker 1: it really well refuted, certainly not not as extensively as
Speaker 1: you can, So can you can you give us a
Speaker 1: little primer on that and and some some of the
Speaker 1: you know, what your take is on that evidence.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, i'd like to thank you because
Speaker 3: you really helped me when I was looking at your
Speaker 3: book Lake Monster Mysteries and I saw that you were
Speaker 3: involved with that Discovery Channel documentary I believe it was
Speaker 3: back in two thousand and three, and they send divers
Speaker 3: you were saying down when they had e colocation readings,
Speaker 3: but they weren't seeing anything.
Speaker 4: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, basically I don't know that I was on
Speaker 5: that particular shoot, but I know, I mean I saw
Speaker 5: the footage and I was on one of the shots there,
Speaker 5: and yeah, basically what had happened was, and I don't
Speaker 5: want to jump want to jump on her story. Basically
Speaker 5: the bit that I remember is that is that she
Speaker 5: had seen she and this other team had gotten some
Speaker 5: what she considered be anomalous signatures, and the immediately dispatch divers,
Speaker 5: like within within seconds to go down and try to
Speaker 5: find the source of that, and they found nothing at all.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: And now, when I contacted Elizabeth von Mugginhaler, I said, look,
Speaker 3: I'm doing a book on the Champlain Monster. Can you
Speaker 3: give me your research. I'd like to know about your
Speaker 3: research and about your background. I mean, what's your background?
Speaker 3: And she didn't tell me about her credentials. And she
Speaker 3: sent me an abstract of a paper that she had
Speaker 3: presented at a scientific conference. I believe it was the
Speaker 3: Acoustical Society of America had met And so I look
Speaker 3: at what she sent me and there's just an abstract
Speaker 3: and that's it. There's nothing, no more detail. So I
Speaker 3: contact the person who organized the conference and she said, oh,
Speaker 3: I remember Elizabeth von Muggenhaler. She never showed up, her
Speaker 3: paper was withdrawn. So I looked into her background, and
Speaker 3: given the fact that she didn't tell me what she had,
Speaker 3: all I've been able to find out is that she
Speaker 3: has a bachelor in psychology and right after she got
Speaker 3: the bachelor in psychology, she founded that Fauna Communications Institute. Well,
Speaker 3: I mean, anybody found their own institute. I can found
Speaker 3: the Ben Radford Institute for Paranormal Anomalies. It's so my
Speaker 3: question is why did the Discovery Channel use her and
Speaker 3: not one of the many real qualified experts on marine
Speaker 3: biosnar and I keep coming up with the answer that
Speaker 3: documentaries are a business and they're getting the biggest audience
Speaker 3: possible and they need to make money and fund themselves. Now,
Speaker 3: I am a sociologist, I am not an expert on
Speaker 3: biosnar or echolocation, and most people aren't. And that's why
Speaker 3: Elizabeth von Mugginhaler has been given a free pass by
Speaker 3: most newspaper reporters and magazine reporters because they don't know,
Speaker 3: and they got a busy schedule.
Speaker 4: They've got to go on to the next story.
Speaker 3: They can't call somebody at the Smithsonian and ask them
Speaker 3: what they think of this and send them the information
Speaker 3: and blah blah blah, So they essentially get a free pass.
Speaker 3: So when I did, as a journalist who's not an
Speaker 3: expert on biosnar echolocation, I contacted several of the world's
Speaker 3: top experts on marine biosnar and I said, look, here's
Speaker 3: her website, here's the information that I've gathered. What do
Speaker 3: you think. Not one of them take her research seriously.
Speaker 3: I mean not at all. I mean they were scathing
Speaker 3: and what they were planning. They said the noise could
Speaker 3: have been one of many things, and she's going for
Speaker 3: the more exotic. What's the old saying, when you hear
Speaker 3: the sound of hoof beats in the night, think first horses,
Speaker 3: not zebras. And she hears something there, she's thinking zebras
Speaker 3: as opposed to horses. The same thing when people look
Speaker 3: up into the sky and see a light in the sky,
Speaker 3: they can't identify it's not necessarily an extraterrestrial spaceship.
Speaker 4: So it's very frustrating.
