Paul DeMara's Okanagan Lake Videotapes

Okanagan Lake, in British Columbia, has its own legend. Its name is Ogopogo. Over the decades, people around the lake have tried to catch it on film. Art Folden shot 8 mm film from Highway 97 in August 1968. Larry Thal filmed about 10 seconds in 1980. Ken Chaplin made a video near Bear Creek in 1989. In the summer of 1992, Paul DeMara added three sequences of his own.

July 24, 1992. Off Kelowna.

DeMara was videotaping the lake. In the frame was "something or some things," he said, "traveling just below the surface of the water at a fairly good speed." Later estimates put that speed at about five miles per hour. Then a boat towing a water-skier appeared. It crossed the line the objects were travelling. The skier fell into the water near the object. The shapes showed no visible reaction to the boat or the skier.

DeMara kept filming. About five minutes later he recorded what he called "a similar anomaly." Several minutes after that, he caught something else moving underwater. Three sequences, within roughly ten minutes.

Arlene Gaal, the Kelowna Ogopogo researcher, analysed the tapes in her 2001 book In Search of Ogopogo. She counted seven "creatures" in the first sequence. The second, she estimated, was about thirty feet long. It came in three sections.

No official investigation was ever recorded. The scrutiny came from writers and analysts. In their 2006 book Lake Monster Mysteries, Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell wrote that the first sequence looked "remarkably like otters." The second and third, in their reading, showed otters swimming in a line. Not one long, segmented animal.

Forensic video analyst Grant Fredricks saw something else. He called the object "very consistent with debris from a fallen tree in the water." In the footage, he noted, it "very slowly bobs up and down." Neither the objects nor the skier react to each other, which the book took as a sign that the skier saw nothing alarming. Okanagan Lake, it has been noted, holds tens of thousands of submerged floating logs.

No one has accused DeMara of faking anything. The argument is over what his camera caught. Otters. A drifting tree. Or seven creatures moving together beneath the surface. Some Ogopogo witness lists file the footage under 1993, but the documented date is July 24, 1992.

The tapes themselves have never surfaced online, and no stills from them have turned up. DeMara's footage stands in a long line of Okanagan films. It also sits beside Walter and Sandi Tappan's 1988 Lake Champlain videotape, another case Radford and Nickell weighed in the same book. Each one leaves the same question on the water. What was moving out there?