Hello! It’s time to look at the very complex backstory to ANOTHER famous #monster photo (ask me if you need links to my monster threads). This time we’re looking at the Sandra Mansi #LakeChamplain photo of July 1977, the world’s ‘best’ lake monster photo. MEGA-THREAD follows…. 
The Mansi photo – as it’s known – is a single colour photo taken at around noon on July 5th, 1977 at Lake Champlain, a giant lake 172km long, 23km wide at its widest, mostly located within the US states of Vermont and New York but with a section in Québec too… #cryptozoology
The Mansi photo has been described as the very best photo of a lake monster ever, has been taken seriously – as a real photo of a giant, unknown animal species – by many scientists, but has also been decried a hoax, and investigated as a misidentification.
In the thread that follows, I, as usual, present both sides of the argument, so if you think I’m presenting a naïve or biased opinion, stick around, read the other tweets, and you’ll see that I discuss the pros and cons and aim to go where the evidence leads... #monsters
Again, as usual, while I _wish_ that there were compelling evidence for a big unknown animal in Lake Champlain, the fact is that there’s nothing compelling, and that existing sightings and events can be explained in ways that don’t require belief in a monster. And...
.... As for the photo itself, I don’t think it shows an animal at all… on which, read on. Some of what I say here repeats the discussion given in my 2017 book #HuntingMonsters, please buy it if you can. #monsters #cryptids
The background to the photo is the claimed presence of a giant water monster of some sort, dubbed Champ. As is typical with lake monsters, it has to have a friendly, cutesy name.
Like all lake monsters, claims that Champ sightings and accounts are biologically consistent and point to the existence of a single unknown species aren’t fair or accurate. The fact is...
.... that Champ accounts, like #Nessie accounts, describe all manner of things seen in and on the water and there’s no indication of there being a single, anatomically consistent animal at the bottom of reports…
As is the case with #LochNess and other monster-haunted lakes, there isn’t one explanation for ‘the monster’. Instead, people are having experiences with a list of phenomena and animals, among them wind, wave and wake effects, swimming waterbirds and large fishes like sturgeon.
Such is the significance of Sandra Mansi’s story that it’s been covered many times in #cryptozoology articles and books (the Mansi photo has also appeared as a cover photo more than once), the result being a reasonable number of retellings of the photo’s backstory…
But these accounts are contradictory in many of their details. For that reason I’m going to assume that the best documented face to face interview with Mansi – the one carried out by Joe Nickell and Ben Radford in August 2002 – represents....
.... her definitive ‘last word’ on what happened, and I’ll reference this interview by adding the label ‘N&R’ (for Nickell & Radford) when I feel it’s needed. It's discussed in their 2006 book Lake Monster Mysteries.
Mansi died, following a battle with cancer, in March 2018. Such was the fame of her photo that there are many articles about her passing online.
Incidentally, there are no other photos in the sequence, nor are there negatives (for… reasons. Hold that thought).
The photo itself is damaged with scratches and other marks, including an oblique white abrasion just to the right of the monster. This damage might be in keeping with the fact that the photo was on show for some time, not tucked away safely in an album (more on this fact later).
Mansi’s story is that she and her family (her then-fiancée Anthony and her kids Heidi-Jo and Larry from a previous relationship) were, in July 1977, on their way from Vergennes to St. Albans in Vermont when they stopped for a picnic north of St. Albans...
Mansi wasn’t able – or willing – to pinpoint the sighting location more precisely, on which… more later :)
The kids played in the lake while Sandra watched. Andrew went to the car to get a camera (a Kodak Instamatic fixed-focus 110). Sandra then noticed a disturbance about 150 ft out in the lake which she thought was fish, then a human diver or divers. Then the head and neck emerged…
It seemed to be a large animal, a sort of ‘dinosaur type’ creature (and it wasn’t linked at this time with ‘Champ’ of popular lore). Mansi thought the creature was a good size: 12-15 ft long, with a neck 6 ft tall.
