B.C. man believes his video proves existence of Ogopogo
Like most purported videos of Big Foot, a Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, the latest clip of Ogopogo is blurry and shaky, but a B.C. man believes it proves the existence of the fabled Okanagan Valley lake creature.
"Wow, that's pretty big," Richard Huls says in the video about the waves. "No boats around."
Huls tells the Vancouver Sun he has always believed in the lake monster and says his video proves something massive lives in Lake Okanagan.
"It was not a wave obviously, just a darker colour," he says to the Sun. "The size and the fact they were not parallel with the waves made me think it had to be something else."
Huls shot the video a few weeks ago while visiting a West Kelowna winery. Since it was posted online a few days ago, it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and has been broadcast by media outlets around the world.
Ogopogo is Canada's version of the Loch Ness Monster and is believed by many to live in Lake Okanagan in the south central interior of British Columbia. It is most commonly described as a sea serpent, about 10 to 20 metres long with a horse-shaped head and a undulating serpent-like body. First Nations folklore describes a specific lair location for the animal they called N'ha-a-itk, or lake demon. First Nations people would avoid this location with their canoes unless they brought a live sacrifice, because of previous lives that were lost in the area.
While there have been more than 1,000 sightings since the 1860s, an expedition in 1991 failed to find any evidence of a living or dead Ogopogo. The trip, financed by Japan's Nippon Television, combed the water with a miniature submarine, but found nothing.
An article on MSNBC points doubt on Huls' claim saying there are no humps that would show a head and the forms are in different sections. They suggest the forms may be logs. Lake Okanagan does have tens of thousands of logs harvested by the timber industry floating on or just under the surface.
As for Huls, he's a believer.
"It proves something is down there," he tells the Sun. "Whether it's Ogopogo or not, it's a different story but there is something at least down there."