Speaker 3: And that's one of the reasons why when I was
Speaker 3: doing research for this, I at times, you know, it's
Speaker 3: kind of like going out with my brother Paulvertam Bigfoot
Speaker 3: research in upstate New York, and in the middle of
Speaker 3: the night, at two in the morning, and you see
Speaker 3: this big footprint plot in the side of the road
Speaker 3: in the middle of nowhere. You think, gee, for a
Speaker 3: second that maybe Bigfoot Israel and then you kind of
Speaker 3: get a hold of yourself, well with this here. When
Speaker 3: I saw this research by Elizabeth von Mugginhal, when I
Speaker 3: was first research for the book, I said to myself,
Speaker 3: you know what, maybe there really is this large Mammo
Speaker 3: echo locating in the lake. But the more I looked
Speaker 3: into it, and I want to believe the less credible.
Speaker 3: It became just like Dennis J.
Speaker 4: Hall. He was the face of Champ.
Speaker 3: In the early nineteen nineties up until about two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven. He had that website, champ Quest. He was
Speaker 3: on just about every TV documentary I can recall from
Speaker 3: that period, newspaper articles. He was essentially the public face
Speaker 3: of Champ. And when I started digging into his background,
Speaker 3: he claims to have had twenty three individual sightings, several
Speaker 3: involving videotape with Champ. As a child, he claims to
Speaker 3: have cradled a baby Champ in his arms. I kid
Speaker 3: you not, and you had done some research on that
Speaker 3: as well, and you helped me out to get some
Speaker 3: more information from my book on that because it ended
Speaker 3: up I think in was it the Virgin's Vermont science
Speaker 3: lab at a high school and then it ended up
Speaker 3: supposedly being thrown out. I mean, just imagine somebody has
Speaker 3: this baby Champ and a formalede hyde jar or something,
Speaker 3: and it's supposedly it was given to some scientists at
Speaker 3: a university, ended up in this high school lab and
Speaker 3: ended up being thrown out. Wouldn't you think you'd take
Speaker 3: a picture. Where is the photograph. And the other thing
Speaker 3: is I mean, Paul claimed that Champ has nearly become
Speaker 3: extinct because the Indians would kill and eat the creatures
Speaker 3: in earlier times. I'm thinking, well, how did he come
Speaker 3: up with that one? And he reminds me of that
Speaker 3: housewife in New Mexico who a few years ago had
Speaker 3: burned a tortilla on her skillet and thought she saw
Speaker 3: the face of Jesus. I have no doubt when he
Speaker 3: hops in the bathtub he probably sees Champ there as well,
Speaker 3: or when he's shaving in his sink in the morning.
Speaker 3: And you know, I don't think he's a bad guy
Speaker 3: or an evil guy, or Elizabeth von mugginhal is a
Speaker 3: bad person. I just think they've gotten carried away, They've
Speaker 3: gotten over zealous. How else do you explain twenty three signings?
Speaker 3: I mean, and then people see and hear what they
Speaker 3: want to hear. It's almost like the Elizabeth von Mugginhaler
Speaker 3: research is almost like the backmasking and this electronic voice
Speaker 3: phenomena and playing records backwards and tape recordings and things
Speaker 3: like that. People here and make meaning were meaning oriented creatures.
Speaker 3: We try to make sense of the world, and we
Speaker 3: want to believe. I want to believe. I want to
Speaker 3: believe that when I walk to the store later today
Speaker 3: and if a car veers toward me and hits me
Speaker 3: and kills me, then I'm gonna there's a heaven there
Speaker 3: and there's ghosts and stuff. But you know, these are
Speaker 3: emotional charged debates, and I'm going to tell you something
Speaker 3: that I think some people might think crazy or a
Speaker 3: bit far fetched, but I think it comes back to
Speaker 3: religion to a certain extent when you look at Champ sightings,
Speaker 3: because I think that Champ just well, look at ghosts.