Some accounts say that Mansi felt a sense of terror on seeing the thing and knew she had her to get kids to safety, and did so without them ever being aware of the monster...
In other accounts (N&R) she said she wasn’t at all scared, and that nothing happened until Anthony appeared, saw the creature, and immediately yelled to get the kids out of the water.
As they climbed the bank to get back to the car, Anthony gave Sandra the camera and she kneeled, took the one iconic shot, then – with the rest of the family – watched the creature, apparently for between 5 and 7 minutes… an unusually long time for a creature observation.
Eventually it sank back into the water. Yeah, ‘sank’. It didn’t dive or obviously bend its neck.
Because the creature neither responded to the sound of the kids playing, or Anthony’s shouting, during the long duration of the encounter, Mansi concluded that it was totally deaf, an interesting conjecture which has been treated differently by different researchers.
The Mansi family left the lake and headed home. They didn’t report the sighting or anything like that. Fast forward some period of time… and Mansi eventually received a developed version of the photo...
(this was ye olde days where you have to send film away and get prints back in the post OR take your film to a shop and leave it to be developed)....
Some interviews (N&R) imply that Mansi was ambivalent about what she saw, hadn’t formed an opinion on it, and didn’t think it was ‘the monster’. So, seeing it in the photo not only confirmed that she’d seen what she thought she did, it allowed her to crystallise thoughts on it.
So, what did she do? Answer… nothin’. It was apparently (hold that thought) put away in an album and left there… until 1981. The story of how the photo came into the limelight is complex. According to John Kirk’s 1998 book In the Domain of the Lake Monsters, it goes like this…
Mansi worked on submarine construction for the company General Dynamics and was one day asked to go to Scotland for involvement in a project. She didn’t want to go, but a male colleague did, and he cited seeing the #LochNessMonster as one of his reasons for going.
She replied that you didn’t need to go to Scotland for that sort of thing, said that there are water monsters at home, and showed him the photo as proof – which he was apparently supposed to keep secret…
He didn’t keep it secret and word spread. Reporters found out (how, I’m not sure) and Mansi now made the (unusual) move of travelling to Washington, DC to have the photo formally copyrighted (an aspect of the story we’ll come back to)...
According to N&R, Mansi had now considered that the photo might be something to do with Champ but hadn’t made up her mind, and as late as 1980 or 81 was still telling experts that she didn’t know “what the hell I saw”.
At some point around late 1979 the photo became known to nautical expert Philip Reines at the State University of New York, and then to Champ researcher Joseph Zarzynski and zoologist George Zug (affiliated with the then-new International Society of Cryptozoology, or ISC).
Zarzynski in particular convinced Mansi that the photo depicted Champ, and it’s at this point that she became a Champ ‘champion’ too. Here’s also where the story became of national and international interest…
In June 1981, it appeared in the New York Times, in Time and Life magazine, and in a million other publications worldwide. A press conference was arranged by the International Society of #Cryptozoology’s Roy Mackal in April 1981...
... and scientific evaluations of the photo were presented at other cryptozoological events later in the year…
These promoted the ‘animal hypothesis’, this being that the object was large or very large and represented a plesiosaur-like animal. ISC Board member Forrest G. Wood memorably said...
... “In appearance, it most closely resembles a … plesiosaur. That does not make it a plesiosaur. All I can say is that, in general appearance, it most closely resembles a plesiosaur”.
The object in Mansi’s photo looks like a large, grey animal with a long neck which is curving over its back so that it's looking behind itself. The ‘face’ is in silhouette as is the visible side of the ‘body’ but sunlight glints off the ‘neck’ (attached tracing by Ben Radford).
Mansi sometimes said that she saw an open mouth and water dripping out, but she contradicted this in her N&R interview, on this occasion saying that the “mouth was closed” (which makes it sound as if she was _expecting_ a mouth, as you would if you assumed it was an animal).
