The Okanagan Lake Odd Waves Sighting, Kelowna (2024)

Okanagan Lake has its own legend. The legend has a name. Ogopogo. Reports of something unexplained in its water keep coming, and many of them come from around Kelowna, where the downtown meets the lake's east shore at City Park.

April 2024. A Friday morning, most likely the 26th. Natasha Chalmers, a Kelowna resident who owns a business downtown, was walking through City Park. A rainbow hung over the lake. She stopped to capture it.

Then something in the water caught her attention. "This thing popped up out of pretty calm water and then it started to move forward in that, kind of arch that you see popping up," she said. At first she suspected a bird. But it just kept popping up.

Then it went under. "But once it was down, it just was gone. There was nothing after that." It never returned. What her phone caught was what it left behind. A series of peculiar waves, rolling across water that had been calm a moment before. The footage does not clearly show the thing itself.

Castanet ran her story on 27 April. Then it travelled. Coast to Coast AM wrote it up on 30 April and again in its weird news roundup on 3 May. The Centre for Fortean Zoology reposted it on 1 May. Unexplained Mysteries followed on 4 May.

On 7 May, Global News aired a viewer clip titled "Odd waves on Okanagan Lake or Ogopogo sighting?" It was placed near Penticton, filmed about two weeks earlier. Whether it is Chalmers's footage under another label, or a second recording, remains unresolved.

Chalmers never claimed more than she saw. "It had that iconic Ogopogo look but it could be a wave, I don't know," she said. Global News noted the sceptics' view: "Some argue that there is no such creature, rather just strong currents in waters of the lake."

Locals had their own theories. On Reddit, one commenter thought it "Seems more likely to be a log or something else inanimate." Another wrote, "That looks like two boat wakes interacting." Castanet forum readers pointed to the lake turning over, and to currents they had watched for decades. These sightings, one noted, come "every year about the same time. Usually in the Spring." Robert Young, an associate professor at UBC Okanagan, has described odd waves in general as a natural physical process, recorded in 34 BC lakes and about 1,000 lakes worldwide. No official investigation followed.

Then the story drifted. Wikipedia's Ogopogo page records that "In June 2024, there was a reported sighting which described a long snake in the water." The line carries no citation. No report of a June snake has surfaced, and it is probably a garbled echo of the April sighting. In 2026, Discovery UK summed the episode up: "in 2024 a sighting was dismissed as 'odd waves'."

Yet it fits a familiar pattern. In 2018, a Kelowna man filmed something "like a giant snake." In 2020, Calgary visitor Adam Schwartz filmed "a weird formation of waves" moving against the current. A shape glimpsed, then gone. Waves left behind. On Okanagan Lake, the two keep arriving together.