Speaker 3: It's not that somebody saw a ghost. It's that they
Speaker 3: may have seen proof of life after death, so that
Speaker 3: when you're actually going to live again. So there's a
Speaker 3: great emotional appeal there. And people say, yeah, but what
Speaker 3: about UFOs or the Locknow's Monster or Champ. Well, with UFOs,
Speaker 3: if they were our extraterrestrial and were to transfer their technology,
Speaker 3: perhaps their technology could make us to be immortal. Okay, Now,
Speaker 3: what's the secret underlying theme here? With things like last
Speaker 3: Monster and Lake Champlain Monster. I see the lore of
Speaker 3: the Champlain Monster and cryptozoological creatures like the Lochness monster
Speaker 3: as anti scientific symbols in a secular rage. Science says,
Speaker 3: for example, the Champlain Monster doesn't exist, but John Doe
Speaker 3: saw it. With each new sighting report, it causes some
Speaker 3: people to question the present sophistication of science, and if
Speaker 3: science is wrong about ghosts or Bigfoot or the Champlain Monster,
Speaker 3: maybe they got religion wrong as well. And to me,
Speaker 3: I think that's the lore of these groups today, all
Speaker 3: these paranormal groups across the United States. There's over four
Speaker 3: thousand groups in the United States alone being driven by
Speaker 3: these TV shows. I don't think it can sustain itself.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of the spiritualist move of the late
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds early nineteends. You've got a waxing and waning,
Speaker 3: and right now it's really waxing. And I think what
Speaker 3: drives that is a similar phenomena whereby somebody goes into
Speaker 3: a haunted house, supposedly haunted, and they've got some machine
Speaker 3: that can detect a temperature rise of two degrees and
Speaker 3: a left hand corner of the room, and then there's
Speaker 3: some electromagnetic activity over there. Well, maybe there's a fan
Speaker 3: nearby or something. I mean, it doesn't necessarily prove the
Speaker 3: existence of ghosts or but it's proving the existence of
Speaker 3: life after death and all this stuff making mysteries out
Speaker 3: of lohills.
Speaker 4: So to speak.
Speaker 3: To me, that is undermining They're trying to undermine science.
Speaker 3: They're trying to say, well, science and explain this. If
Speaker 3: they can't explain this, maybe there is a god and
Speaker 3: maybe they've got it wrong. Now all of science doesn't
Speaker 3: say that Champlain monster doesn't exist, but mainstream science would say,
Speaker 3: you require as myself, I do a fossil body, bones,
Speaker 3: DNA evidence. Nothing less will suffice because we have photographs
Speaker 3: that really are not conclusive proof.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it's funny you you mentioned that.
Speaker 5: I was I was just sort of thinking back as
Speaker 5: you were talking to in in my chupacaba research, I meant,
Speaker 5: there's one of the particular ones that was found in Blanco,
Speaker 5: Texas that ended up in a creationist museum because to
Speaker 5: to to this one person, uh, he believed that the
Speaker 5: existence of chupacabra, if if it was real, it's somehow
Speaker 5: disproved evolution, And exactly as you're saying with Champ. For
Speaker 5: some people, if Champ is real, it's somehow you know,
Speaker 5: disproves important swaths of science, and it's it's fascinating to
Speaker 5: sort of to see those connections there.
Speaker 3: There's a researcher at Harvard University. She is a biologist,
Speaker 3: and she wrote a recent article about mermaids, and there
Speaker 3: was a similar debate going on about mermaids. I believe
Speaker 3: it was and certain other quasi creatures in the late
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds that was being used
Speaker 3: at that time by pro creationist groups.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've always thought that mermaids in particular, any of
Speaker 2: this Camara like I'll say, any of those Camara like
Speaker 2: creatures would be great. I mean, if you're going to
Speaker 2: look for something to falsify evolution, having something that's half
Speaker 2: mammal and half fish, that'd be fantastic. Of course, I
Speaker 2: don't think there's any likelihood those things are going to
Speaker 2: turn up. But your point on this being a sort
Speaker 2: of a secular alternative to religion, that's something that Susan
Speaker 2: Clancy talks about quite a bit in her Abduction book.
Speaker 2: I think it's called Abducted. I want to get her
Speaker 2: on it. She'll come on to be a guest. But
Speaker 2: so you this book, it seems to be combining a
Speaker 2: lot of history. But your background is sociology, So in
Speaker 2: your experience, how does sociology messure with your skepticism.
