What happened
According to Sandra Mansi's account, on July 5, 1977, she was spending an afternoon with her fiancé and children on Lake Champlain, not far from the Canadian border. A shape with a long neck and small head reportedly rose from the water and turned for several minutes before submerging. Mansi took a single photograph with a simple Kodak Instamatic camera. For several years she kept it in an album, fearing ridicule, and the negative was lost. The photograph appeared in 1981 in “The New York Times” and was quickly hailed as the most important evidence for the existence of Champ, the monster of the lake lying between Vermont, New York State and Quebec. Mansi was later unable to pinpoint exactly where she had taken the picture. In the early 1980s, the Vermont and New York legislatures passed resolutions symbolically protecting Champ.
Witnesses
Sandra Mansi, her fiancé and her children, who were spending the day at the lake.
Explanations and hypotheses
A 2003 analysis by Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell indicates that the photograph most likely shows a surfacing log or branch – roots and branches carried by waves often take on a neck-like shape. The lack of a negative and of any point of reference makes it impossible to estimate the object's size, and the bay where the photo was supposedly taken is shallow – it is hard to imagine a large animal hiding in it. Proponents emphasize that expert examinations found no evidence of photo manipulation and that the witnesses saw the object move for several minutes.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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