Lake Champlain Echolocation Recordings

Lake Champlain has its monster. Reports of Champ reach back to Capt. Crum in 1819 and Sheriff Mooney in 1883. The fiercest debate centres on the Sandra Mansi photo of July 5, 1977. Almost everything in the record is visual. A shape. A hump. A photograph.

In 2003 the Discovery Channel tried something different. It contracted the Fauna Communications Research Institute, a nonprofit founded by bioacoustician Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, to listen. She later said the channel offered "a lot of money" for the work. With her was physicist Dr. Joseph Gregory, her business partner, whom commentator Joe Citro called a professor of sound and vibration at North Carolina State.

The team spent about a week aboard a 50-foot cruiser named Casablanca. They carried military-grade hydrophones, four computers, two digital audio recorders, two portable analyzers and two vector sensors. One June morning, about 8:00 a.m., the air was still and the water was mirror-smooth. Near Button Bay the equipment caught a faint, unfamiliar series of high-pitched ticking and chirping. It was not fish. It was not motor noise. Citro wrote that the pitch was about "ten times higher than any known fish in the lake." And: "It was something they'd never heard before in the lake."

The team moved. The sounds came again. The next day at Hunter Bay. Days later at Thompson's Point. All three sites line up with alleged Champ sightings and with healthy Atlantic salmon populations.

In July 2003 the Burlington Free Press reported that the institute described the sounds as "similar to those produced by Beluga whales or dolphins." Later coverage placed them somewhere between a Risso's dolphin's clicking and a beluga's chirping. Each recording had its own signature. Von Muggenthaler took that to mean three different animals.

From the sound alone she sketched a creature. A carnivore about 15 feet long. Swimming at up to five knots. A highly advanced brain. Most likely, she has said, a freshwater mammal. "What we can say for sure is that there's a creature in the lake that produces biosonar. We have no idea what it is." She ruled out boats, fish-finders and fishing reels. "We know it's not a beaver, an otter, a deer or a moose." Yet she keeps the legend at arm's length. "That monster stuff, that's just drama. That's not science."

In 2010 she, Gregory and Scott H. Mardis published an abstract in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. It called the sounds "likely a form of echolocation," even though none of "the known native creatures" echolocate.

The same Discovery production brought Joe Nickell and Benjamin Radford to the lake. They swept the water with sonar and watched sighting hotspots. They found nothing. Radford's view is blunt: "anytime anyone sees anything that they can't identify on the lake, it becomes Champ." There are, he adds, "No teeth, bones, skeletons, or dead ones." Biologists raise a harder problem. No dolphin or whale is known to live in the lake. Discussing later recordings in 2014, UVM biologist J. Ellen Marsden said the rapids are too shallow for a beluga to pass. Middlebury geologist Tom Manley doubted any population could survive about 9,000 years. "It just does not make a lot of logical sense."

In 2009 Seven Days reported that von Muggenthaler, though she calls her findings indisputable, did not yet have enough data for a credible scientific paper. A three-year, 24-hour monitoring project was planned that year. No published results have surfaced, and no public copy of the original recordings has turned up. Still, others kept listening. In 2014 Katy Elizabeth and Dennis Hall recorded clicks near Scotch Bonnet with a DolphinEar hydrophone, and she recorded again in 2018 and on September 20, 2024. The sounds of 2003 remain unidentified.