Eels as monsters

Eels as monsters in lochs and loughs.

In The Monsters of Loch Ness by Roy P Mackal (1976 Futura London) he wrote about the investigations in Ireland. The Loch Ness investigation teams did not confine them selves just to Loch Ness but also looked at Loch Morar and a couple of loughs in Ireland. .Some of the information that lead them to look at Irish loughs is detailed in the book( p37-39 in the edition cited above)) and includes:

Teige O’Donovan reporting sightings going back to 1914 from Lough Abisdealy (which translated means the lake of the monster). The descriptions of the creature were that it had a small flat head , along neck and three large loops sticking out of the water. Size was estimated at 25 feet( 8 metres) and the creature was dark brown. Interestingly one of the observers said the creature swung a portion of it’s body out of the water and described it as “looking exactly like the tail end of a huge conger eel”.

Lough Fadda has been discussed on here before.http://cryptozoo-oscity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/lough-fadda-horse-eel.html

There was strange sighting at Lough Claddaghduff by a Mr. Michael Coyne in 1956 who reported seeing a creature like looked like a large eel with ten feet showing as it turned over to display it’s lighter underbelly.

There was the story of the large eel stuck in a gully between Loughs Gowlan and Derrylesa from 100 years ago , which died.

In Lough Neagh in 1956 fishermen reported their nets damaged “by a thing like a giant eel”

You may wonder how this was connected to Loch Ness. There were stories that Roy Mackal mentions(p68) from older residents of Loch Ness that claimed eels of 10 feet(3 metres) to 16 feet( 5 metres) long had been caught in the loch years ago. I also heard the same stories from an elderly fisherman in 1972. He said when the eel fishing had been at it’s peak many years ago ,very large eels had been caught . I have been unable to substantiate this but I have seen it mentioned in other books about the Loch( I believe Tim Dinsdale mentions it in his books). Eels live in the loch in large numbers but are the normal European eel who don’t normally grow to enormous sizes. There have been reports of eels with manes being seen in the loch and divers reporting eels thicker than a man's leg, but no proof has been forthcoming. The theory that the lake monsters are giant eels is not a new one but when you look at reported sightings the descriptions of many say “eel like” . Eels tend to dwell near the bottoms of lakes and would only occasionally appear on the surface, perhaps when chasing fish. The manes reported could be a frill such as some fish like the Oar Fish have and a very large eel would indeed be very thick around the middle to be almost as big as a man’s thigh. . Certainly a giant eel has more credence than a dinosaur but could be a breed of eel from the Ice Age and hence the large size. Anything is of course conjecture but then science starts with conjecture and observation and then tries to prove or disprove a theory , which is what cryptozoologists are actively doing.

Yeti sightings on the rise and an Alaskan bigfoot?

Three separate yeti sightings reported in Siberia in recent weeks

By JohnThomas Didymus

Local fishermen and an official in the Kemerovo region of Siberia have reported three separate sightings of yetis. This is not the first time sightings have been reported in this region of Siberia.

Siberian Times reports a sighting occurred last month near Myski village. The fishermen said they saw the "yetis" from a boat on a river. According to the men, at first they mistook the mysterious figures for bears and then humans.

According to Siberian Times, a local fisherman Vitaly Vershinin, said: "We shouted to them - do you need help? They just rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill." Vershinin added, "It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all-fours, and they ran on two... so then they were gone."

The Daily Mail reports the second sighting occurred on the bank of the Mras-Su River, several days after the first. The fisherman who reported the second sighting, said: "We saw some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs. We realised that they were not in dark clothes but covered by dark fur. They did walk like people."
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/333539#ixzz27YuOYPDH

Arctic Bigfoot? Balding polar bear? Inquiring minds want to know

Ben Anderson

Is there a Bigfoot on Alaska’s North Slope? One Barrow family thinks so, and it has them worried about a remote cabin property they own about 35 miles south of America’s northernmost community. Sarah Skin has been camping at the cabin every year for the last half-century. In the last three years, she and her family say they've repeatedly seen 10-foot tall, bipedal creatures that are black, brown or grayish in color. Skin said that they've seen the creatures three years running, each time in the fall when the family heads to the cabin to hunt for caribou. Before that, she’d never seen anything like the Bigfoot, as she refers to the mysterious beasts, anywhere near her cabin, located about halfway between Barrow and the community of Atqasuk.

Read rest here: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/arctic-bigfoot-balding-polar-bear-inquiring-minds-want-know

We have sightings of these creatures in Siberia and in the Himalayas  so we shouldn't be surprised its seen in snowy Alaska.

