OGOPOGO

Opening

Okanagan Lake in British Columbia is about 127 kilometres long and up to 232 metres deep. Long before settlers arrived, the Syilx people spoke of a being in the lake, n'ha-a-itk, a name rendered in English as lake demon, water god or sacred spirit of the water. Settlers called it Ogopogo, a name usually traced to a 1920s English music-hall song, and the creature is now Kelowna's mascot.

The best-known film was shot in August 1968 by Art Folden, who pulled off Highway 97 south of Peachland and filmed a dark, log-like object moving across the calm water with his 8mm home movie camera. In 2005 a surveyed re-staging showed the object was much closer to shore than Folden thought, and so much smaller. No body or bone has ever come out of the lake.

Timeline

Before contactSyilx and Secwepemc traditions describe n'ha-a-itk, living in caves near Rattlesnake Island and Squally Point. Settler-era accounts say small animals were offered for safe crossing.

1872Susan Allison, an early settler, gives the first detailed settler account of a creature in the lake.

1924By historian Mark Orkin's account, a music-hall song with the line "And Ogopogo was his name" is first heard in Vernon. Orkin notes an earlier claim that the name was used in 1912.

August 1968Art Folden, driving with his family, films the object. He estimates it at about 300 yards offshore. Enthusiasts infer a very large, fast animal.

11 August 1980About 50 people watch something off the beach at Kelowna for some 45 minutes. A visitor from Vancouver shoots about ten seconds of 8mm film.

17 July 1989Ken Chaplin videotapes a slim creature near log booms at Bear Creek. Biologists say it was most likely a beaver or large river otter.

24 July 1992Paul DeMara videotapes objects moving off Kelowna as a water-skier passes through them.

2005Benjamin Radford, Joe Nickell and cryptozoologist John Kirk re-stage the Folden film for the National Geographic Channel's Is It Real?

Key figures

Art Folden shot the film that still anchors the case. He did not claim to know what he filmed. He called it "something large and lifelike".

The Syilx Okanagan Nation hold the older tradition. Westbank First Nation members have said the demonic version came from settler miscommunication, and that n'ha-a-itk is a respected protector of the valley.

Arlene Gaal, a Kelowna writer, collected decades of sightings and footage, and John Kirk of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club saw what he described as five black humps in 1989.

Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell, sceptical investigators, wrote the main critical study, Lake Monster Mysteries (2006).

Physical and documentary trail

The trail is film, video and testimony. The Folden footage shows a dark shape with a wake that, in Nickell's words, resembles a fast-moving log. Its size and speed depend entirely on its distance from the camera, which Folden estimated by eye. In 2005 the three investigators agreed on a site south of Peachland matching Folden's view, then had a surveying crew place a boat at measured distances. All three, including the believer Kirk, agreed on roughly where the object would have been. It was far closer than 300 yards. Radford concluded it was probably a real animal, such as a waterfowl, otter or beaver, too far away to identify.

The later footage has fared no better. A forensic video analyst who reviewed the DeMara tape found it consistent with debris from a fallen tree, noting that neither boat nor skier reacted to it.

An earlier version of this report placed Folden on a hillside near Kelowna, called his camera Super-8 and dated the film 12 August 1968. Published accounts put him on Highway 97 south of Peachland with an 8mm camera, in August 1968. I could not confirm the exact day. The current summary's teaser said officials once wanted monster-repelling devices on a ferry. That 1926 story circulates widely online, but I found no contemporary source for it, so it has been left out.

The results demonstrated that the distance was far less than Folden had thought; therefore, estimates of the object's size and speed had to be reduced accordingly.

Things you might not know

• The name may be older than the song. Orkin traces it to 1924 in Vernon, but notes the Dictionary of Canadianisms dates it to 1912.
• The song is a joke. In Orkin's quotation, Ogopogo's mother was an earwig and his father a whale.
• The lake has frozen. Okanagan Lake has frozen over in eight winters in the past 110 years or so, a problem for a large air-breathing animal.
• Greenpeace weighed in. When a tourism reward was offered in the 1980s, Greenpeace insisted the animal be filmed, not captured.
• The settler story of drowned horses has no fixed date. John McDougal is said to have lost his swimming horses to the lake, but accounts put it in 1855 or 1860.

Competing explanations

A large unknown animal. This depends on witness size estimates over open water, and on films that shrink when distance is measured. A breeding population would need to survive in a lake that occasionally freezes, and no carcass has ever washed up.

Known animals and objects. Otters swimming in a line, beavers, waterfowl, large sturgeon, floating logs and boat wakes all occur on the lake and match what the clearer films show. This is the explanation the 2005 test supports for Folden.

An older spirit tradition later read as a zoological claim. In Syilx understanding n'ha-a-itk is not simply an animal, and turning it into a plesiosaur-like monster is largely a settler and tourism development.

Later life of the case

Ogopogo is one of Canada's best-known cryptids and a Kelowna civic symbol, from statues to play structures. Sightings, photographs and videos continue, often from Peachland and Kelowna, and are regularly featured on monster television. Syilx voices have increasingly asked that the being be called by its own name.

Finding

Art Folden filmed something real on Okanagan Lake in August 1968, and the film is genuine. When its distance was surveyed in 2005, the object shrank to the size of an ordinary lake animal. No film since has shown more, and no physical evidence of a large unknown animal has ever been recovered.

What still will not resolve: exactly what Folden filmed. The footage is too distant to tell an otter from a beaver from a bird, and no second camera recorded it.