The Thai Film. On August 11, 1980, some fifty tourists watched as Ogopogo performed for about forty-five minutes off the beach at Kelowna. Larry Thai of Vancouver shot some 8mm film of the event (Gaal 2001, 52–55). Unfortunately, the footage is only about ten seconds long, and “a large dark appendage that moves out of the water” (Gaal 2001, 54) appears to be one of the many defects of the old film. Gaal (2005a) conceded to me that the film might depict two creatures rather than just one; if so, I would suggest a pair of otters.
The DeMara Video. On July 24, 1992, Paul DeMara videotaped, off Kelowna, “something or some things” that were “traveling just below the surface of the water at a fairly good speed, estimated at five miles per hour.” Suddenly a boat appeared, towing a water-skier, and crossed the line of movement, whereupon the skier tumbled into the water. About five minutes later, DeMara saw and filmed what he termed “a similar anomaly” (Gaal 2001, 64), estimated by Gaal at thirty feet long and composed of three sections. Several minutes later came a third sighting of something moving underwater (Gaal 2001, 62–67). Gaal (2001, 62–66; 2005a) agrees that there were several “creatures” (she counted seven) in the first video sequence, and I think they look remarkably like otters. I also believe that rather than depicting a single three-section creature, the second and third sequences show otters swimming in a line.
An alternative skeptical view comes from an FBI video specialist, Grant Fredricks (2005), who analyzed the DeMara video and concluded that what he saw was “very consistent with debris from a fallen tree in the water.… the objects very slowly bob up and down.” He also pointed out, as we did, that the objects don’t react to the approaching boat or skier, nor does the skier seem at all alarmed by the objects. This suggests that the skier recognized whatever was in the lake and knew that it was neither unusual nor a threat.
Yet another videotape, shot by Ken Chaplin on July 17, 1989, has been dismissed by wildlife experts as “most likely a large river otter or beaver” (Gaal 2001, 71), and Kirk is among many who agree (1998, 64).
CONCLUSION
Despite many sincere eyewitnesses, a critical look at the evidence yields no proof of a large unknown creature inhabiting Lake Okanagan. Mundane explanations can account for the reports, and the best sightings may be of northern river otters swimming in a line. They imitate the serpentine creature—an image inherited from sea monster tales and Native American legends—that people now expect to see, and that some do indeed perceive, on “the lake of mystery.”
OGOPOGO THE CHAMELEON
Benjamin Radford
In our search for Ogopogo, the famous monster of Lake Okanagan, I had an idea of what to look for: a creature up to seventy feet long, with dark skin and a characteristic series of humps. Though I went in search of one monster, in a way, I found three. Ogopogo seems to have several distinct incarnations: as an Indian legend, as an elusive biological beast, and as a lovable local mascot. Each Ogopogo reflects the era and expectations of those who embrace it.
N’HA-A-ITK: THE INDIAN LEGEND
Because the evidence for lake monsters rests almost entirely on ambiguous sightings, fuzzy photographs, and a lakeful of supposition, native Indian tales have been used to suggest historical precedence for the creatures. Some lake monsters, such as Loch Ness’s Nessie and Lake Champlain’s Champ, are depicted as mysterious but fundamentally friendly beasties, playful and elusive. Not Ogopogo, or at least not the Indian stories on which it is supposedly based: that of the fearsome N’ha-a-itk (though the spelling Naitaka is common, I’ve chosen to use the more authentic spelling N’ha-a-itk). The N’ha-a-itk-Ogopogo link is firmly cemented in the creature’s history and lore, and Ogopogo is more closely tied to native myths than is any other lake monster. Virtually all writers on the subject lump the two together, and in fact, most use the terms interchangeably. For example, “the Indian name for the animal was Naitaka,” writes Peter Costello (1974, 222) in his book In Search of Lake Monsters. The definitive book on Ogopogo, In Search of Ogopogo by Arlene Gaal, is subtitled “Sacred Creature of the Okanagan Waters” and has a chapter titled “Native Legends of the Ogopogo.” Noted lake monster hunter Roy Mackal (1980, 222) even goes so far as to state with certainty, “The Naitaka are real animals.… The term Ogopogo is of recent origin, whereas the Indian name Naitaka and its variations go back hundreds of years.”