In some interviews, Mansi built up mystique around the photo, the monster, and her take (and her family’s) on the monster: she said it was associated with such negative feelings, such dread and fear, that she’d deliberately buried it in an album so it was out of sight and mind...
In an interview with Loren Coleman, Mansi said that she still had nightmares about the event, even years after the event. She also said “It’s frightening, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t told anyone about the picture, or I hadn’t seen the monster”.
A 2013 Skeptical Inquirer article and 2012 book (The Untold Story of Champ) by Robert Bartholomew painted a rather different picture of events, however…
Bartholomew found – as did three other journalists, independently, back in 1981 – that Mansi kept the photo pinned to a noticeboard. It was well known to her kid’s friends, who’d come and take a look at it because it was cool. It wasn’t hidden away and out of sight.
This is in keeping with the fact that the original photo is scratched and damaged, as noted earlier, and with yellowing edges...
Bartholomew also found the lack of the negative problematic. Sources on the Mansi photo often say that Mansi just ‘lost’ the negative, which is fine, but in a 1980 letter to Vermont naturalist Charles Johnson, Mansi said...
.... that it was deliberately buried or burned due to the attached negative feelings. Why the inconsistency?
Nautical expert Philip Reines – tasked with investigating the photo in 1979 – wanted to see the negative and found that this wasn’t possible, which meant that he couldn’t study it as closely as he wanted to, nor could he authenticate the photo as a result…
When this became known, the Mansis insisted “through their lawyer than the photo be returned, which [Reines] reluctantly did” (wrote Bartholomew).
Speaking as someone interested in learning about stuff rather than seeing things as sources of profit, claims involving mystery animals and legal action are not good bedfellows.
Bartholomew also emphasised that -- rather than being so traumatised by the event that she wouldn’t talk about it, Mansi’s work colleague Roy Kappeler (who she enlisted as a publicity agent) said that she spoke about it often, and was obsessed with it as a way of making money.
It should also be noted that Mansi was inconsistent on the location. The primary narrative is that she couldn’t recall where the photo was taken, and certainly couldn’t pinpoint it.
Which is perhaps odd given the supposed trauma associated with the event, and given that Mansi was a local who also had relatives in the immediate area…
…. but is also perhaps understandable because Lake Champlain is a big-ass lake and not all people are good at remembering locations…
It should also be noted that the sighting location can only have occurred in a given 30-mile stretch which wouldn’t have changed much between 1977 and when the Mansis were asked to locate it in 1980.
Champ researcher Zarzynski had the Mansis go on vacation in July 1980 to find the location and help verify events. But as Zarzynski stated to Reines (and not in his public writings on Champ), “the Mansis did not look for the site”, despite this being the whole point of the trip.
But in her 2002 interview with Nickell and Radford, Mansi stated that she didn’t want the location to get out, since she was afraid that “some idiot with a gun would go out there and shoot at something in the lake”…
If this is the real explanation, it’s fine, and not an unreasonable cause for her not ever giving out the location. But, as Bartholomew noted, it’s odd that she never mentioned this on the many other occasions when she was asked about the location...
.... especially given that researchers stated that finding the precise location would allow the size of the object, its distance from the camera and so on, to be determined with confidence. All in all, it seems that she didn’t want people to find, and go to, the exact spot.
All this aside, does the photo really show a monster? As usual with monster photos, we have a set of people who argue that it does, and those who argue that it likely does not, and (sadly) has a more prosaic identity.
We’ll start with those emphasising the animal hypothesis. Because the object in the photo recalls a sauropod dinosaur or an old-school reconstruction of a long-necked plesiosaur, it’s been championed by those supporting the ‘Prehistoric Survivor’ school of #cryptozoology...
... (which posits that all manner of animals known as fossils have survived to the present and explain modern monster reports)...
