John Kirk's Okanagan Lake Sighting

Okanagan Lake lies in the interior of British Columbia. Its creature has a name. Ogopogo. The Syilx/Okanagan people tell of N'ha-a-itk. John Kirk is a British Columbia cryptozoologist, co-founder and president of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, the BCSCC.

He wrote In the Domain of the Lake Monsters, published by Key Porter in 1998. The Globe and Mail noted that he "has no formal scientific training." He came to the lake anyway. And he kept coming back.

The archive lists this encounter in 1989. Okanagan Lake, at or near Kelowna. What Kirk described was big, a creature 35 to 40 feet long. "Five sleek jet-black humps," and a lashing tail. He believed it was moving at roughly 25 mph, about 40 km/h.

Nothing is recorded about a head. No eyes, no sound, no smell. How long it lasted is not known. The details reach us through Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell's 2006 book Lake Monster Mysteries, which cites the case on page 118. Kirk's own first-hand words have not surfaced.

Even the year is uncertain. Several sources place Kirk's first close encounter in 1987, during a family holiday in Kelowna. The BCSCC says he saw the creature often from 1987 to 1990 and obtained video footage in 1987 and 1989. An archived site, Welcome to Ogopogo Country, describes a video taped sighting by Kirk in May of 1987, and separately footage taken from atop Knox Mountain. None of it has surfaced online. The 1989 entry may blend a first encounter, a second video and the founding of the BCSCC, two years after that holiday.

1989 was a busy year on the water. On 18 July, Ken and Clem Chaplin filmed a creature near Bear Creek, a separate case. That year Kirk and James Clark also found "semi-digested shrimp suspended in a liquid secretion" near Rattlesnake Island. Samples sent to UBC were lost and never identified.

Radford offered a plainer reading. Kirk's sighting "was likely a group of otters." Swimming in a line, otters can look like a row of humps. Broader explanations for Okanagan reports include floating logs, of which the lake holds tens of thousands, and sturgeon, though whether they live in the lake is unclear.

In 2005 Kirk joined Radford and Nickell for the National Geographic Channel's Is It Real?. Their test looked at the 1968 Arthur Folden film, not Kirk's sighting. Using surveyor boats, the team found the object had been much closer to shore than first thought. Its size and speed had been overestimated. They concluded it was "probably a water fowl, otter, or beaver too far away to be identified."

Kirk has stayed with the lake. He told Discovery News that the Okanagan film record is "more numerous and of better quality than anything I have personally seen at Loch Ness." The BCSCC says he saw the creature again in 2021 and 2022. Yet he is no easy believer. Of Cameron Lake in 2010 he said, "It doesn't make sense scientifically to have a massive great beastie living in a wee lake."

He is interviewed in Cursed Waters: Creature of Lake Okanagan, a 2024 Small Town Monsters documentary that reached Prime Video in August 2024. Ogopogo itself runs through books by Arlene Gaal, episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and MonsterQuest, and an episode of The X-Files. The humps Kirk described remain one more line in that long record.