Champ (Lake Champlain Monster)

The Mansi photograph has a problem of method that does not depend on what it shows: the two things needed to test it are missing. When the photograph surfaced in the autumn of 1979 it was sent to Philip Reines, a nautical expert at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, who learned that Sandra Mansi had thrown away the negative and could not locate the spot where she took the picture. Robert E. Bartholomew, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2013, sets out what each would have allowed: the negative, magnifying the image "to see greater detail"; the location, establishing "the object's size and distance, and whether the photo was even taken on Lake Champlain". Without either, "it was impossible to determine with any degree of certainty what was in the photo". Yankee Magazine writes that the print was examined with technology that would detect doctoring and that it had not been doctored. An examination of the print can test for retouching, and it cannot give the distance to the object. Bartholomew's article adds two pieces of information that, he writes, "had previously been withheld from the public". In August 1980 Vermont's official naturalist, Charles Johnson, recorded "a discrepancy over what happened to the negative": Sandra Mansi said they had thrown it away, as they did with all their negatives, while Anthony Mansi, talking to Johnson alone, said they had buried it, or burned it. And on 17 July 1980 the Champ researcher Joseph Zarzynski wrote to Reines that during a ten-day holiday in the area, planned partly so that they could find the site, "the Mansis did not look for the site". Bartholomew adds that the weather records for the last three days of that trip show fine conditions, and that Zarzynski knew both facts when he wrote Champ: Beyond the Legend (1984). The Mansis placed the sighting somewhere between St. Albans, Vermont, and the Canadian border, a stretch of about twenty miles. Joe Nickell and Benjamin Radford of Skeptical Inquirer went to the lake in August 2002 and found a further difficulty in the depth charts. Along the eastern edge of Maquam Bay, north of St. Albans, the water at Mansi's estimated distance of 150 feet is "twelve feet or less", according to the hydrographic contour map they consulted, and the whole of Missisquoi Bay is no deeper than fourteen feet. For the older sightings Nickell lists animals and objects that live in or cross the lake. Sturgeon there are generally five to six feet long and can grow to twice that; a local fisherman, Tom Forrest, saw a friend hook a longnose gar of about 6 feet 4 inches, and in 1998 Forrest's group took fright at a partly waterlogged tree trunk nearly forty feet long. A wildlife official, Jon Kopp, told Nickell that a "huge snakelike creature" he once watched turned out to be six or seven otters swimming in single file, and Nickell adds swimming deer, whose length is easy to overestimate when they leave a wake. A deckhand on the Valcour ferry told Nickell and Radford that Champ reports had declined with the end of large traffic on the lake, because a barge's wake often travelled across it and mystified anyone who did not see the barge. Nickell also points to the calendar: of the 224 reports catalogued by Zarzynski, only one, probably a spoof, comes from before 1860, and the count rises to fifteen in the 1870s and twenty-three in the 1880s.