What happened to the Lake Leelanau creature?

Lake Leelanau consists of two conjoining lakes north and south and runs through the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan. The south lake has a maximum depth of 62 feet (19 m) and the north lake has a maximum depth of 121 feet (37 m).It is the reported home of a strange creature described as having a long neck and tail and two large eyes.

The creature first appeared after the Lake Leelanau Dam was built in the late 1800’s.When the dam was finished the Lake lake’s water levels rose 10 to 12 feet ( 3-4 metres) , flooding parts of the land and creating a marsh like environment around the lake. It also shut off the lake’s outlet and some say sealed the creature in.
In the summer of 1910 , a teenage boy, William Gautier, was fishing on the lake. He rowed out to a new fishing spot near the town of Lake Leelanau looking for perch and paddled up close to a tree that he estimated to stand about five feet tall above the water, with a six-inch trunk. He cast a line, and began tying the boat to the tree. The young William suddenly noticed the tree had eyes. They were staring him dead in the face at about four feet above water level. The two starred at each other for a few moments before the animal dove into the water and went under the boat. Gauthier said later that the creature's head passed one end of the boat while the tail was still at the other end, though it was undulating very quickly through the water. Gauthier admitted to having been frightened by his encounter, and that he stayed off that lake for many years. His great grandchild stated in an interview years later that his great-grandfather came from a prominent family in the area and was very well-educated, so not easily fooled. William had also told his family that he knew of others who would admit privately but not publicly that they, too, had seen the creature.
Several other encounters with the creature where apparently reported around the turn of the century, but were not formally recorded for fear of being ridiculed.
I could not find any modern day reports and the theory is that whatever was trapped by the dam was alone and has since died.

Some other Russian lake Monsters

Lake Koskol and lake Kok-Kol Monsters .

Lake Koskol, in the former Russian province of Kazakhstan, was reported to hold a plesiosaur-like, Lake Monster .The first account of the creature to reach western ears was reportedly broadcast on a Soviet radio program in 1977. These reports suggested that the animal was most likely prehistoric in origin.

'Nature' magazine carried an article in 1977,( just after Sir Peter Scott had given a scientific genre name to 'Nessie' ),that 'Koskolteras Rhombopterix' might have been seen in Lake Kos Kol in Kazakhstan. The monster was 15 metres long with a large, 2m x 1m head. It quoted an unnamed commentator on Moscow radio observing that since several "extinct" species had been recently rediscovered to be still surviving, it was possible that "unknown creatures of the kind reported in both these lakes" might, indeed, exist.

I could find nothing since then that had been reported about the monster.However that doesn't mean there hasn't been more reports.Please leave a comment if you know of any new sightings.

This is not to be confused with Aidakhar the monster of Lake Kok-Kol.

Kok-Kol lake lies in the Kazakhstan area Dzambul.. The report of a creature seen in the lake said that the body reached fifteen metres in length and that the head was a metre and eighty centimetres in size. During the seventies and early eighties Soviet scientists took a great interest in the lake. In 1986, an expedition went to the area to research the evidence but didn’t come back with any proof.. One of the characteristic attributes of the monster, was said to be its call. However, in January 1986 a report in the Soviet press agency Tass, (and also later in Western newspapers),by the team of the Soviet Academy of Sciences concluded, that after studying the findings of the expedition, the sounds were caused by noise of air being sucked into the cracks connecting the deep lake with underwater caves. The reports of turbulence in the lake were also attributed to these air ducts. Despite the official explanation, however, locals still believe in the monsters.

I translated with the help of google and a dictionary , the little information there was on these two creatures , so I apologise for any errors.

Bigfoot sighted in Wisconsin?

Big Foot discovered in Wisconsin?

By Doug Hissom ·

The sheriff from a small Wisconsin county was investigating a possible Sasquatch (Big Foot) sighting earlier this month. A scared constituent called the report in, saying they saw a dark creature with fur all over standing along the ditch.Sheriff John Spears told the local press that the report came in from one person. “The person who called it in was driving down the road, and they saw what they described as a dark-haired… Sasquatch,”  Spears told the LaCrosseTribune.com. “It looked like it was hiding in the ditch line. When they went by, it jumped.”

