Video of Champ the lake monster

Is that Champ, the mysterious cryptid that supposedly roams Lake Champlain? The image above is a video still from new phonecam footage said to have been taken near Oakledge Park in Burlington, Vermont. BB pal Loren Coleman is all over the story at Cryptomundo. "Media and Others Take Closer Look At 'Champ Video'"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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goldmineguttd

I live in Burlington. I’m pretty sure nobody here actually believes in Champ. The lake is, uh, not exactly secluded, and if there was a large sea monster living in it, we would know.

This video is obviously a large dog or something and Loren Coleman is making a fool of himself.
TroofSeeker

No wetsuit. He can have a scuba rig, but he goes in in his boxers. It broadens the media attraction. He’ll be armed with Milkbones.
Anonymous

Sorry folks, but when an animal swims, it’s back does not come above the surface of the water like that (unless wearing a PFD). It does have the profile of a moose looking away from the camera, but of the 50 or so moose I have seen fairly close in the wild, this one is missing something; big vertical ears!
Anonymous

To qoute Spalding…”Doookie!”
Darren Garrison

Maybe it is one of these dogs:

http://english.pravda.ru/photo/report/mutant-3050/1/
redconsensus

Whatever that thing is, it’s a very poor swimmer. I’m going to go with log or invert canoe with a few kooky kids pushing it along by dog-paddling.
ill lich

Seriously– everybody here saying “dog” must be only looking at the still photo and not watching the video. I’m not saying it’s a “sea-monster”, but it ain’t no dog. The community on cryptomundo is leaning towards moose, but even that theory has some holes in it.
Moriarty

Much like Bigfoot, it seems this monster actually IS blurry. And that is truly terrifying. There’s huge, out of focus monsters awkwardly swimming in our lakes!
Ned613

IWOOD@#13 raises an interesting point that shows why this is a hoax. He refers to a video of Champ made “in broad daylight.” The behavior of these species would have to be consistent. Either they are diurnal feeders or crepuscular feeders like tho one in this video. They cannot be both because they would haved evolved into one niche or the other but not both.
Takuan

hmmph, all I know is if were a teenager living next to a lake, I’d make a monster to remember. There’s so much better gear available now too. R/C, decent batteries, compressed gases, cheap fittings… we should have a design contest.
noen

Not a dog, maybe a deer or moose. At the 1:10 mark on the YouTube video you can see the head turning and briefly see two pointed ears… I think.
jfrancis

If you can register a number of frames you can stack and average them for a clearer look:

http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2009/05/image_stack_fun.html
TroofSeeker

The Yankees ought’a sign the guy that threw the stick Fido is swimming after.
The real Champie’s got a mouth like an alligator, fangs like a viper, beady, glowing red eyes, scales like razor blades,
oh, and he shoots bees out of his mouth.
Anonymous

beeeeees!
Anonymous

it’s a dog…. duh.
scdevine

”
Is that Champ, the mysterious cryptid that supposedly roams Lake Champlain?
”

No. It is a fake. There are no cryptids. Loch Ness is full of decaying peat and there isn’t enough oxygen to support a catfish below a depth of about a meter. Bigfoot would have been devoured or skinned for trophies by the Natives during the Stone Age, or at least he’d show up on infrared satellite scans.

Looks like a Labrador with a frisbee in his mouth to me, although it might be a German Shepherd.
Daemon

It’s hard to be sure, but to me it looks a bit too small to be a sea monster worth mentioning.
jfrancis

I steadied the footage for my own curiosity using the stabilization function in After Effects. I also used the AE ‘time echo’ effect to perform the running average I describe in comment #1 above.

If the original author wants me to give it to him to post, I will.

If he wants to give me the best, least compressed source video I’ll repeat the process.

I was unable to steady the creature itself, but I was able to nail a point on the horizon. It’s quite steady; you get as good a look at whatever it is as you are probably going to get, but it remains an unknown silhouette.
Anonymous

It could be a previously unknown sea monster or a dog. Occam’s razor suggests the answer.
PaulR

Me, I see a buoy.

Why are all these pictures always sooooo fuzzy?

Y’know, the sun’s setting in the background, just to the right of the right edge. So the buoy’s side that is facing the obviously-not-a-photographer, is in the shadow.
Flying Orca

Yeah, cow moose is my guess; that’s about how much of the body shows when they’re swimming.
schmod

looks like a dog swimming
Antinous / Moderator

Hmm. Absolut cryptid.
arkizzle / Moderator

“I guess boingboing is going to continue it’s assault on science and reason for the sake of a tabloid headline.”

Yep. And you can tell by how enthusiastically David was promoting the idea that this was actually a sea monster, can’t you?

And please, if you get a chance, let the fundies know that BoingBoing is against science and reason, because we don’t seem to get enough of them questioning why BB is continuing it’s assault on snake-oil* and religion*.

*Not necessarily related, but I did just put them in the same sentence.
cwclifford

It’s obviously an 16-foot long dog with a tail that it propels itself with!

