The Lake Khaiyr Monster, Yakutia (1964)

Lake Khaiyr lies in the Ust-Yansky District of Yakutia, north of the Arctic Circle, about 5 km south of the settlement of Khayyr. It is small. About 0.6 by 0.5 km. Its banks are steep except on the northeast, where a gentle shore is covered with sedge. The water is grey and murky. In 1964 a field party was working there. Among them was N. F. Gladkikh, described as a member of the biological team of the Yakutsk branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Older Western books called him a biologist.

Gladkikh told it in his own words. "At 7 a.m. I went to the lake to get water, with a bucket." He had gone no more than 15 or 20 meters. Then came a splash. He saw "a huge animal crawling out of the water."

It was probably 4 to 4.5 meters long and 1.5 to 2 meters tall. Its neck was maybe 1.5 meters. "It had a small, flat head, like a snake." One version gives its colour as dark blue with a sheen, the skin smooth. It seemed to be eating grass. Then it turned its serpent head toward him.

Gladkikh screamed and ran back to camp. By the time his colleagues arrived, the animal had gone back into the lake. One retelling says they saw only a wave passing across the water and grass flattened by its massive body.

The story reached Komsomolskaya Pravda in November 1964, under the title "The Mystery of Lake Khaiyr". The report is credited to G. N. Rukosuev, deputy head of Moscow State University's North-Eastern Expedition. It described "a small head on a long gleaming neck, a huge body covered with jet-black skin and a vertical fin along the spine." It also told of a later sighting by the expedition leader and several others. A head in the lake. Then a dorsal fin. The creature beat the water with its long tail, producing waves. A Russian source adds that the party heard a loud roar from the lake in the middle of the night.

In 1965 a group of sport divers and tourists searched the lake. Despite thorough searches, they found nothing out of the ordinary.

For decades the tale lived on in Western books, from Tim Dinsdale's The Leviathans to Peter Costello's In Search of Lake Monsters. The drawing attributed to Gladkikh, a long-necked quadruped with a dorsal fin, became one of the most-reproduced lake monster illustrations.

Then, in 2008, Karl Shuker reported in Fortean Times on a 2007 Komsomolskaya Pravda article. It said Gladkikh "never was a biologist nor in fact even a scientist; he was instead a 'migrant worker'". Gladkikh had admitted that he fabricated the entire event, either "to entertain himself and his friends or as an excuse for shirking his duties at work". Shuker also found that claims of a fishless lake, avoided by birds and steeped in local sightings, were false.

Gladkikh's own admission marks the original sighting as a fabrication. Local lore offers a second thread. Residents told of enormous pike that could swallow fishermen and boats, and some call the creature the "Bull-Pike". Later expeditions reportedly found only unusually large pike.

Darren Naish wrote "The sad death of the Lake Khaiyr monster" on Tetrapod Zoology, and Loren Coleman spread the news on Cryptomundo. Yet the old version survives in travel features and Russian lists of mysterious lakes, often set beside the creature of its Yakutian neighbour, Lake Labynkyr.