Messages that some giant unknown animals live in the reservoirs of our planet first appeared in ancient manuscripts. So, in 1600, the Swedish archbishop Olaf Matus recorded the stories of sailors about a huge monster that lives in the sea near some unnamed land and even sometimes goes out on land, where it completely swallows people and bulls. And at the beginning of the 18th century, the Norwegian Eric Pontopidden told about a sea snake more than 60 meters long and 6 meters thick, covered with blackish scales. True, the author himself did not see this animal, but described it in detail from the words of local residents.
Scottish Lake Monster
The beginning of public attention to underwater monsters is now associated with the publication in 1934 of a photograph of a creature similar to an extinct plesiosaur, which was taken by a respectable London physician, R. Kenneth Wilson. The author claimed that while walking in the vicinity of the Scottish Loch Ness, he was able to photograph a lake monster peeping out of the water, and quite by accident. This publication then created a sensation and caused a real pilgrimage of the curious to Loch Ness. In the newspapers, the Scottish monster was named Nessie. Psychologists attributed the excitement around the said lake to the fact that just at that time the Great Depression broke out in the world, accompanied by sad economic and political news, from which readers were very tired by that time. And therefore, against the general dull background, articles about a mysterious underwater creature entertained readers and looked just like a ray of light in a dark kingdom.
Interest in Nessie and other mysterious creatures, information about which to this day regularly comes from different parts of the globe, has not yet disappeared. The public's attention to these phenomena was not diminished even by the 1994 report that the legendary photograph of Nessie 60 years ago was nothing more than a fake, made by Wilson himself and three of his accomplices. Currently, over 3,000 eyewitness accounts have been recorded, claiming that they personally observed this mysterious plesiosaur on a Scottish lake.
Have you seen Ogopogo?
In July 1950, Nessie's "relative" unexpectedly appeared on another continent - in the far west of Canada, in the province of British Columbia. Here he appeared one day in front of a married couple from Montreal named Watson. The couple were sailing on a boat on Lake Okanagan when a strange creature suddenly emerged from the depths. According to the Watsons, it was an animal "about 30 feet long, and its body consisted of approximately five undulating humps protruding from the surface." Having swam in front of people, the mysterious underwater inhabitant turned smoothly in the opposite direction, obviously chasing a school of fish. He left a trail of seething water behind him. Back in Montreal, the Watson couple published this message in the newspapers, after which reporters and onlookers from all over North America rushed to the shores of the Okanagan.
For reference: the lake has a highly elongated and winding shape, its length reaches 135 kilometers, its width is up to 6.4 kilometers, and its maximum depth is 230 meters. Reporters managed to find out that in the legends of local Indians this strange creature under the name of Ogopogo appears at least since the 17th century. In most stories, it is described as a serpentine animal with a head similar to that of a horse or a goat. The Indians have long considered the monster an evil spirit and argued that the remains of prey torn apart by the monster, including human bones, are sometimes taken out of the water on the rocky shores.
After 1950, cases of Ogopogo's observation became more frequent. In the coastal town of Kelloun, this lake monster is now considered a major local attraction. The city's coat of arms depicts the hippocampus - a sea horse with a fish tail that best fits Ogopogo's description. The monster's drawing also adorns the emblem of the local ice hockey club "Kellone Rockets", and in the city itself, not far from the coast, a statue of Ogopogo is installed to attract tourists.
Ocean meetings
Other publications indicate that both sailors and river workers have also more than once personally observed mysterious underwater animals, and there is no doubt about the reliability of most of these reports.
So, in 1964, a group of French scuba divers discovered a 24-meter snake-like monster in shallow waters off the coast of Australia, probably wounded by a propeller blade. Tourists even managed to take several underwater pictures of the monster, but it moved towards them, gaping its jaws, and then the daredevils rushed to the shore.
And in December 1967 the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva published an article by TASS correspondent Mikhail Izbenko. On the instructions of the management, he was aboard the Sovetskaya Rossiya whale base, which fished in the Indian sector of Antarctica. And during this voyage, snake-like aquatic animals were twice observed from the board of the helicopter assigned to the whaling base, calmly lying almost on the surface of the sea. The helicopter pilot, when they appeared, dropped to 30 meters and determined that the "sea serpent" had a light brown color, the body length was up to 20 meters, and the thickness of its body reached one meter. A few minutes later, the crew saw the second "snake", the length of which was about 15 meters. Unfortunately, the pilots could not photograph the monsters, since they did not have the equipment.
This article in the newspaper aroused great interest not only among readers, but also among cryptozoologists - specialists in life forms who have not yet received official scientific recognition. However, they did not manage to obtain any other information about this case, except for that contained in Izbenko's article.
"Damn" from Lake Labynkyr
This lake is lost in the remote Yakut taiga, and scientists first became interested in it after a geological expedition visited here in 1953. One of its participants, Viktor Tverdokhlebov, sailed on the lake in a boat, after which he made the following entry in his diary: “The object was floating pretty close. It was something alive, some kind of animal. It moved in an arc: first along the lake, then straight towards us. As it approached, a strange numbness, from which it grows cold inside, seized me. A dark gray carcass, the eyes of an animal, rose slightly above the water, and something like a stick was sticking out of the body. We saw only a small part of the animal, but a huge massive body was guessed under the water."
According to the stories of local residents, later collected by a geologist, from time immemorial, a certain huge creature has lived in the lake, which they call the "Labynkyr devil". It looks like an animal of dark gray color with a huge mouth, the dimensions of which are equal to the width of a raft of ten logs. Legends say that this "devil" is very aggressive and dangerous, he is able to go ashore, where he attacks people and livestock.
After the publication of Tverdokhlebov's notes, no one carried out any special searches for the "Labynkyr monster". True, in the press sometimes there appeared notes of visiting tourists who visited the area about the monster, but those were only retellings of local legends. None of the newcomers have ever seen the very "devil" during these decades. Only in 2005, the "Searchers" TV program organized an expedition to the lake, during which it carried out a number of studies and measurements, and with the help of a deep-sea telezone, she was able to find the remains of the jaws and vertebrae of some animals at the bottom. At the same time, the mysterious creature in the lake never got into the frame.
In 2016, an employee of the Russian Geographical Society, Andrei Solovyov, spent more than 100 days on Lake Labynkyr and during this time collected testimonies from local residents and even a helicopter pilot who saw from the air a creature about five to seven meters long. Solovyov also examined the damage to the nets of the local fishermen in the form of many-meter holes, the origin of which no one could explain, if we exclude the impact on them of some very large animal. But again, the scientist never managed to see the monster itself.
Cryptozoologists put forward various hypotheses regarding the nature of the "Labynkyr line". It can be either a giant pike, or one of the relic animals that are now considered extinct - a reptile like an ichthyosaur or a plesiosaur.
In conclusion, we add that Labynkyr is located in the Oymyakon region of Yakutia, at an altitude of 1020 meters above sea level, and is 14.3 kilometers long and about four kilometers wide. According to measurements in recent years, its average depth is about 50 meters, and the maximum is up to 80 meters. The water temperature in Labynkyr does not exceed 9 ° С. But the most striking thing here is that the lake does not freeze all year round, although it is located in the coldest region of the northern hemisphere of the Earth, where in winter there are frosts down to -50 ° C and below.