The Ogopogo is a lake monster said to inhabit Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, Canada in Canadian folklore. Some scholars have charted the entity's development from First Nations folklore and widespread water monster folklore motifs. The Ogopogo now plays a role in the commercial symbolism and media representation of the region.
Background
Okanagan Lake is the largest of five inter-connected freshwater fjord lakes in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. Named after the Syilx Okanagan Nation that have lived in the valley since time immemorial, it was created when melting glaciers flooded a valley 10,000 years ago. It stretches for and has a maximum depth of and an average depth of . Okanagan has frozen over during eight winters in the last 110 years.
The lake monster has been mostly described as being a serpentine creature with smooth dark skin with a large body thicker than a telephone pole and being up to in length. The monster has said to move at incredible speeds, coiling its body in vertical undulations, and propelling itself with a powerful tail. Many have compared the creature as being strikingly similar to the cryptid Cadborosaurus, or the extinct Basilosaurus.
Etymology
According to historian Mark M. Orkin, the creature received its colonial name "on a night in 1924 when the strains of an English music-hall song were first heard in the city of Vernon, British Columbia". Orkin cites the following lines from the song: His mother was an earwig, His father was a whale; A little bit of head And hardly any tail— And Ogopogo was his name. Orkin, however, notes that "A somewhat different form of the song appeared in the Vancouver Province in 1912, August 24, 1926. According to the DC the name was first applied in 1912." Additionally, the creature may sometimes be referred to by the pet name Oggy.Orkin, Mark M. 2015 . Speaking Canadian English: An Informal Account of the English Language in Canada, p. 205. Routledge. Smaller creatures may be referred to as Ogopups.Costello, Peter In Search of Lake Monsters
History Native origins
According to Ben Radford, the Ogopogo is "more closely tied to native myths than is any other lake monster." The Secwepemc and Syilx natives regarded the Ogopogo, which they called the Naitaka, as "an evil supernatural entity with great power and ill intent." The word "n'ha-a-itk" has various translations, such as "water-demon", "water god", or "sacred creature of the water". In native lore, Naitaka demanded a live sacrifice for safe crossing of the lake. For hundreds of years, First Nations would sacrifice small animals before entering the water. Oral traditions often described visiting chief Timbasket, who rejected the required sacrifice, denying the existence of the demon. Upon entering the lake on a canoe with his family, Naitaka "whipped up the surface of the lake with his long tail" and the canoe and its occupants were sucked to the bottom of the lake. The Naitaka was often described as using its tail to create fierce storms to drown victims. In 1855, settler John MacDougal claimed that his horses were sucked down into the water, and nearly his canoe before he cut the line.
According to Pat Raphael of the Westbank First Nation, a member nation of the larger Okanagan Nation Alliance, the demonic view of Naitaka came about through miscommunication between Canada's early European settlers and the Syilx/Okanagan people. To the Syilx, it's n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ (n-ha-ha-it-koo), a sacred spirit of the lake that protects the valley. The spirit was said to dwell in caves under Rattlesnake Island (a.k.a. Monster Island) or adjacent to Squally Point. However, Jordan Coble of the Westbank First Nation counters by saying that the creature is a being that is meant to be both respected, not feared. He also goes onto explain that the concept of "n'ha-a-itk" includes the creature as well as everything that exists in the valley.https://creativecollaboration.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Lake-program_proof-4.pdf . Coble also disputes the notion of "n'ha'a'itk" being an evil spirit as the creature is not restricted to the water and has been witnessed on land, which indicates a physical creature than a lakebound phantasm https://creativecollaboration.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Lake-program_proof-4.pdf . The First Nations around Okanagan do not dismiss the creature as being purely folkloric. Knowledge keeper Richard Armstrong in Penticton, the southernmost town on Okanagan Lake, commented that Western culture often attempts to explain things away and to First Nation peoples, the existence of the lake creature is an accepted part of life and reality.https://www.castanet.net/news/Penticton/138353/ogopogo-the-legend
Alleged sightings
Susan Allison's 1872 sighting was the first detailed Ogopogo account from a white settler. She was the first non-native person to live in the region, establishing relations with the native peoples.
While driving on Highway 97 in 1968, Art Folden noticed something moving in the lake. He pulled off the road and filmed what he claimed to be footage of the alleged creature, showing a large wake moving across the water. Folden estimated that the Ogopogo was offshore. A computer analysis of the footage concluded it was a solid, three-dimensional object. Folden noticed "something large and lifelike" out in the distance on the calm water and pulled out his home movie camera to capture the object. A 2005 investigation conducted by Benjamin Radford with Joe Nickell and John Kirk for the National Geographic Channel television show Is It Real?, utilized surveyor boats to find the actual distance of the alleged creature from the shore. They found that it was much closer to shore than originally thought, resulting in a reduction of actual size and speed. They concluded that it was likely a real animal, but its size had been greatly overestimated and that it was probably a water fowl, otter, or beaver too far away to be identified.