Figure 7.6 Lake Okanagan’s Rattlesnake Island (a.k.a. Monster Island), the reputed home of Ogopogo. (Photo by Benjamin Radford)
N’ha-a-itk has various translations, including “water demon” or “lake monster.” Many writers prefer to emphasize translations that suit their agendas (such as “snake in the lake”); other interpretations of the Indian word may be just as accurate but less amenable to conscription into lake monster mythos. Mary Moon (1977) gives other examples, such as “sacred creature of the water,” “water god,” and “lake demon.” The creature would demand a toll from travelers for safe passage near its reputed home on Rattlesnake Island, a small, rocky clot in Lake Okanagan (figure 7.6). The fee was not just a bit of gold or tobacco but a sacrifice—a live sacrifice. Hundreds of years ago, whenever Indians would venture into the lake, they brought chickens or other small animals to drop into the water. The drowned fowl would sink into the lake’s depths and ensure the travelers a protected journey. The island’s rocky shore was said to be littered with the gory remnants of passersby who didn’t make the sacrifice.
Indian traditions speak of Timbasket, the chief of a visiting tribe who paid a terrible price for challenging N’ha-a-itk. Historian Frank Buckland tells the story:
Timbasket, the Indian cynic.… declared his disbelief in the existence of the lake demon. He was told that the Westbank Indians intended to sacrifice a live dog to the water god as they passed Squally Point, but he was quite unimpressed. He knew too much to concern himself with outmoded customs.… [Later when crossing the lake] Timbasket defiantly chose to travel close to the rocky headland. Suddenly, the lake demon arose from his lair and whipped up the surface of the lake with his long tail. Timbasket, his family and his canoe were sucked under by a great swirl of angry water, (quoted in Moon 1977, 25)
This was the modus operandi for N’ha-a-itk: it would use its mighty tail to lash the lake’s waters into a fierce storm that would drown its victims.
The white settlers apparently heeded the Indians’ warnings, for the most part; when there were occasional lapses, they would be reminded of the wrath of N’ha-a-itk. In 1854 or 1855, a settler named John MacDougall is said to have neglected the sacrifice. While crossing the lake with a team of horses, a great force sucked his steeds down with a tremendous slurp. MacDougall was terrified when he realized that his canoe, lashed to the horses, was about to be pulled down to a watery doom as well. He grabbed a knife and cut the ropes, narrowly escaping with his life.
Moon (1977, 32) cautions those seeking retribution: “Anyone thinking of killing Ogopogo had better ponder the fate of the Lambton family.… During the first half of the fifteenth century, Sir John de Lambton killed a ‘wyrm.’ As a result of killing the monster, the Lambton family fell under a witch’s curse: for nine generations no Lambton would die in his bed. None did. Some say the curse has pursued the Lamb-tons down to the 1970s.” Thus black magic enters the Ogopogo story.
According to Moon, “The Indians.… looked on it as a superhuman [supernatural] entity.” Other writers agree, including W. Haden Black-man (1998, 71), who points out that the Sushwap and Okanakane Indians “believed that it was an evil supernatural entity with great power and ill intent.”
N’ha-a-itk’s paranormal connection to the elements is perhaps the strongest of any lake monster. Besides a seemingly supernatural control over the lake’s waters, it commands aerial forces as well: “the Indians said no boat could possibly land [on Rattlesnake Island], for the monster would cause a strong wind to blow and baffle the attempt.… the monster was something more than an amphibian. It was always in some way connected with high winds” (Moon 1977,
32).
What manner of monster is this? The power to summon storms and create whirlpools? Witch curses? (Frankly, not dying in one’s own bed doesn’t seem like such a terrifying fate.) Such stories and descriptions suggest that N’ha-a-itk is a disincarnate force of nature, not a corporeal creature actually living and eating, breathing and breeding, in the cold waters of Lake Okanagan.
