Three Manipogos seen by seventeen strangers at Toutes Aides, Lake Manitoba (1960)

Lake Manitoba lies northwest of Winnipeg. Its northwestern corner, around Toutes Aides, has long been a frequent hotspot for sightings. Locals spoke of a creature in the water as far back as the 1930s. By the summer of 1960 they had a name for it. Manipogo, after Manitoba and the famous Ogopogo.

That July, the lake made the news. Around 20 people reported seeing the creature over a single weekend, a sighting tied to a picnic on Sunday, July 24. They described something about 10 feet long, with humps every 2 to 3 feet, black on top and white underneath. The story reached The Times in London.

Then came August 10, 1960. Near Toutes Aides, a community 245 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, a group watched from the shore. Seventeen witnesses in all. Tom Locke and 16 others. They were reportedly strangers to one another.

They saw three creatures, not one. Three, swimming together. In George Eberhart's summary, they looked like huge, dark-brown snakes. Later retellings add humps showing above the surface as the animals moved parallel to the shore, and all three diving at the same time. Nothing was photographed, and no account records how long it lasted.

Locke is the only witness named. Accounts call them a land inspector in charge of planning the provincial government's program for public playgrounds and recreational parks, or a provincial land surveyor. Locke is widely credited with coining the name Manipogo. In 1961 a new park on the northwest shore was given it. Manipogo Provincial Park.

The timeline is untidy. The Times item of July 30, 1960 already reports locals calling the creature Manipogo, eleven days before the August sighting. Some lists date the name to 1957. Locke may have coined it earlier, or made it official through the park.

The summer's reports drew a scientist. Dr. James A. McLeod, professor of zoology at the University of Manitoba, travelled to Lake Winnipegosis to look into the July sighting. Siggi Oliver of the provincial Fish and Game Department also looked into the reports. McLeod was sceptical. Still, he would not rule out a surviving prehistoric animal, and he pointed to the coelacanth.

His 1960 search came up empty, and in 1961 he tried again. A breeding population, he reasoned, would leave carcasses and bones. He searched for remains and found none. The press followed, from the Winnipeg Free Press to Maclean's and the Calgary Herald. No official finding ever addressed the seventeen witnesses of August 10.

The debate that followed offered familiar candidates. Swimming moose are dark brown, carry a shoulder hump, and leave a wake that can read as a long body. Large, long-lived lake sturgeon, floating logs, driftwood and river otters swimming in a line have all been proposed. Waldemar Lehn argued in Science in 1979 that refraction from temperature inversions can turn ordinary objects into lake monsters. None of these has been tied to this particular sighting.

Manipogo outlived the searches, and in August 1962 two fishermen photographed a black, snake-like shape on the lake. A 1997 story claimed one had been shot, and it was later called a hoax. Writers including Chris Rutkowski, John Kirk and Eberhart kept the case alive, and Northern Mysteries gave it an episode in 2006. St. Laurent still holds a Manipogo Festival each March. At the heart of it all are seventeen strangers on a shoreline, watching three shapes in the water.