In the 1980s, a local tourism agency offered a cash reward for a proven sighting of the beast. Greenpeace announced that the beast must be filmed and not captured: the Ogopogo was listed as an endangered species.
In 1980, around 50 tourists watched an alleged Ogopogo for about 45 minutes off a beach at Kelowna. Larry Thal, a tourist from Vancouver, captured 10 seconds of the sighting on 8 mm film. Some skeptics have suggested that this footage captured only a pair of otters.
In 1989, John Kirk reportedly saw an animal which was long and consisted of "five sleek jet-black humps" with a lashing tail. He believed it to be traveling at around per hour.
Another sighting occurred in 1989, in an area of log booms near Bear Creek. Ken Chaplin and his 78 year old father Clem staked out the area with a video camera. Chaplin caught what he described as a slim, serpent-like creature measuring up to in length swimming approximately from their canoe. The creature slapped its tail before diving, with force Chaplin described as being enough to "have killed a man if it had hit him." Chaplin returned to the location with his daughter a few days later and sighted the same creature again. These sightings sparked a media frenzy in which they were cataloged in a Time Magazine, and appeared in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. However, the sighting was quickly dismissed by local biologists with Robert Lincoln stating Chaplin had likely exaggerated the size, and that the creature in the video was likely a beaver. Chris Bull a former head of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada backed up Robert's conclusion stating that sightings like Chaplin's are commonly the result of quick thinking, and misinterpretations.
On July 24, 1992, Paul Demara videotaped "something or some things" that were "traveling just below the surface of the water at a fairly good speed," which was estimated to have been . In the footage, a boat towing a water skier suddenly appears in frame and the skier falls into the water near the object. Within several minutes, DeMara made two other videotapes, each showing what appeared to be multiple animals in the water. Benjamin Radford suggested that the creature was only several otters. In 2005, FBI contract instructor and Certified Forensic Video Analyst Grant Fredericks concluded that the object "was very consistent with debris from a fallen tree in the water," noting that it "very slowly bobs up and down." He also pointed out that the alleged creature did not react to the water skier, and the skier did not seem alarmed.
In August 2008, a local photographer named Sean Viloria and his girlfriend Jessica Weagers were sitting by the lakeshore in Peachland when Weagers noticed a disturbance in the water. Viloria snapped one photograph, but his camera died and he wasn't able to capture any more. The image captured depicted two humps emerging from the water(The image wouldn't make a public appearance until 2020). Eight days later, south of the original sighting, Viloria, and Weagers spotted another disturbance on the water snapping 11 photographs of an unknown object as it surfaced near a boat(Only 3-4 have been publicly shown). The main photograph was interpreted as either being the tail or neck of the object, while the other two showed the back. Viloria estimated the creature as being long, judging by the size of the boat in the background. The photos were examined by many local experts. Chris Bull concluded it didn't look like any known animal of the lake. A biologist noted the black/red texture was possibly a different creature or pollution. Members of the show MonsterQuest examined the photographs and found no evidence of tampering, as featured in the 2009 episode "Lake Demons". This broadcast marked the first appearance of the photos on television(A special edition version in 2020 shows Viloria's first photo). However people have suggested Viloria had taken photos of a wind surfer that had tipped over which explained the colors.
In 2011, a cell phone video captured two dark shapes in the water. A suggested explanation is that the video shows two logs. Radford analyzed the video for Discovery News and concluded that "the video quality is poor and the camera is shaky, but a closer look at the 30-second video reveals that, instead of one long object, there are actually two shorter ones, and they seem to be floating next to each other at slightly different angles. There are no humps, nor head, nor form; only two long, darkish, more or less straight forms that appear to be a few dozen feet long. In short, they look a lot like floating logs, which would not be surprising since Okanagan Lake has tens of thousands of logs harvested by the timber industry floating just under the lake's surface."
Three sightings were reported in September 2018, one of which described a giant snake approximately long.
In June 2024, there was a reported sighting which described a long snake in the water.
Searches In 2000, a Japanese expedition caught a 40 foot sonar image of an object about 7 meters below the point near Rattlesnake Island. Several underwater caves were also discovered off of the island as well. A following expedition in 2001 resulted in inconclusive sonar readings of a large object, and another in 2006 discovered more caves at much greater depths.