The object in the photo DOES look like a sauropod from a pre-1960s painting (like this Zdeněk Burian piece), or like an out-of-date reconstructing of a plesiosaur with its neck raised out of the water (like this Bernard Long piece).
Plesiosaur necks likely were very flexible (no, I do not agree with suggestions that plesiosaurs had stiff or inflexible necks [I’m a palaeozoologist who sometimes does technical work on plesiosaurs]), but...
... there are a number of reasons why they probably couldn’t raise the neck in the manner shown here. Plus the whole idea of ‘living plesiosaurs’ anyway is contradicted by lots of evidence and lacks any good support.
An opinion promoted by some cryptozoologists (including those involved with the ISC) is that the photo shows a ‘zeuglodont’ whale (aka a basilosaurid), a group of whales known from the fossil record of the USA, Egypt, southern Asia and elsewhere…
This proposal never made any sense: no whale (not even a ‘zeuglodont’) has or had a neck long enough that it would be able to lift it out of the water to create a plesiosaur-like profile...
I think the only reason the ‘zeuglodont’ hypothesis was promoted was because some cryptozoologists favoured ‘zeuglodonts’ as the culprits behind lake monster sightings (there’s a long history whereby ‘zeuglodonts’ have been regarded as relevant to sea and lake monster stories).
Another whale-based idea in the literature is that the object is the big, floppy pectoral fin of a whale. Said whale can only be a humpback-type animal. So, wait.. there are humpback-like whales in Lake Champlain? Yeah, sure. In other words: no.
Another cryptozoological claim (originating with Jeff Johnson and shared by Champ researcher Scott Mardis) is that the object shows a turtle-shaped plesiosaur with huge paddles, the curve of the back not being the back at all but actually the leading edge of one of the paddles…
This is a pretty desperate idea in my opinion. I mean, to get into a position like this, Mansi and the other witnesses would need to see the animal rotate itself such that it was standing vertically in the water…
This would require the lake to be deep at the spot concerned which is contradictory with other data (regarding the sandbar, read on). And, again, it also requires the animal to be a living plesiosaur, an idea which...
... is not just out of whack with the fossil record and our knowledge of living animals, it also lacks any and all supporting evidence.
Johnson’s proposal makes the object in the Mansi photo look turtle-like, which brings us to the minority opinion that Champ and some other lake monsters are giant turtles: specifically, a species which sometimes carries its babies around on the dorsal midline of its shell…
.... this explaining the variation we see in lake monster profile. This is a classic case of cryptozoological ‘creature building’ (see my 2013 book with @thejohnconway and @cmkosemen The Cryptozoologicon) and...
... only works if you exclude a great number of eyewitness accounts (including the ‘best’ of them) pertaining to giant animals in Lake Champlain.
Also in keeping with the ‘animal hypothesis’ is the work of aerospace engineer Clifford A. Paiva. Paiva did some computer enhancements of the monster’s head and has presented evidence for scales, an eye and the line of the mouth. Yeah, look…
.... I don’t really know who Clifford Paiva is, but this smells like over-interpretation and/or pseudoscience to me, and I’m pretty sure it should be ignored.
Cryptozoologist (and ISC founder) Richard Greenwell said that the object in Mansi's photo looks like the object in the Surgeon’s #LochNessMonster photo, as if this provides support for it. But spoiler: the Surgeon’s photo is a hoax: see my thread here... ).
Champ researcher Katy Elizabeth has also claimed that large lumps are visible on the top of the head of the animal in the Mansi photo and that they might be parotoid glands like those seen in some amphibians….
… and also that the back of the animal in the Mansi photo is lined with lumps which she’s likened to the lumps present on some salamanders. I think that all of this is pareidolia and that these features are not unambiguously present in the photo.
In 1982, Paul LeBlond (elsewhere known for his writings on Cadborosaurus, the British Columbian sea monster) used his expertise in wave analysis to work out a size for the creature in the Mansi photo. He concluded...