Speaker 3: Well, to me, this is about as much the hunters
Speaker 3: as the hunted. And as I say in the book,
Speaker 3: research into the history of Champ tells us more about
Speaker 3: us than it does about Champ if Champ is there,
Speaker 3: because you get all this infighting going on supported before
Speaker 3: and it was really surprising, and you're getting this today
Speaker 3: as well. It reminds me of the Democrats and the
Speaker 3: Republicans in the United States. You have these groups and
Speaker 3: all the infighting going on between these groups, and I
Speaker 3: ask myself, why is it that all these groups of
Speaker 3: bigfoot researchers and lake monster researchers seem to be in
Speaker 3: a perpetual state of squabbling. And I think it's because
Speaker 3: a couple of reasons. One, everybody wants to be the first.
Speaker 3: They want to be the first one to get credit
Speaker 3: for proving the existence of Bigfoot, of the Champlain Monster.
Speaker 3: The other one is more nuanced. You get a lot
Speaker 3: of backyard researchers involved in paranormal groups and bigfoot groups,
Speaker 3: lake monster hunting, and things like this. And I think
Speaker 3: that's fine. There's nothing wrong with somebody who is not
Speaker 3: a scientist looking for these creatures and going out and
Speaker 3: hunting and stuff like this. However, they are generally not
Speaker 3: steeped in the experience of having submitted articles for scientific journals.
Speaker 3: I published over sixty articles in peer reviewed journals, and
Speaker 3: anybody who's done that knows you're going to get criticized,
Speaker 3: and you have to take the criticism constructively, then rework
Speaker 3: the material and resubmit it. What's the T shirt that
Speaker 3: used to have when I was a kid doesn't play
Speaker 3: well with others? Well, that's what's happening here with a
Speaker 3: lot of these cryptozoology groups. Somebody criticizes someone constructively and
Speaker 3: the next thing you know, there's a feud going on
Speaker 3: and this group isn't talking to that group, and that
Speaker 3: person's the son of a gun. And it is just
Speaker 3: in the history of the UFO groups, the Bigfoot groups,
Speaker 3: Lake monster groups. Locknest is notorious for it as well.
Speaker 3: I mean, it is just rife. I have talked to
Speaker 3: so many people who have said to me with paranormal
Speaker 3: groups today, oh, I actually for my own group because
Speaker 3: I couldn't stand John Doe and Mary Jones or whoever
Speaker 3: they were, because they were doing this and we disagreed
Speaker 3: about that and the nature of science. And that's what
Speaker 3: tipped me off with the Elizabeth von Muggenthaler research, that
Speaker 3: there might be a fly in the ointment there. And
Speaker 3: that was when I mentioned Ben Radford's name to Elizabeth
Speaker 3: mount Muggenthaler. She went ballistic. She was very unhappy and said, oh,
Speaker 3: he's not a real scientist, and you know, he's just
Speaker 3: trying to get publicity and this and that, and I
Speaker 3: thought to myself, well, that's not how a scientist would
Speaker 3: have handled that question. I mean, she was very blunt.
Speaker 3: And that's when I said, Okay, I need to do
Speaker 3: more research here. What's her background, what what degrees does
Speaker 3: she have? And how much research experience does she have?
Speaker 3: And it turns out not much interesting?
Speaker 1: Interesting? Yeah, it was.
Speaker 5: It was funny because I had I think I communicated
Speaker 5: with her once many years ago, several years ago, and
Speaker 5: I hadn't heard anything more about her since, and I'm
Speaker 5: sure that she'd either read or someone had had showed
Speaker 5: her the section in my lake Master book. But I
Speaker 5: had idea that I was I was on her ship
Speaker 5: so there you go. But you know, in your book
Speaker 5: you have some really interesting sort of very new revelations.
Speaker 5: A lot of times in Bigfoot books, in Monster books especially,
Speaker 5: you know, for me a triangle you O books, there's
Speaker 5: nothing new, it's it's just rehash. It's the same old stuff.
Speaker 5: They're just you know, it's something that someone copied off
Speaker 5: a website. But with your with your book The endtel
Speaker 5: Story of Champ, you actually have some really interesting new
Speaker 5: new revelations. And so I I don't want to give
Speaker 5: away the book because you have you know, there's lots
Speaker 5: of stuff there and people should check it out. But
Speaker 5: can you can you give us a couple of little
Speaker 5: little tidbits of of some some really interesting important revelations
Speaker 5: that you have there.
