Black Dragon of Lake Tianchi

In July of 2003, a BBC film crew made the victorious announcement that they had conclusively debunked the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. They used a total of 600 sonar beams and satellite navigation technology to search the lake, and were confident that they had not missed an inch of it. They were planning to find Nessie through the distorted sonar signals which would've been reflected back at them from the oxygen emitted from the giant lungs of a presumed marine reptile - but they found no such evidence, nor were they tantalised by any sonar anomalies at all. This seemingly showed that the Loch Ness Monster conclusively did not exist, and they made this announcement on the 27th of July of that year. However, I can imagine that their pride was somewhat bruised when a report of a lake monster came in from China just four days later, settling into an ongoing spate of encounters with a dragon-like monster seen emerging from the depths of Lake Tianchi, which is a crater lake situated in a large volcanic caldera on the border of China and North Korea. It has a surface area of 9.82 km2 and a maximum depth of 384m - and is more often known as Heaven Lake. They might want to rethink that name if all these monster reports are to be believed...

## The 20th Century

Despite the beast apparently having been known for centuries beforehand, the first recorded sighting of a monster emerging from the murky depths of this seemingly far from heavenly lake was in 1906, according to local records gathered for an article on the topic in the Sydney Morning Herald. During this incident, a large animal resembling a buffalo lunged out of the water with a deafening roar and attempted to attack three bystanders until one of them shot at it. It was hit in the belly six times before bellowing once more and returning to the water.

The next incident was somehow even more spectacular, with over a hundred people reporting sightings of monsters in the lake in the period between the 21st and the 23rd of August 1962. A person using a telescope was able to see two monsters seemingly chasing each other. A report from around this time (which is unfortunately undated in my sources) describes a monster with a human-like head with big round eyes and a protruding mouth. It apparently had smooth, grey skin and a white ring separating its 1.2/1.5m long neck from its body. The next time the creature would surface would be in August of 1980, when a group of meteorologists alleged that they had seen an animal with a cow-like head and duck-like beak at the end of a 3ft neck. A group of tourists were shocked to see the monster in January of 1987, when it emerged onto an easterly shore of the lake and sprayed water out of its nose. A witness named Shen Ruder described it as roaring like a locomotive. Some photographs and a video of a dragon-like creature swimming in the lake were taken on September 2, 1994 - and despite the assertion that this video showed a large creature raising 6ft-high waves, the footage has unfortunately been lost. A photographer named Wang Ling recorded yet more lost footage of four black creatures frolicking in the water in 1996 - an event apparently witnessed by a further 200 people.

## The 21st Century

The first 21st Century sighting of the monster took place on the 11th of July 2003, just days before the BBC would claim to have debunked Nessie. Several government cadres reported having seen a shoal of mysterious animals swimming through the volcanic waters - and Provincial Forestry Bureau Vice-Director Zhang Lufeng was quoted as having said that the monsters had been seen more than five times within 50 minutes, and that the number of visible creatures often varied - sometimes there was only one, while the last time they were seen there were twenty entities among their ranks. He and his fellows were watching the creatures from a distance of about 2-3km away, meaning that they were only visible as black or white dots, but the ripples they made apparently allowed the cadres to determine that the objects were '*living beings*'.

Four days after the BBC had killed the Loch Ness Monster, the Lake Tianchi Monster rose up out of the depths again - this time to be witnessed by twelve military servicemen. They described it as having a back covered in scales, and as having 10cm long horns on its black-coloured head. The monster apparently swum around in the lake for about two minutes before slipping back down below the surface. Five hundred people saw the monster in 2004, when it allegedly jumped up above the water in full view of the crowd. It was described as a serpentine creature with black scales and a horse-like head. A number of soldiers of the People's Liberation Army witnessed the creature in 2005, and described it as being a blackish-green serpent.

On the 6th of September in 2007, news photographer Zhuo Yongsheng caught a shoal of six of the mysterious creatures on camera, taking photos as well as a 20 minute video clip. One of these photographs shows the creatures moving in three pairs parallel to one another, while the other shows them all grouped together, creating ripples across the lake. He had been able to take these photos after going to the Southern slope of Mount Changbaishan with two local guides at 5:05am that morning with the aim of shooting photos of the sunrise.

   Although the cloudy conditions meant that he was unable to do this, his efforts would instead be rewarded with the capture of impressive video evidence for the existence of unknown creatures in Lake Tianchi. Du Baiqing, one of the two guides, was the first to spot what he initially took to a rock at exactly 5:26am. Yongsheng promptly turned to focus his camera on the dark object, at which point five more anomalies just like it emerged from the water behind it. The seal-like creatures - as they were now clear to be - frolicked in the water for an hour and a half before eventually disappearing from sight at 7:00am. Yongsheng described them as swimming '*as fast as yachts*' and as having '*fins - or maybe wings*' which were longer than their bodies. Intriguingly, he also commented on the fact that they were all swimming at exactly the same pace, to the point that he said that it looked as if '*someone was giving orders*'.

The most recent monster sighting took place on July 27th of 2013, when a volcano monitoring station worker by the name of Wu Chengzhi saw a strange creature in the lake while taking routine measurements of its temperature along with a colleague of his. The first thing he saw was a V-shaped ripple on the surface of the water, and then a black object appeared at the forefront of this ripple formation, apparently swimming forward at a very fast speed. He immediately pulled out his camera and snapped several photos - one of which he supplied to the media, and appears to show a fawn-like head and neck protruding above the water.

## Conclusion

Several sources state that Lake Tianchi is known to be too cold and barren to support a large aquatic life-form, and so the question must be asked what it is exactly that people are seeing. The earlier sightings are definitely biological in nature, but Yongsheng's description of the precise movement of the entities and Chengzhi's capture of something which *certainly doesn't* look like a fawn's head despite what the media may say could almost go to suggest that perhaps we are looking here at tests of classified submarine technology. The 2004 sighting, however, somewhat punches a hole in this theory. These incidents would be easily classified as sightings of USOs if the only ones recorded were the 2007 and 2013 cases, but the long history of the monster being seen in the lake makes me wonder if something stranger might be going on here...

## Sources

'BBC Proves Nessie Does Not Exist' for *BBC NEWS*

'China's Loch Ness Monster Resurfaces' for the *Sydney Morning Herald*

 'Sightings of the Lake Tianchi Monster' for *unmyst3.com*

'Lake Tianchi Monster' on *Wikipedia*

'Soldiers Spot Chinese Nessie' for *BBC NEWS*

'Tianchi Monster Caught on Film' for *china.org.cn*

'Suspected Monster Appears in Tianchi Lake' for *china.org.cn*