Larry Thal's Ogopogo Film and the Crowd Sighting off Kelowna

Okanagan Lake is the home of Ogopogo, the lake monster of British Columbia. By 1980 the legend already had a famous piece of film behind it. In 1968 Art Folden had filmed something in the water. Twelve years later, a family holiday would add another.

1980. Larry Thal, a tourist from Vancouver, was at Kelowna with his wife and children. He had a home movie camera. He was filming the family.

Then the lake took over. "I was taking pictures of the kids and the wife, and bingo! All of a sudden the Ogo Pogo, supposedly, whatever it may have been, appeared on Lake Okanagan..." Thal turned the camera on it. He recorded about 10 seconds of 8 mm film.

Others saw it too. According to later accounts, around 50 tourists watched an alleged Ogopogo for about 45 minutes off a beach at Kelowna. Discovery UK describes them as "a busload of day-trippers from Vancouver." None of them has been named.

The footage reached Arlene Gaal, an Ogopogo researcher and author based in Kelowna. Gaal studied it closely. "Larry's film shows how the animal swims. It shows the speed and the massive waves that it creates. It actually shows that it has some sort of appendage that seems to pop up every now and then, but the interesting thing is that the animal that Art Folden shot and the animal that Larry Thal shot are basically the same size." Her estimate for that size was 40 to 60 feet long.

Ten years later the film found a national audience. On 7 February 1990, NBC's Unsolved Mysteries aired an Ogopogo segment in Season 2, Episode 19. Thal told his story on camera. Gaal discussed the footage. The segment also featured a newer video, shot by Ken and Clem Chaplin in 1989, and the Thal film stood beside it as part of a longer record of sightings on the lake.

Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell offered a more modest reading in their 2006 book Lake Monster Mysteries. The animal in the film, they concluded, was a pair of otters. As Discovery UK put it, "when the footage was looked at in closer detail, it was thought that all he really caught on camera was two energetic otters." Otters often swim in a row. Their motion can be mistaken for one continuous serpent. Radford made a related argument about the Folden film. Across open water, size is easily overestimated.

No one has ever claimed Thal faked his footage. The debate has always been about what he filmed, not whether he filmed it.

The Thal film sits between two of the best known pieces of Ogopogo footage: Art Folden's film of 1968 and the Chaplin video of 1989. Its exact date and the name of the beach have not surfaced, and the original film is not known to be online. Yet a crowd of about 50 and a 45 minute watch keep it in the conversation. For believers, a lake shore full of witnesses. For sceptics, two otters swimming in a row.