Ken Chaplin's Ogopogo Video at Bear Creek, Okanagan Lake

Okanagan Lake has its own monster. Its name is Ogopogo. By the summer of 1989 it had been reported for generations, and filmed before, by Art Folden in 1968 and Larry Thal in 1980. Then a Kelowna car salesman picked up a video camera.

July 18, 1989. Clem Chaplin, 78, believed he had seen Ogopogo near Bear Creek, on the west shore of Okanagan Lake across from Kelowna. He showed the spot to his son. Ken Chaplin, a salesman at Hilltop Toyota, stood with his father on a low bluff and filmed. A blackish thing swam towards the right, maybe 50 meters away.

The next evening he filmed again, this time aboard his six-metre-long inboard motorboat. A low, blackish shape swam to the left, its head slightly raised, shoulders and tail visible. "You can see the body thrashing behind it," Chaplin said. "And then it brought its tail section out of the water." It slapped its tail with a force he said would "have killed a man if it had hit him." As it dived, two appendages, perhaps webbed feet, kicked backward. Accounts of the vantage point differ. One version places the family in a canoe, about 75 feet away.

The witnesses described something about 15 feet long. Slim. Serpent-like. Hairless, greenish, spotted. "I saw its features as being snake or lizard-like. No fur or hair." On July 21, Horace Simpson, 72, watched it through binoculars and said it was the length Clem and Ken said it was. Days later Ken saw it again with his daughter. In all he recorded four videotaped sequences.

August 10, 1989. Chaplin held a press conference. Five days later Kelowna City Council, at Mayor Jim Stuart's request, asked the federal and provincial governments to protect Ogopogo as an "endangered species." Tourism manager George Tinling declared: "The video has taken Ogopogo from myth to reality." National Geographic asked to take the tape to Washington, D.C. for computer enhancement. A Current Affair offered $20,000. Time covered the story. So did Unsolved Mysteries.

The attention had a price. Chaplin left his job after an ultimatum from his boss and estimated the affair cost him about $21,000. He charged $100 per viewing. Mayor Stuart said, "I think of Ken as someone with gold fever."

Regional wildlife biologist Robert Lincoln watched the tape. "It was not a hoax. There was nothing in there that gave us the impression this was fabricated in any way." His verdict: "this particular video was of a beaver." Chris Bull, former head of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, agreed. Vancouver Aquarium biologist Stefani Hewlett suggested a river otter.

Journalist Daniel Wood, who interviewed Chaplin for The Globe and Mail, watched the tape several times. "Yes: Chaplin does have a videotape of a real animal," he wrote. "It's definitely not a sturgeon. It's definitely not a wave. It's definitely not a log."

Chaplin answered the experts directly. "The largest recorded beaver in the interior is four and a half feet long." And: "I've asked myself thousands of times, 'Is there a possibility I could be mistaken?' And I just can't see where I could be." He knew Bear Creek's beavers well. When researcher Arlene Gaal circulated a photograph of one as possible Ogopogo, he corrected it publicly. Gaal called his own tape "the best image ever taken of any unknown species."

Unsolved Mysteries later reused the segment in a version hosted by Dennis Farina. In 2011 the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Canadian blog marked twenty two years since the footage. The tape still stands between a beaver and a legend. Chaplin's last word to Wood was simple. "That thing's definitely there. It's real."