Kanas Lake "Lake Monsters" Filmed by Beijing Tourists near Sandaowan (2005)

Kanas Lake lies in the Kanas Nature Reserve, in Burqin County, Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang. Its lake monsters were talked about long before 2005. In 1980, forest ranger Jin Gang reported a red object more than 15 metres long. In 1985, a team from Xinjiang University saw large red fish in the lake. The sightings went on, and in 2004 Fang Wei and her husband said they saw four "lake monsters".

June 7, 2005. Afternoon. A tour boat carrying seven tourists from Beijing stopped near Sandaowan, the Third Bay, so its passengers could take photos. Few people were touring the lake that day. Theirs was the only boat on the water.

Then the lake moved. About 200 metres from the boat, "they suddenly spotted two dark objects, very large in size, springing out of the water, breaking a wave one meter high." Each looked about 10 metres long, and they travelled one behind the other in fish-like leaps. Then they swam quickly west to east toward the middle of the lake. Behind them, the surface carried a wake like a speedboat's.

The tourists raised their video camera and filmed. The objects "headed swiftly towards the middle of the lake and disappeared from sight in about two minutes." The surface soon went calm.

A 2009 compilation on weather.com.cn tells it in another order. The wave came first, with spray that looked more than 20 metres long. Then a single large shape moved underwater in the same direction. Only then did it show as two objects, one behind the other. The same source names the tourist behind the camera as Li Xiaoling, though no 2005 report gives a name.

Local authorities began talks with the tourists to copy their tape. On June 24, CCTV gave the case an episode of Xinwen Huiketing, titled "Major new discovery about the Kanas 'lake monster'". China Daily reported that a diving team would search the lake in July, at a cost of 1.5 million yuan. Later reports described an expedition from August 12, with ecological experts and volunteers asking how many taimen live in the lake, how big the largest grows, and whether they took missing livestock. No results were published. The original tape has not surfaced online.

The usual answer is a fish. Yuan Guoying, linked to the Xinjiang Ecological Society, said the "monster" was probably a large Hucho taimen, a freshwater salmon. Xinjiang University research in the 1980s had pointed the same way, and a 1987 team reported taimen 3 to 4 metres long. But taimen normally grow to about 2 metres. In 1988, Ren Mulian of the Heilongjiang River Fisheries Research Institute argued that the lake was too small and cold to support fish of the reported size.

A 2007 CCTV documentary filmed a taimen of about 3 metres. Some online commentators suspect the scenic area of encouraging sightings to draw tourists. No one has made a specific hoax claim against the 2005 tape.

New videos from Kanas followed in 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018 and 2022. Yet in 2009, weather.com.cn still called the 2005 film the only time an unidentified object at Kanas had been filmed at close range. Two shapes, ten metres each, two minutes. Then calm water, and a question the lake has kept to itself.