Spears ordered his deputy to check out the incident but he found nothing.   The witness claimed, it was a “large figure, dark in color, black-brown in color, with no clothes and it looked like it was just fur,” Spears said.The person added,  “There’s no way it could have been a wolf,” Spears said.The report was one of 22 suspicious activity reports in the area including some peacock problems, he said. The department only confirmed two sightings of peacocks in Christiana.

Read rest here: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/big-foot-discovered-in-wisconsin/2012/09/20

Russian Nessie in the news

Is that Nesski? Russian scientists claim lake is home to Siberian Loch Ness monster

    Giant underwater monster rumoured to be living in remote Siberian lake

    Echo scanners found evidence of 'giant dense moving object' measuring over 30 feet

By Will Stewart

Russian academics are calling for a scientific probe into claims of a 'Siberian Loch Ness monster' in one of the world's remotest lakes. Researchers using underwater scanners have found evidence of 'Nesski' - measuring up to 33 feet in length - in the deep waters of Lake Labynkyr, says a new report.Intriguingly, the evidence is at a lake where native Evenk and Yakut people have long claimed an underwater creature lurks. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205595/Siberian-Loch-Ness-monster-pictures.html#ixzz26xcfSoBW

Lake Labynkyr is a deep lake situated on the territory of Oimyakon uluss. Legends speak about the monster that lives deep in the water of the legendary lake and attacks dogs, reindeers and even people. Stories say how one day the monster wiped out a caravan of Eleven ( one of the native peoples in the area)people. There are several documented encounters. The public first learned about the monster in the 1950's from the diaries of soviet geologist named Tverdohlebov. Since then several expeditions have set out to prove or disprove the existence of a monster. It is said that it could be a huge pike, a water mammoth, a reptile or a plesiosaurus, or even something from the parallel world. The expeditions don’t seem to have reported any findings.

I came across a story from the nineteenth century that in a remote region of Russia known as Sakha, or "the Devil" there lived a monster in the lake there called Labinkir It was said to be a large, aggressive creature. Further research found the following : Two geologists in 1953, doing prospecting work reported to the USSR academy of Science to have seen the creature who according to their testimony appeared from the water and approached them menacingly before disappearing. Then in the early 1960’s several people said they saw a monster with a long neck come up out of the lake making an eerie sound. Another person who saw it reported it as being lizard-like. Some reindeer owners claimed they saw the monster’s long neck bolt out of the water, trying to catch a nearby fowl. In 1964 a group of hunters claimed they saw a deer swimming in the water with a dog in pursuit. Suddenly out of mist a giant dinosaur-like monster appeared and the deer and dog disappeared into the waters.

A group of biologists from the university of Moscow on a research trip into the extreme eastern part of Russia declared they could not rule out the creature's existence.” We have scanned the bottom of the lake with an echo meter and have run into long living objects in movement" was the quote in "Itoqi" ("The Balance",a Russian weekly founded in 1996.)
Head of the expedition, Liudmila Emilianova, concedes that the 5 to 6 meter objects are not irrefutable proof of the creature's existence but believes their findings to be "a first step of a sensational discovery." Professor Emilianova believes the eye witness testimony of the local people. One of these reports given by a fisherman whilst out in his boat ,was that he saw the creature rise out of the water and then submerge. Others claimed they have seen the creature in Lake Verona about 20 kilometers away and it is suspected by some that the creature goes back and forth via an underground tunnel. Professor Emilianova said she will return to the Lake with more sophisticated equipment to further research the area.
 The lack of a lot of documented sightings may be because the lake is some 150 kilometres from the nearest civilization,a village called Tontor, and is ,without doubt, one of the most isolated areas of the world, and very cold, temperatures often dipping to -70 degrees below freezing.(,however like Loch Ness, the lake never freezes). There are no paved roads and one could only arrive by horse, airplane, helicopter, or land rover.

I then found the following report, I presume from the expedition:

The expedition to lake Labinkir was in end of august 2000.

The lake Labinkir is located in a remote part of East-Siberian mountains, at height about thousand meters above a sea level.. The unique natural conditions (in particular probability of presence of underwater caves system) and inaccessibility for the man, allow to assume that from very old times, in its dark waters could live ancient animals.During expedition, the measurements of lake with the sonar were made. The bottom in places of measurements was equal, with light evaluations. Average depths about 35 meters. The vegetation at the bottom lakes completely absent, bottom structures is small rocks, and there is rather low fish. During one of gaugings, the abnormal signals, from a large body (about eight - ten meters) were received, which has passed on depth of eleven meters (general depth of twenty two meters) under a boat, make several circles nearby and disappeared... But the questions have remained.

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