... as he did in his analysis of the Wilson Nessie photo: see my thread on that photo!) that the object was VERY BIG, as in between 4.8m (16ft) and 17.2m (56 ft) long, which seems like a worryingly substantial error margin.
An ISC article of 1982 reveals that LeBlond initially put the upper limit at an even larger 24m (78ft)! This article also includes the aside that the great size of the object demonstrated that it weren’t no hoax, since no way could someone drag around an object as long as 17m…
Speaking as someone who isn’t a wave expert but has looked at a lot of water, I think that LeBlond was on the optimistic size as goes the size and that it wasn’t as big as he said, a more reasonable size being less than 3 m…
Ben Radford and Joe Nickell estimated the size of the object in their 2006 book. Using a scaled marker, and testing it at various distances in the lake, photographed and measured from shore (and using the same fixed-focus Kodak camera as Mansi did), they found...
... that the object had to be around 2 m long in total, and with a neck less than 1 m tall (in these photos, @BTRadford is some distance from shore, in the lake. How come he didn't get eaten?)...
In a separate analysis, Dick Raynor found the object to be about 1.4m long and around 80 cm tall. We'll look more at the Raynor analysis in a minute – it’s really interesting.
Could the object be a hoax? Film-maker Richard D. Smith said in a 1984 article that a hoax could only be accomplished via the use of a complex, giant model which simply couldn’t be fabricated, transported or positioned for the photo.
While there’s no good reason to think that the photo _does_ involve a hoax, this is very odd reasoning…
…. there’s nothing about the object in the photo which demonstrates that it must have involved a complex model. The ‘monster’ is amorphous and lacks detail (despite Elizabeth’s claims, noted earlier), nor does it have any of the features which make it identifiable as an animal.
Several other assertions that “it can’t possibly be a hoax” were made during the 1980s, these variously pointing to the fact that the lake is too cold for a hoax (err… what?), or that surely there’d be more than one photo if it were a hoax (again … wha?).
Basically, we can’t rule out a hoax, but there’s no reason to suspect one either. What seems most likely (to me, and to other researchers who’ve looked into the case) is that Mansi saw a real object, but misinterpreted it as an animal.
I think she saw a mass of floating wood. Consider that the object is not the tidy, animal-like thing assumed by cryptozoologists: the photo doesn’t show a head and neck which make anatomical sense in the same plane.
Rather, they’re at an angle which is difficult to reconcile with anatomy. A dark area in between the two has been argued (by Zarzynski and others) to be a physical connection (in which case the upright part of the neck has an even stranger connection with the ‘body’), but...
... it might also be a shadow (said shadow is in the right location for a photo taken at noon, since the ‘head’ would cast a shadow directly downwards)…
… and there’s also and a dark area on the left side of the neck which ruins its tidy shape. And there’s also a raised lump to the left of the neck which may or may not be anything to do with the ‘monster’, it’s hard to say...
LeBlond illustrated it as a possible fin, which makes no sense as said fin would be well to the left of the rest of the animal.
Champ researcher and lake monster aficionado Scott Mardis says that this left-side lump might be a wave; he could be right, but I don’t think he is as this would be a very odd location for there to be one. It would have to be a mini rogue wave.
I basically think that these extra components ruin the animal-like shape. What we’re seeing as an animal is an example of us paying attention to the bits of the image we ‘like’ and ignoring the rest.
As might be obvious by the fact that I keep referring to it as an ‘object’, I don’t think it’s an animal at all, but an animal-shaped mass of wood. I published this is in my (now very dated) opinion piece on sea and lake monsters published in Fortean Studies vol 7 in 2001…
And I was pleased to see that the same conclusion was reached (independently) by Ben Radford (who wrote about the case in Skeptical Inquirer in 2003, then in Fortean Times in 2004; the latter article was titled ‘The lady and the Champ’, ha ha)...