There is a video link btw. Much more interesting that the armchair skeptics responding.
baron_army

I contend this may actually show a floating, partially submerged tree. Coleman even provides a “stabilized” version of the video which supports my suggestion — the object is not moving as quickly as the initial video would suggest and doesn’t appear to move up and down as much. It appears as if much of the “movement” of the object is an artifact of the videographer moving their perspective. The quality of the video is terrible and, even if it did show an animal of some kind — still proves nothing. Disagree? I recommend you do some research on the scientific method.

My take on all of this:

The New Champ Video

Champ Video Makes it to “Real” Media
aldasin

I guess boingboing is going to continue it’s assault on science and reason for the sake of a tabloid headline.
Maybe the earth really is only 6,000 years old, who knows?
IWood

No, that’s Eustace, the mysterious cryptid that does roam Lake Champlain and is pissed that Champ gets all the press, seeing as how that lazy sack of crap hardly ever gets his ass out of the lake muck to put in an honest day’s work, I mean do you know how hard it is to pick out the people on shore with cheap cameras? That’s skill, that is. Last August Champ showed up thirty feet away from a guy with a Nikon D700 in broad daylight and Eustace had to practically beach himself to devour the guy and his camera. Great, Champ. Just great.

Schmuck.
apoxia

A sea monster that inefficient at swimming certainly wouldn’t have existed to the modern day. Of course, there are far more cogent arguments than that as to why this isn’t a sea monster.
Blackhat

Moose. Which was then grabbed and pulled under by the real “Champ” and never made it to the far shore…
IWood

#12 posted by aldasin

I guess boingboing is going to continue it’s assault on science and reason for the sake of a tabloid headline.

Your sense of whimsy is starting to smell. You should compost it or something.

Also, set that poor apostrophe free! It’s needed elsewhere.
Halloween Jack

With all the groovy homebrew CGI stuff that gets posted here and elsewhere, is anyone–anyone at all–really convinced by less than two minutes’ worth of choppy footage from “mookiebone”? Your kid cousin can come up with better than this on her MacBook and throw in a green Orion alien woman riding on its back. DNA samples or it didn’t happen.
ill lich

One guy on cryptomundo posed and interesting idea (whether it’s true or not), that this and other supposed lake monsters are actually a species of large slug, which would at least partially explain away how something this large could live in cold lakes with little food, as they would be bottom feeders and wouldn’t need to surface for air (and might even live under the soil most of the time).

I thought it was a moose at first too, but it appears longer than any moose I’ve ever seen, and leaves a very strange looking wake the whole time, as if there were some kind of paddle behind it disturbing the surface of the water.
pinehead

It looks too long to be a dog. Notice how, behind the head area, you can see some more mass breaking the water from time to time?

It could be an old log bobbing in the water, and the “head” might be the stump of a limb or a root. I say that because of how close to the shore it got without rising.

Whatever the case, I notice “Champ” is neither a very fast swimmer, nor did he seem interested in turning his head to look at the cameraman or anything else. That stiff kind of slow motion suggests driftwood to me.

But you never know.
David Pescovitz

IWOOD @15, thanks! : )
Falcon_Seven

Cheesy cellphone video camera. Check.
Bad lighting. Check.
No objects of know size in foreground for scale. Check.
Persistent myth about weird ‘Lake Monster’. Check.
Post video on Youtube and disable embedding. Check.
Rubes duped by latest hoax video. FTW!
trippcook

Lake monsters aren’t real.
StRevAlex

Champie Lives!
dculberson

It’s a streetlight.
physik

Totally the Obama family’s new Portuguese Water Spaniel.
dr

Werner Herzog out for a swim.
Mojave

A dog? Seriously? How on earth are you folks seeing a dog!?!? Look at the neck…..look at the mass of body that trails out after the neck…

Cryptid.
Anonymous

It’s obviously a male Champ, floating on his back, with his naughty bits breaking the surface.
Anonymous

Looks like the top half of a yawning hippo.
Anonymous

Its a dog swimming!
Jack Daniel

They gotta attract those tourist dollars somehow…
Rider

Also why would a lake monster be swimming towards shore and why the footage mysteriously end right before dog, errr wait I mean lake monster gets out of the water.
sapere_aude

It’s a zither.
ill lich

After watching the video I can’t say it’s a dog. Hoax maybe, but not any dog I’ve ever seen.
Anonymous

looks like an african sunset with harry the hippo taking in a gilp of swamp juice.
Anonymous

I was at a book signing event on the lake last night for a new book on the history of the lake (400th anniversary of Samuel Champlain showing up), and the panel addressed this: “It’s a Moose”
ackpht

Dog. Next?
scdevine

How about we put our minds together all collaborative-group-productivity-over-the-web like, and vote for Cory to go get a snorkel, a wetsuit, and a dart pistol full of weakened measles virus, and get his butt out there and vaccinate the hell out of that thing.

Just to be on the safe side.

Ahem.