Speaker 3: Sure, and and Ben, somebody actually cutting and pasting from
Speaker 3: a website, would that actually happen? I mean, that's probably
Speaker 3: happening five times every second, you know, somewhere in the work.
Speaker 3: When I was just as a quick aside, when I
Speaker 3: was doing some research on my other interest, which is
Speaker 3: mass hysteria mass psychogenic illness a few years ago, when
Speaker 3: I was in Australia, I was doing a Google search
Speaker 3: and I got this newspaper in India which had a
Speaker 3: remarkable series of mass hysteria outbreaks. I was studying and
Speaker 3: was very interested in. So I got a hold of
Speaker 3: the newspaper article and was reading it and I was
Speaker 3: thinking to myself, Wow, that's exactly what I'm doing. And
Speaker 3: then I realized they're quoting from me, as I cut
Speaker 3: and pasted from a skeptical article and it was a
Speaker 3: paper in India. So yeah, things like that happened. There
Speaker 3: are a lot of revelations in the book for Starters
Speaker 3: that the two well known monster hunters, doctor Phil Rains,
Speaker 3: who looked for Champ in the sixties, seventies and eighties,
Speaker 3: and then Joe s Arzinski, the other big hunter, basically
Speaker 3: didn't like each other a lot, and they had these
Speaker 3: strong disagreements behind the scenes, and nobody ever knew about it.
Speaker 3: So I got a hold of a lot of their correspondence,
Speaker 3: which is very enlightening. But to me, it's really surprising
Speaker 3: how the historical reports of Champ, most of them have
Speaker 3: never been reported before in book form since the eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties,
Speaker 3: and early nineteen hundreds. So I saw it as my
Speaker 3: duty to include those reports in as much detail as possible.
Speaker 3: Of course, everything's fully referenced. It's very important to have
Speaker 3: a full record of this stuff and then people can
Speaker 3: decide for themselves. The other one, though, is the famous
Speaker 3: Sandra Mansie photograph. Now that's often said to be the
Speaker 3: best lake monster photo ever taken. I believe it was
Speaker 3: back in nineteen ninety four. The famous surgeons photo at
Speaker 3: loch Ness, which was taken in the early thirties, that
Speaker 3: was discredited, and it's widely believed now that that was
Speaker 3: a hoak. You still get some people straggling saying no,
Speaker 3: but there's somebody directly involved with that who claims that
Speaker 3: it was a hoax, so it likely was so by default.
Speaker 3: Now the Champlain Monster, the famous Sandra Manzie photo taken
Speaker 3: in the summer of nineteen seventy seven, is considered to
Speaker 3: be the best lake monster photo ever taken, and probably
Speaker 3: in all of cryptozoology as well. That photograph is really
Speaker 3: unusual in the sense that I was surprised when I
Speaker 3: saw it. You look at and you think, wow, it
Speaker 3: looks like this large snakelike creature, and historically it's this
Speaker 3: creature people are seeing fifteen to forty feet long, large
Speaker 3: and snakelike, so maybe it really is proof of the
Speaker 3: existence of champ. But then Sandra Mansie said, she threw
Speaker 3: away the negative. And you have to think about this.
Speaker 3: You take a picture of what you believe to be
Speaker 3: a living dinosaur, and you throw away the negative, which
Speaker 3: is the key part that you can use to verify
Speaker 3: the photo because you can blow it up and get
Speaker 3: much greater detail. And then mister Mansie later told a
Speaker 3: scientist in Vermont, and I have the correspondence there, the
Speaker 3: actual letter that he wrote. He said, you know, mister
Speaker 3: Mansey said that they didn't throw away the negative, that
Speaker 3: they either burned or buried it in their backyard. Now
Speaker 3: I'm not making that up.
Speaker 4: I've known.
Speaker 3: They interpreted it as some type of negative creature, maybe
Speaker 3: some type of evil creature. So okay, fair enough, let's
Speaker 3: go on that hypothesis that it was so disturbing they
Speaker 3: decided to burn or bury the negative in the backyard. Well,
Speaker 3: then there's another problem, and that is when you interviewed
Speaker 3: Sandra Mansie back in two thousand and two, I was
Speaker 3: listening to your tape just the other day, and thank
Speaker 3: you for sending it to me. She said that she
Speaker 3: put the photo where.