... and by Joe Nickell and Radford in their 2006 book Lake Monsters Mysteries (the book is Radford & Nickell but the Champ chapter is Nickell & Radford).
Nickell & Radford showed that it wasn’t difficult to find monster-shaped chunks of driftwood in and around Lake Champlain; in fact, people have noticed this before and drawn attention to it, as you can see in the 2nd image from the mid-1980s (1st image by Ben Radford)...
In interview, Mansi did describe the object’s surface texture as “like bark, crevice-y” (N&R) … though, in other interviews, she says it was slick and smooth and shiny and like that of a fish … which can also work for wooden objects, of course (composite by Scott Mardis).
Independently of my, and Radford’s, results is Dick Raynor’s study of 2015. This hasn’t been formally published but is available online (and I used it when writing about the Mansi photo for my book Hunting Monsters).
Raynor was interested in testing the claim that the spot where Mansi took the photo can’t be identified. Is this true? There are features in the photo which help us pin it down. The far bank is visible, and there's what looks like a tent, a reddish car and what might be a canoe..
Based on the approximate size of those objects (and other parameters), Raynor showed that the far bank was 1700-2000 ft (518-609m) away. We also know from the angle of the sunlight that Mansi was looking east when she took the photo. Add all this together and…
Only a single location fits! The photo must have been taken along a stretch of Poor Farm Road, south of South Alburg. And this location is especially interesting: the lake close to shore here is shallow (about 2m) and has a modest-flowing north-south current.
This is exactly the sort of place where vegetation gets carried along, and can collide with the bottom and get pitched and turned in the current…
Raynor noted that the Mansi photo includes an anomaly: a big mass appearing above the trees. It doesn’t match anything at the location Raynor has identified…
But it DID in 1995 and before. There were previously a bunch of farm buildings there, including a tall silo. This, almost certainly, explains the ‘anomaly’, and backs up this site as the precise location where Mansi took the photo.
Raynor also got a modern photo of this location and superimposed the Mansi photo on top of it. The match is pretty compelling (allowing for a few decades of tree growth and such)…
There’s also a brownish patch in the water, about parallel to the bank, which appears to be a submerged sandbar in between the monster and the rest of the lake. This detail had been noticed beforehand...
.... (including in B. Roy Frieden’s analysis, published in Joe Zarzynski’s 1984 book on Champ), hence the suggestion that the ‘animal’ might have been resting on a shallow, raised section of the lake floor.
Frieden’s analysis, incidentally, also led him to conclude that the photo wasn’t a montage nor involved superimposing of the ‘monster’… which is not the same as him supporting the idea that it shows a real animal. #cryptozoology #monsters
Combine all of this with my observations on the ‘untidiness’ or ‘lumpyness’ of the object, and with Nickell and Radford’s observations, and I think we have good reason to take seriously that this wasn’t an animal at all, but an animal-shaped mass of wood.
What has to be best lake monster of them all – well, it’s as ‘convincing’ as the Loch Ness muppet photo (which I covered in this thread: ) – is, then, not a photo of an animal after all.
And that’s where we end things. My thoughts on the Mansi photo have previously been published in my 2001 Fortean Studies article, at this article at Tetrapod Zoology … web.archive.org/web/2012072402…, and in my 2017 book #HuntingMonsters (which currently seems to be out of print, argh).
Over the years I’ve read a substantial number of articles on the Mansi photo, all of which in some way affected my review of the story here. They include those in the ISC newsletter, LeBlond’s analysis, and articles by Loren Coleman, Ben Radford, Dick Raynor, Gary Mangiacopra...
... and Robert Bartholomew. And books relied on included John Kirk’s, and Radford and Nickell’s. For MORE, do buy the books by those people (I myself don't own Zarzynski's book as it's now too expensive, boo)...
Thanks for reading. I’ll keep doing these as long as you lot keep reading them :) You can support me and my research, and see what I'm doing here at patreon: patreon.com/TetZoo