One must be careful about accepting native stories and legends as true accounts of actual creatures. Just because a given culture has a name for (or tells stories about) a strange or mysterious beast—be it Sasquatch or Ogopogo—doesn’t necessarily mean that those names or stories reflect reality. Cultures around the globe tell of fantastic beasts and other entities that are important elements of human folklore. I hope that future anthropologists won’t look back on our age and believe that these creatures coexisted with us just because we can all name and describe them. (Future mystery mongers might conclude that giant green ogres and talking donkeys existed in our daily lives on the basis of an antique Shrek DVD.) This highlights a problem that folklorist Michel Meurger points out in his groundbreaking book Lake Monster Traditions. Meurger suggests that claiming native evidence for unknown creatures is an “old gimmick of portraying the sighter as a kind of noble savage,’” a process he aptly names “the scientification of folklore” (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 13).
According to some traditions, Ogopogo’s history predates its identification as N’ha-a-itk. In fact, N’ha-a-itk was actually a murderer named Kel-Oni-Won. According to Dave Parker, a traditional First Nations storyteller, Kel-Oni-Won murdered a vulnerable old man with a club. The gods decided that the killer’s punishment “was to change Kel-Oni-Won into a lake serpent, a restless creature who would forever be at the scene of the crime where he would suffer continued remorse. He was left in the custody of the beautiful Indian lake goddess and was known to the tribesmen as N’ha-a-itk; the remorseful one who must live in the lake with the company of other animals. It is said that the only animal who would tolerate his company was the rattlesnake” (quoted in Gaal 2001, 122).
This folkloric motif—an unending punishment for an unforgivable crime—is common in many myths. The later custom of making sacrifices (a warning to heed elders’ traditions and rituals) has an analogy in other lake monster mythologies. For example, children living around many reputedly monster-inhabited lakes are told by their parents that if they don’t behave and obey, they will be thrown into the lake and the monster will eat them. This “bogeyman” method of social control is a common but largely unrecognized function of lake monster traditions. The origin of N’ha-a-itk and, by extension, Ogopogo is rooted in morality tales, not eyewitness descriptions of real creatures.
Celeste Ganassin, curator of education at the Kelowna Museum, explains that for many early First Nations peoples, the distinction between reality and myth was not particularly important, because the stories hold a culturally specific significance that renders objective truth somewhat arbitrary. Native Indians’ stories are not the white man’s literal, empirical reality. In the same way that one misses the significance of an urban legend by focusing on whether it corresponds to reality (Ellis 2001, 144), one misses the importance of N’ha-a-itk by treating it as simply Ogopogo or its predecessor. The beliefs and stories serve important functions, Ganassin says, and divorcing the N’ha-a-itk myths from their cultural context strips them of their value. Writers tread shaky ground when they conscript Indian myths of N’ha-a-itk into evidence for present-day Ogopogo’s reality. “People pick and choose parts of the First Nations myths to fit their needs, to support whatever argument they are trying to make. They take what they want and use it to support their ideas” (Ganassin 2005). Almost invariably, it is white writers, not native people, who insist that N’ha-a-itk and Ogopogo are one in the same.
It’s not hard to imagine why native groups might create or perpetuate traditions about the lake. The area around Rattlesnake Island can be a cold, desolate, foreboding area. Nearby lies Squally Point, so named for the violent squalls that can quickly arise and menace boaters. As Arlene Gaal (1986, 121) notes about a rocky bluff across from the city of Peachland, “When you look down into the water from there, there’s no bottom whatsoever. The water goes out of sight. It looks eerie. Little waves hit the caves along the rocky shore, and they make sucking sounds. The combination of what you see and hear is kind of scary.” There are many “cursed” places around the world, where local legend warns off savvy travelers and where monsters are said to dwell. I encountered one such area on the coast of Newfoundland near Bonavista: a huge, dark, unusual sinkhole near a rocky cliff that had washed out two holes toward the ocean. It’s known as The Dungeon and is said to be home to sea monsters (figure 7.7)
Ganassin suggests that to really understand N’ha-a-itk you need to examine its social function. “To those people who crossed that body of water, it was a real phenomena. The ritual of honor and sacrifice was tied to sacred practice.” Ganassin also points out that Lake Okanagan is hardly unique in its native stories of terrifying creatures inhabiting the depths. “You can’t look at a First Nations group anywhere without finding a tradition of some sort of entity in a lake they had to respect or fear. Typically they believed that some sort of spirit inhabits it. Any body of water in First Nations culture can—and often did—generate these stories to explain natural phenomena such as storms, sudden winds, and so on” (Ganassin 2005).