Speaker 1: Been well, she said she put it.
Speaker 5: She had told a couple different stories, but she she
Speaker 5: told me that she put the photo in a photo
Speaker 5: album behind some other photos.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: And she told a number of journalists who had interviewed
Speaker 3: her face to face. This was in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: that she took the photo and she pinned it to
Speaker 3: her bulletin board and her kitchen and it remained there
Speaker 3: for a.
Speaker 4: Couple of years.
Speaker 3: Now, there's a big difference between it's not a one
Speaker 3: off interview and it's not like some somebody misquoted her.
Speaker 3: These are direct quotations. So that's and you know, on
Speaker 3: the one hand, I want to give her a pass
Speaker 3: there and say, well, maybe she just memories fade and
Speaker 3: people can get things confused. But there's there are about
Speaker 3: a dozen things that if you take him in their totality,
Speaker 3: it just doesn't make sense, and there's much more to
Speaker 3: the story than people realize. And then of course you
Speaker 3: got the Sandra Mansay claimed the New York Times offered
Speaker 3: her money to publish the photo, and the Time said
Speaker 3: that that's not true. The other thing that's interesting is
Speaker 3: the attempt to cash in. Now, if I took a
Speaker 3: picture today of the Champlain Monster. I might think about
Speaker 3: cashing in on it. I have to admit that I'd
Speaker 3: like to think not, but maybe. I mean, we're all human,
Speaker 3: that's possible. But because of the human twists and turns here,
Speaker 3: what's happened to the photograph? It's kind of like a pretzel.
Speaker 3: Most of the listeners probably don't know. Whenever the Mansie
Speaker 3: photo was published and they release it for money, a
Speaker 3: small army of people have their fingers in the pie,
Speaker 3: including lawyers. Sandra Mansie's workmate, a man named Roy Kapler,
Speaker 3: took Mansie the core over the photo in the eight
Speaker 3: because she had signed a piece of paper at work
Speaker 3: saying that he was going to be her business manager
Speaker 3: to promote the photo. So now, whenever the photo was
Speaker 3: published and they settled out of court, whenever the photo
Speaker 3: was published, Capler gets a cut. Capler's lawyer gets a cut.
Speaker 3: Mansie gets a cup, Mansie's lawyer gets a cut, Mansie's
Speaker 3: ex husband's estate because he's now dead. Anthony Manzie gets
Speaker 3: a cut.
Speaker 4: In the book.
Speaker 3: I like to call it a freeing feeding frenzy champ
Speaker 3: as a four oh one K plan. Yeah, there's something
Speaker 3: there that's just not quite right. That goes to the
Speaker 3: human aspect of this and the fact that she got
Speaker 3: a business agent, And it just would have been a
Speaker 3: lot better for Sandra Mansie to have said, look, I
Speaker 3: took this photograph. Here it is, I'm not trying to
Speaker 3: get any money for it. And I think that would
Speaker 3: have enhanced her credibility a lot more. And it would
Speaker 3: be my recommendation that Sandra Mansie not go into the
Speaker 3: pr business.
Speaker 2: And I assume you cover this in detail in the book,
Speaker 2: but just between between the time Nancy took the photo
Speaker 2: and the time that she's starting to look for a
Speaker 2: business manager, how much a gap is there.
Speaker 3: Well, in theory that we're aware of, it's two years
Speaker 3: because she took it in seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that part of the story, the gap is
Speaker 2: still there.
Speaker 4: The gap is still there.
Speaker 3: And look, if I take a photo of what I
Speaker 3: think is a prehistoric creature in the lake, then number one,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to throw away the negative. Number two,
Speaker 3: I'm going to contact somebody sooner than two and a
Speaker 3: half years. I have a gut feeling that Sandra Mansi
Speaker 3: did not hoax the photo. I think it's authentic what
Speaker 3: she took up. But I also think because and now
Speaker 3: Ben correct me if I'm wrong, but when you interviewed
Speaker 3: Sandra Menzi, you were trying to get other pictures on
Speaker 3: that same role. She only took one photo of the
Speaker 3: creature that we know of, or of what's proparted to
Speaker 3: be the creature. But it would have been helpful if
Speaker 3: she had some pictures that had come before or after
Speaker 3: that picture on the role. And then you had asked
Speaker 3: her about that, and she was looking into it, and
Speaker 3: I'm assuming she couldn't find them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I had asked her and I said, look, you know,
Speaker 5: do you have any other photos? She said't, I just
Speaker 5: took this one. And contrary to popular belief, this was
Speaker 5: not the last. It wasn't the last photo on the role.
