Hi there, thanks for having me on. I'm a cryptozoology researcher, been studying lake monster cases for about fifteen years now. And there's one case that I keep coming back to, one photograph that changed everything we know about what might be living in Lake Champlain. I'm talking about the photograph taken by a woman named Sarah Danvers back in July of 1977. And that's the thing, this case is different. This wasn't some blurry nonsense. This was clear. This was real. And she paid a price for sharing it with the world. So let me tell you what happened to her. July 5th, 1977. Warm summer day. Sarah, her fiance Tom, and her two kids were on vacation, driving from Vergennes up toward St. Albans along Route 36. They'd spent the night with relatives and decided to stop at this lakeside field for a picnic. Nice quiet spot on Lake Champlain. Kids running around, playing in the shallow water near the shore. Just a normal family afternoon. Tom went back to the car to grab the camera, a Kodak Instamatic, and Sarah was just standing there watching her kids, looking out at the lake.
And that's when the water started churning. Now, Sarah grew up near this lake. Her grandfather used to tell her stories about Champ when she was little. Tease her, you know, saying if she didn't behave in the boat, Champ would get her. Kid stuff. She never believed any of it. So when she saw that churning water, her first thought was scuba divers. Then she figured maybe a big school of fish. Lake Champlain has some massive sturgeon, walleye, that sort of thing. Made sense. But then the head came up. Then the neck. And then the back. and head emerging separately is unusual - Fiona' She described it later as grayish-brown, with skin like an eel. Slimy looking, she said. The creature's head was twisting around, scanning the shoreline. Its mouth was open and water was draining out of it. She said she felt like she shouldn't be there. Like she was watching something that should have been extinct thirty million years ago.
Here's what gets me about Sarah's account. She wasn't scared at first. She told interviewers she felt total awe. Calm, even. Just watching this impossible thing exist right there in front of her. It was Tom who panicked. He came back, saw it, started screaming at the kids to get out of the water. He helped Sarah up the bank, handed her the camera. The thing was still there. Still watching. And she raised that Instamatic and took one shot.[ One single photograph. Then they, and I'm quoting her directly here, they hightailed it out of there. Now here's where it gets complicated. Sarah didn't tell anyone. For three years, she kept that photograph hidden. She and Tom couldn't even talk about it between themselves. She said they started calling it their two-thousand-pound duck. Because it was easier to live with a two-thousand-pound duck than something you couldn't explain. She was terrified of ridicule. Terrified people would think she'd lost her mind. So the photo sat in an album, and she tried to forget about it.
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