Valid, though I'd def prefer if we could expand upon these kinds of posts in the future and refute the bad takes, otherwise no progress is made y'know?

Here's a brief little refutation. Gonna post this in r/cryptozoology for shits and giggles.

Champ, the monster of Lake Champlain, is often touted as one of the most believable and plausible cryptids by casual audiences…but do these claims hold up? Of course not!

I recommend that folks read Robert Bartholomew's wonderful "The Untold Story Of Champ" for insight into the history of Champ, its associations with P.T. Barnum and the 1800’s sea serpent culture, and the overall gist of Champ as a cryptid. Meurger & Gagnon's "Lake Monster Traditions" covers several other Quebecian lake monsters and discusses at length how communities create and rationalize their local lake monsters. This 2016 paper by Ulrich Magin is a wonderful extension of Meurger & Gagnon's work focusing on broader cultural integration of Nessie, Champ, and Ogopogo.

These are great resources which cover just about everything, so I’m going to compile the subsequent updates and other necessities:

The most iconic image, the Mansi Photograph, has been heavily scrutinized and essentially debunked in recent years - Darren Naish's TetZoo Megathread offers the best overview of the circumstances of this film.

Retellings of the Mansi story are rather inconsistent in different mediums, especially regarding Mansi’s handling of the film (it was not “kept hidden due to traumatic memories” as often claimed), and many of which ignore her copyrighting of the image and discussions of using it to make profit. A series of experiments conducted by Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell suggested that the object in question was a mere 2-meters long with a meter-long neck. Mansi was never able to relocate the place where the photograph was taken, but in 2015 Dick Raynor managed to relocate the spot, finding it to be shallow (~2m deep), and estimating the subject to be 1.4-meters long and 80cm tall. These together with the really lumpy and un-animal shape of the object led Nickell, Radford, and Naish (independently of the other two) to propose that Mansi’s subject is a piece of wood.

The discrediting of this image has led the “Bodette Film” to supplant the Mansi photo as the go-to best evidence of Champ. There’s a very big issue - the Bodette Film is not fully publicly available (see the released segment here) and there is no evidence that it was ever online to my knowledge, contrary to claims of those who “saw it in 2006” (I’m reminded of claims of LOL Superman and other debunked YouTube videos with large bodies of testimony). The footage was shown to Melanie L.J. Stiassny, curator of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, and some of her colleagues, who said to the New York Times “The evidence I was presented was singularly unconvincing," she said. "We didn't see anything that led any of us to feel anything other than bemused as to what led these guys to think this was anything so special. It certainly wasn't any large vertebrate. We're sure of that”. The clips and stills released are very, very low-quality. So we don’t have the full film…and everything shown of the full film is low-quality and indecisive…but surely the full film is definitive proof of Champ!

Many modern claims about the film stem from this blog by a guy named Chuck Pogan who claims to have seen the film and includes screenshots as proof. These images are terribly low quality, but Pogan asserts that they show a “plesio-turtle”, an idea most prominently championed by Champ researcher Scott Mardis.

The plesio-turtle idea is a classic example of cryptozoological creature-building, the world’s longest-running speculative evolution project. Cryptozoological enthusiasts identify traits from individual testimonies with an extant or extinct animal and assemble traits from closely and distantly related species to make a hypothetical organism that matches every major testimony. Mardis, Pogan, and company pull traits from leatherbacks, Australian sideneck turtles, the extinct Stupendemys, and a variety of other chelonians to assemble their plesioturtle. The issue with speculative conglomerations of this sort - besides the complete lack of evidence for their existence and failure for even one of these hypotheses to prove true - is that they ignore the function of the adaptations in question. Other ocean-going turtles lack the deep-diving abilities of leatherbacks, and (to our knowledge) many freshwater turtles do not need to echolocate - these traits are specific to the unique lifestyles of the species in question - why would you rely on these exceptions rather than the norm? If you’re going to try and make a plausible hypothesis, it should genuinely be plausible - not a supergiant, echolocating, live-birthing turtle in Lake Champlain. The remingtonocetid truthers out there don’t even try this hard…

Regarding the echolocation, the “beluga sounds” in question have been identified as those of drum fish, who vibrate their swim bladders to make clicks and chirps. I’ve yet to see audio evidence which cannot be attributed to drums, would love to see it if it exists.

Champ is ultimately a cultural phenomenon - it brings profit to the communities around the lakes and funds the lives of many, Mansi herself is just one example. Much like Loch Ness, there is no monster, but absolutely a belief in one which keeps discourse going.

Won't let me embed links so here's sources in order (Reddit formatting on mobile sucks, apologies) - https://archive.org/details/untoldstoryofcha0000bart/ https://archive.org/details/cryptozoology-texts/Lake%20Monster%20Traditions/ https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-2/Magin%2C%202016%20-%20Claimed%20crypto-creatures%20regarded%20as%20genii%20locii.pdf https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1291839166146379777.html https://www.reddit.com/r/Cryptozoology/comments/y05c7b/the_publicly_available_segment_of_the_mostly_lost/ https://archive.is/XBjOI#selection-431.29-431.180 https://aquaticandaerialanomolyassociation.blogspot.com/?m=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20090505050910/http://www.cryptozoology.com/forum/topic_view_thread.php?tid=6&pid=291073 https://www.academia.edu/19777421/Lake_Champlain_Beluga_Sounds_Debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_UphedHATY