Speaker 5: She said, there were others. She just it's not that
Speaker 5: she just didn't take anymore forever reason she kind of
Speaker 5: froze or whatever. So yeah, I said, you know, I said,
Speaker 5: if you can find other photographs, you know, just before,
Speaker 5: just after this, it'd be very helpful. And exactly as
Speaker 5: you said, she from what I recalled, she said she
Speaker 5: would look for it.
Speaker 1: And of course I never heard any more about it.
Speaker 3: The other aspect, of course, is the location, and I
Speaker 3: find it very hard to accept that she can't find
Speaker 3: that location, given that you know, she grew up in
Speaker 3: Vermont and her relatives had a camp in the Saint
Speaker 3: Albans area, and she had the opportunity to look for
Speaker 3: the photo back in the early eighties and came up
Speaker 3: to specifically look for the photo and didn't. So I
Speaker 3: believe that in the year twenty thirteen we may have
Speaker 3: more definitive information on the Sandra Mansie photo. Ben Radford
Speaker 3: and myself are working on that behind the scenes, and
Speaker 3: we're hoping to have more definitive information later this year
Speaker 3: in hopes of trying to shed more light on that
Speaker 3: Sandramnsey photo.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, absolutely so. I just wanted to say it's again.
Speaker 5: I've I've read the book and it's a it's a
Speaker 5: to my mind, it really is the definitive book on Champ.
Speaker 5: You know, there are lots of books, you know, Zarzinski's
Speaker 5: book is a good one for what it is. But
Speaker 5: if if someone wants to read a really good, again
Speaker 5: essentially definitive book on Champ, yours is the way to go.
Speaker 5: And I I really I can tell how much work
Speaker 5: went into it, and again for somebody who is not
Speaker 5: only knows a lot about the subject, but is really
Speaker 5: intensely interested and plays a role in it.
Speaker 1: I think you did a great job.
Speaker 2: It sounds like it. It sounds like a fantastic book.
Speaker 2: I I haven't read it myself, but it's definitely going
Speaker 2: to be on my read list.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I have a question for you, Bob that we'd like
Speaker 2: to ask all of our guests. And I know you
Speaker 2: probably don't aren't prepared for this, but here, guys, what's
Speaker 2: your favorite monster?
Speaker 3: My favorite monster? Well, it would be a TV series.
Speaker 3: It would be call Shack the Night Star.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great show. That's one of my favorite shows.
Speaker 3: There's a book on the history of Cool Shakt and
Speaker 3: maybe three movies and that movie. The movies and the
Speaker 3: TV series which was in the early seventies Darren McGavin.
Speaker 3: That series was the forerunner for the X Files. That's
Speaker 3: what was used by Chris Carter for the X Files.
Speaker 3: That's what he based it on. And toward the end
Speaker 3: of the X Files, they actually used Darren McGavin and
Speaker 3: it was quite ill at the time for a cameo
Speaker 3: appearance on the X files.
Speaker 2: It read. I followed both shows, and I'd read that
Speaker 2: they were going to try to do an actual col
Speaker 2: Chet crossover, which I really really wanted so much, so
Speaker 2: when he got to be on there, it was different.
Speaker 2: I was a little disappointed. I was still glad to
Speaker 2: see him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Coach Shack is great because there's that.
