Lake Tianchi Monster: two heads chasing each other on Heaven Lake (1962)

Heaven Lake fills the crater on top of Changbai Mountain, on the border between China and North Korea. Koreans call it Cheonji. Its surface lies at 2,189.1 metres. Its deepest point is 384 metres down. From mid-October to mid-June it is usually iced over. In August, it is open water.

The lake had its monster long before 1962. In 1903, a buffalo-like creature with a loud roar was said to have attacked three people, taken six shots to the belly and retreated into the water.

Mid-August 1962. Zhou Fengying, of the Jilin Province meteorological equipment supply station, was looking over the lake through six-power binoculars. In the northeast corner, 200 to 300 metres from shore, the heads of two animals surfaced. Each was about the size of a dog's head. Blackish-brown. One behind the other, 200 to 300 metres apart.

They swam chasing each other. Sometimes they sank under the water. Sometimes they came back up. Behind them they left a herringbone-shaped wake, a V spreading across the surface. It went on for more than an hour. Then the thing dived under the water.

English Wikipedia tells it differently. It dates the sighting to 21 to 23 August 1962, gives the witness a telescope and says more than a hundred people reported the sightings. The Chinese accounts name one observer, give no exact day and speak of binoculars. One Chinese summary counts only dozens of people across five occasions between 1962 and 1980.

Those August dates match two sightings from 1980. On 21 August that year, the Beijing writer Lei Jia saw a broad trumpet-shaped wake at sunrise. Two days later, two staff of the provincial meteorological bureau watched five animals with heads as big as an ox's and fired two shots. Somewhere along the way, the two years appear to have been merged. Recent blogs added more, with massive black anomalies seen through a theodolite telescope.

No official investigation of the 1962 sighting has been found. Sceptics start with the lake itself. It is ice-covered about eight months a year, and in 2007 Xinhua reported scientists saying it was too cold for large creatures. Others point to its recent volcanic activity. One sceptic said "it's all in the imagination, or just a floating volcanic rock."

Others look to fish. According to Chinese Wikipedia, North Korea stocked a fish species in the lake in 1960, two years before Zhou's sighting. Specimens have since reached 7.7 kg and 85 cm. A 2006 CCTV science programme reportedly leaned towards a large or mutated fish. Otters, large geese, boats and optical effects have also been proposed. At Kanas Lake in Xinjiang, another set of lake monsters was identified as taimen in 1989.

Zhou later claimed to have seen the monster in Tianchi on more than one occasion since the 1960s, and to have seen it clearly during a close encounter in 1980. Others kept reporting it too. More than 20 people on Tianwen Peak in 1976. A photograph by the reporter Li Xiaobin in 1981. Officials counting as many as about 20 creatures in 2003. About 20 minutes of video of six seal-like creatures, shot by Zhuo Yongsheng in 2007.

The Mountain Goats sang about it on Heretic Pride in 2008. An animated film, The Tianchi Monster, followed in 2019. But among the stories of the Lake Tianchi Monster, the 1962 account remains the quiet one. Two dog-sized heads. A V on the water. More than an hour of chasing, and then the dive.