The Huls Video: Two Dark Shapes on Okanagan Lake

Okanagan Lake runs through British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. It has its own legend. Ogopogo, or N'ha-a-itk, is said to live in its deep water. In 1968 Art Folden filmed something from Highway 97. In 1991 Nippon Television searched the lake with a remote vehicle and a mini-submarine. They found nothing.

Autumn 2011. Richard Huls of West Kelowna was visiting a winery overlooking the lake. Out on the water he saw two long, dark shapes lying side by side. No boats were nearby. This was no wake.

He raised his cell phone and filmed. The clip runs about 30 seconds. The camera shakes. But the shapes are there, darker than the water, roughly straight, sitting at angles that do not match the waves. "It was not going with the waves," Huls said. "It was not a wave obviously, just a darker colour. The size and the fact that they were not parallel with the waves made me think it had to be something else."

CHBC News in Kelowna aired the video first. By November 9 it had almost 200,000 views on Global's YouTube page. Within days reports put it past 500,000. On November 10 it played on ABC's Good Morning America.

Huls stayed careful. "It proves something is down there," he told the Vancouver Sun. To CHBC he added: "Whether it's Ogopogo or not, it is a different story but there is something at least down there." The station later issued a correction. "CHBC News regrets the attribution to Richard Huls that he saw the Ogopogo, rather Huls claims to have seen an object in the water and does not know what it was."

No official body examined the footage. Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer, reviewed it on November 7, 2011. He saw two shorter objects, not one, floating next to each other at slightly different angles. "There are no humps, nor head, nor form," he wrote. Whether they moved at all was "hard to tell." Discovery News reported that they did not move at all. It also quoted John Kirk of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, who said Ogopogo footage is more plentiful and better than Loch Ness footage.

Radford's answer was logs. The lake holds "tens of thousands of logs harvested by the timber industry," floating at or just under the surface. Discovery News suggested two logs escaped from a timber boom. Radford called the clip "very similar" to the Folden film, which he had helped evaluate for a 2005 National Geographic expedition. At UBC Okanagan, environmental sciences professor Rob Young saw something else. "I think I'm looking at a standing wave," he told CHBC, pointing to temperature-driven layers of water moving past each other.

No one has accused Huls of a hoax. Floating logs remain the explanation most often cited, though it was never confirmed. The video joins a long line of Okanagan films, from Folden in 1968 to the sightings of 2018. And it carries a quiet footnote. The witness never claimed to see a monster.