page_title: Ogopogo
section_title: Alleged sightings
hierarchical_section_title: Ogopogo / History / Alleged sightings
caption_attribution_description: Okanagan Lake
context_page_description: In Canadian folklore, the Ogopogo or Oggy is a lake monster said to inhabit Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, Canada. Some scholars have charted the entity's development from First Nations folklore and widespread water monster folklore motifs. The Ogopogo now plays a role in the commercial symbolism and media representation of the region.
context_section_description: Susan Allison's 1872 sighting was the first detailed Ogopogo account from a white settler. She was the first non-native person to live in the region, establishing relations with the native peoples.
  While driving on Highway 97 in 1968, Art Folden noticed something moving in the lake. He pulled off the road and filmed what he claimed to be footage of the alleged creature, showing a large wake moving across the water. Foldern estimated that the Ogopogo was 300 yards offshore. A computer analysis of the footage concluded it was a solid, three-dimensional object. Folden noticed "something large and lifelike"; in the distance out on the calm water and pulled out his home movie camera to capture the object. A 2005 investigation conducted by Benjamin Radford with Joe Nickell and John Kirk for the National Geographic Channel TV show Is It Real?, utilized surveyor boats to find the actual distance of the alleged creature from the shore. They found that it was much closer to shore than originally thought, resulting in a reduction of actual size and speed. They concluded that it was likely a real animal but its size had been greatly overestimated and that it was probably a water fowl, otter, or beaver too far away to be identified.
  In the 1980s, a local tourism agency offered a cash reward for a proven sighting of the beast. Greenpeace announced that the beast must be filmed and not captured; the Ogopogo was listed as an endangered species. In 1980, around 50 tourists watched an alleged Ogopogo for about 45 minutes off a beach at Kelowna. Larry Thal, a tourist from Vancouver, shot some 8mm film, albeit for only 10 seconds. Some skeptics have suggested that it was only a pair of otters.In 1989, John Kirk reportedly saw an animal which was 10.7 to 12.2 metre (35 to 40 feet) long and consisted of "five sleek jet-black humps" with a lashing tail. He believed it to be traveling at around 40 kilometre (25 miles) per hour.
  On July 24, 1992, videotaped "something or some things" that were "traveling just below the surface of the water at a fairly good speed, estimated at 8 kilometre (5 miles) per hour." A boat towing a water skier suddenly appears in frame and the skier falls into the water near the object. Within several minutes, DeMara made two other videotapes, each showing what appeared to be multiple animals in the water. Benjamin Radford suggested that the creature was only several otters. In 2005, FBI video specialist Grant Fredricks  concluded that the object "was very consistent with debris from a fallen tree in the water," noting that it "very slowly bobs up and down." He also pointed out that the alleged creature did not react to the water skier, and the skier did not seem alarmed.
  In 2011, a cell phone video captured two dark shapes in the water. A suggested explanation is that the video shows two logs. Radford analyzed the video for Discovery News and concluded that “The video quality is poor and the camera is shaky, but a closer look at the 30-second video reveals that, instead of one long object, there are actually two shorter ones, and they seem to be floating next to each other at slightly different angles. There are no humps, nor head, nor form; only two long, darkish, more or less straight forms that appear to be a few dozen feet long. In short, they look a lot like floating logs, which would not be surprising since Okanagan Lake has tens of thousands of logs harvested by the timber industry floating just under the lake's surface." 
  In September 2018, there were reportedly three sightings, one of which was described as a giant snake that was about 15 m (49 ft) long.
caption: Ogopogo is said to inhabit Okanagan Lake
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