Julie Green's Memorial Day Sighting of the Pend Oreille Paddler

Lake Pend Oreille lies in Bonner County, North Idaho. Sources put its depth at 1,150 or 1,200 feet. For decades people had seen things in it. A dark shape with a bumpy back, longer than a rowboat. A creature moving with an undulating motion, creating a large wake. It became known as the Paddler.

In 1983 two North Idaho College professors decided to look closer. English professor James R. McLeod, prompted by Loren Coleman's Mysterious America, led a Cryptozoology Club study with anthropology professor Richard "Duke" Snyder. As of 1984, they counted 27 sightings of the monster. Julie Green's would come after that count closed.

Memorial Day, 1985. Julie Green, a teacher from Coeur d'Alene, set out with friends for an afternoon on the lake. In the mid afternoon sun, a large V-shaped wave crossed about 200 yards in front of her boat.

"There was clearly something in the water ahead of us that was undulating, coming in and out of the water," she recalls. Green dropped her engine and gave chase. The object was gunmetal grey. It rivalled the length of her 22-foot boat. It soon outdistanced her.

No original 1985 account has surfaced, and the tellings differ. One puts the wave about 200 yards away. Wikipedia says several hundred yards. Nick Redfern, in Monsters of the Deep, has Green and her friends several hundred feet away when they saw "something huge and fantastic." A school newspaper, the Cedar Post, recalls an unnamed young woman who in 1985 saw a large grey thing break through the water and cause ripples. It is probably the same afternoon. No photograph, film or physical trace was ever reported.

The lake has another history. Farragut Naval Training Station stood on it during the Second World War. Since 1955 the Naval Acoustic Research Detachment at Bayview has run unmanned and scale submarine tests there. Wikipedia notes that Green's description of a "gunmetal grey object" adds credibility to the idea of a Navy cover-up. McLeod championed that idea. In November 1996 it was the cover story of Omni magazine. "I think the Navy directly or indirectly perpetuated the monster rumor for some time to disguise what they had been doing in the lake," McLeod said.

The Navy disagreed. Cmdr. Rick Schulz of the David Taylor Acoustic Research Center at Bayview was blunt. "The Navy would not go to that extent or effort to create some story to cover up the fact we are involved in submarine testing." He did allow that individual sailors may have spread rumours.

A 1984 expedition had reportedly concluded the Paddler was most likely a giant sturgeon. Sandpoint Magazine later noted that large sturgeon are not actually found in the lake. Waterlogged trees, logs, stolen boats and derailed railcars have all been suggested. Hoaxes have muddied the water too. In late 1984 McLeod's team traced the 1977 tabloid Paddler photo to a 12-foot papier-mâché catfish from a 1974 Sandpoint play. Nobody has called Green's own account a hoax.

McLeod set it all down in Mysterious Lake Pend Oreille and its "Monster": Fact and Folklore in 1987. In 2009 a Washington State University English course on monsters used it. Green's afternoon has been retold by Redfern, by local radio and newspapers, and by bloggers. The wave. The grey shape. The boat falling behind. That is all that survives.