Indeed, the stories of N’ha-a-itk are virtually identical to those told about many other North American lakes, including Ontario and Superior. Meurger, for example, tells of an 1864 account by Indian captive Nicolas Perrot, who reported, “They honoured the Great Tiger as the god of the water.… They tell you that the [lake spirit] stays at a very deep level, and has a long tail which raises great winds when it moves to go to drink; but if it wags its tail energetically it brings about violent tempests.” As at Okanagan, the Indians would make live sacrifices to appease the water spirit. “Before undertaking longer voyages they take care to break the heads of some dogs, which they hang from a tree or a branch” (for a fuller discussion, see Meurger and Gagnon 1988, ch. 3).
Figure 7.7 “The Dungeon,” said to be the home of sea serpents in northeastern Newfoundland, near Bonavista. (Photo by Benjamin Radford)
If the N’ha-a-itk story is going to be used as supporting evidence for Ogopogo, one has to explain not only what the link is but also why all the other lakes throughout the world with similar traditions have supposed lake monsters that no one has found. (For a parallel example of native stories in the Bigfoot milieu, see anthropologist Wayne Suttles’s discussion in Dave Daegling’s Bigfoot Exposed.)
Though most writers gloss over the tenuousness of the link between N’ha-a-itk stories and Ogopogo, others acknowledge it but claim that ancient Indian petroglyphs, or rock art, depict the lake monster. Costello (1974, 220) writes, “The Indians have left crude drawings on stone of what is thought to be Naitaka, in which we can see the now familiar long neck, flippers, and even the two ‘ears’ on the crown of the head.” Mackal (1980, 225) states, “There are at least three crude pic-tographs on rocks around the lake, now in an extremely poor state of preservation, which may be related to an alleged lake monster.” Mackal quotes Moon’s discussion of a drawing “showing a creature ‘stealing’ away through the weeds.” Consulting the original source, I found that Mackal neglects to mention that Moon (1977) specifically states that this creature was “rodent-like” and therefore less of a fit for N’ha-a-itk than Mackal implies. Mackal suggests that “the relationship is tenuous and can be inferred only from the nature and location of the picto-graphs themselves.” Yet the petroglyphs suggested as Ogopogo depictions are dubious for exactly these reasons. The petroglyph most often cited (figure 7.8) is not from the Okanagan Valley at all but from Sproat Lake on Vancouver Island (Kirk 2005).
Another writer, Karl Shuker, suggests that petroglyphs dating from around 1700 BC might be evidence for lake monsters. One particula
r drawing, Shuker (1995, 112) writes, “is a strikingly accurate depiction of the vertically undulating, elongate water monsters frequently reported from the lakes and seas of Canada—so much so that it could easily be taken to be a sketch made by one of these beasts’ twentieth century eyewitnesses.” Yet the petroglyph he describes was found not on the shore of Lake Okanagan—nor even in British Columbia—but instead more than two thousand miles away near Peterborough, just outside of Toronto. It may represent a monster, but its location doesn’t suggest Ogopogo. (The assumption that ancient artwork represents reality is what I refer to as the Bangles fallacy, after the 1980s band whose hit song “Walk Like an Egyptian” satirically assumed that real Egyptians walked as they were depicted on tomb walls.)
The criteria for inclusion seem to be so broad that nearly any ancient drawing found anywhere in North America that, to anyone’s eyes, might resemble some creature that could live in water can be cited as evidence. Even desert-dwelling Indians (such as the Zuni and Pueblo) depicted horned serpents in their art and pottery. Writes Meurger, “The Zunis of New Mexico have represented their serpent god of underground waters and of torrents, Kolowisi, as a horned reptile with many fins and gaping jaws” (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 165).
Figure 7.8 This Indian petroglyph, claimed to represent Lake Okanagan’s Ogo-pogo, is actually located on Vancouver Island. (Courtesy of Peter von Puttkamer, from his documentary Monster Hunters)
Thus there is little basis for the reputed links between ancient art and modern monsters. “There is no true academic evidence that specifically states that First Nations people ever put down in petroglyphs the shape of N’ha-a-itk,” Ganassin (2005) notes. “The pictures didn’t come with captions.”
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