Free Lake Monster Mysteries by Benjamin Radford

involving wind speed, fetch, wave period, and wave height—all of which were estimated. LeBlond did his best with the scant evidence he had to work with, but no matter how good the math or the model is, with so many unknown variables, any result will be little better than a wild guess. LeBlond’s analysis, by his own admission, was imprecise: “Sources of error may appear at many stages of the estimation method, and this must be kept in mind when interpreting the results.” Most writers who cite the LeBlond analysis fail to mention this important caveat and portray his results as conclusive and scientifically sound. One writer goes so far as to say that LeBlond’s heavily qualified conclusions “destroyed the learned academic’s [i.e., Frieden’s] hypothesis that the animal could have been a fake” (Kirk 1998, 135). (Though again, I agree with Kirk that it isn’t faked.)
    Several years later, LeBlond applied a similar analysis to the famous surgeon’s photo of the Loch Ness monster (see chapter 1 ). He concluded that the creature’s neck extended four feet above the waterline and that “the object thought to be Nessie is therefore of a dimension which warrants all the interest it has received” (LeBlond and Collins 1987). Yet that image has since been shown to be a hoax—the pranksters using a neck only about a foot high, not four feet, as LeBlond had calculated. It now seems clear that the methods LeBlond used are not valid for estimating the size of unknown objects in water and should be abandoned.
    There is one area where LeBlond’s discussion is clearly wrong. Hementions the efforts to locate the Mansi site and provides a map with a shaded area showing “stretches of shoreline from which the Mansi photograph may have been taken.” The areas highlighted are on the western shores of Hog Island and below Maquam Bay across from Hero Island. Yet only someone who has never been to the area could suggest these sites as possible candidates; the far shores are much too far away to be depicted in the Mansi photograph.
    Some cryptozoologists, it should be noted, were cautious about the results of the photographic analysis. J. Richard Greenwell, of the International Society of Cryptozoology, discussed the various analyses and their conclusions that “there are ‘definitely no cuts, no superimposition,’ but, he warn[ed], that ‘does not mean it is a monster or a living object. It does mean an object was there and was photographed’” (quoted in Zarzynski 1988a, 132).
The Radford Analysis
    Armed with analyses, comments, and critiques of the Mansi photo, I set out to conduct my own investigation. All the previous analyseshad focused on just the photograph or just the sighting account. In the quarter century since the photo was first published, there had been no in-depth effort to reconcile the two and get a complete picture of the event. This seemed to be a glaring oversight for such a famous and important photo. I spent countless hours looking at the photo, trying to glean any hint or angle that might tease out its secrets. Rather than using the most often reprinted (and cropped) version of the photograph, I traveled to Connecticut to study the rarely seen original print. Mansi’s lawyer, Alan Neigher, a warm and accommodating man, kindly gave me free access to stare at the thing as long as I pleased.

    Figure 2.7 The Lake Champlain monster, traced from an enlargement of Sandra
Mansi’s 1977 photograph. (Illustration by Benjamin Radford)
    There are two fundamental questions about the object in the Mansi photo: Is it alive? and How big is it? There are a number of puzzling elements in the story that make little sense if the object is actually a large, living animal but need not be answered if the object is nonliving.
    Morphology. In my own analysis of the Mansi photograph, I discovered something odd about the object. It isn’t