Speaker 3: It just makes it elusive. You got to have a
Speaker 3: sense of humor. There's a sense of humor in the
Speaker 3: are yet it's serious at the same time, and you've
Speaker 3: got to be able to laugh at yourself. And look,
Speaker 3: I don't have all the answers to me. It's fun,
Speaker 3: it's interesting, it's exciting, and it's relevant in a legitimate
Speaker 3: part of our history, whether it's the history of the chupacabra,
Speaker 3: whether it's the history of the Champlain Monster or the
Speaker 3: Locknest Monster or Bigfoot. And whether these creatures are real
Speaker 3: or not, they are legitimate parts of our history and
Speaker 3: they're very important for what they tell us, not so
Speaker 3: much about the creatures assuming they don't exist, for what
Speaker 3: they tell us about ourselves. And I think that the
Speaker 3: ultimate answer to the mystery of what's in Lake Champlain
Speaker 3: will not be solved by scanning the lake and looking
Speaker 3: for evidence of a prehistoric or undiscovered creature. It'll be
Speaker 3: solved by looking upward to the human mind and what
Speaker 3: deep seated psychological needs are being fulfilled. The whole notion
Speaker 3: about Champ, the Lockness, monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts as anti
Speaker 3: scientific symbols in a secular age, undermining mainstream science. I
Speaker 3: think that is the key relevance here. That's what it
Speaker 3: tells us from a sociological point of view. That's the
Speaker 3: key nugget to take from this.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a great summary.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for being with us today. I really
Speaker 2: appreciate it.
Speaker 4: You had one more minute.
Speaker 3: I've pulled out an excerpt from the book that kind
Speaker 3: of summarizes everything.
Speaker 4: Sure, okay, now set this up.
Speaker 3: There is a biologist at at Harvard University, EO. Wilson,
Speaker 3: and he has suggested that seeing monsters, and I don't
Speaker 3: know if you're familiar with etherea or not, but it's
Speaker 3: part of our evolutionary DNA because snakes and creepy qrawleys
Speaker 3: they give us the hebgbis and they make us nervous,
Speaker 3: and they should be because they could kill us, especially
Speaker 3: in the past. So maybe there's some kind of biological
Speaker 3: inclination here, not that you're hallucinating creatures, but to be hypervigilant,
Speaker 3: and then maybe you misperceive something. So my excerpt in
Speaker 3: the book goes like this. The Champlain Monster is many
Speaker 3: things to many people. To some biologists, it is part
Speaker 3: of our evolutionary heritage that preprograms us to see mythical beasts.
Speaker 3: To environmentalists, it is a green symbol. To sports lovers,
Speaker 3: it's a baseball mascot. Local politicians and shopkeepers view it
Speaker 3: as a symbol of economic revival. For parents, it is
Speaker 3: a cautionary tale in a way to scare children. Don't
Speaker 3: go down to the lake alone, or Champ will get you.
Speaker 3: For children, it is a comforting stuffed toy, a friendly monster,
Speaker 3: and a dead set certainty. For believers, it is an
Speaker 3: anti scientific symbol, epitomizing the that science does not have
Speaker 3: all the answers we're asked. For skeptics, depending on their temperament,
Speaker 3: it is either a humorous legend or an annoying myth.
Speaker 3: For everyone, Champ is a poster child of what may
Speaker 3: lie undiscovered. Because it is scientifically plausible, Chant may be
Speaker 3: a new or long thought extinct creature. Someday sophisticated technology
Speaker 3: will finally settle the debate, and even if the answer
Speaker 3: is nay, the legend will endure because Champ is a
Speaker 3: legitimate part of our regional identity and national history.
Speaker 2: Monstertle I'm Blake Smith, and you just listened to Ben
Speaker 2: Radford and myself interview author Robert Bartholomew about his new
Speaker 2: book on Champ. A link to the book will be
Speaker 2: in the show notes at MonsterTalk dot org. We've got
Speaker 2: more transcripts uploaded this week thanks to contributions for listeners.
Speaker 2: Our transcript project turns Monster Talking Too will Google searchable content,
Speaker 2: which can also be used to update Wikipedia if you'd
Speaker 2: like to contribute. Their links at monster talk dot org,
Speaker 2: as well as our contact information, links to our active
Speaker 2: and fun Facebook group, Twitter accounts, and more. Special thanks
Speaker 2: to Shane Brady and Robert Smith for their kind donations.
Speaker 2: This show was created with the helpful support of Skeptic Magazine.
Speaker 2: The views on this show are not necessarily the views
Speaker 2: of Skeptic Magazine or the Skeptic Society. Monster Talk theme
Speaker 2: music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys, Oh there's no Stinger
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