The Lake Vorota Monster: Viktor Tverdokhlebov and the Labynkyr Devil (1953)

Lake Labynkyr lies in the Oymyakon district of Yakutia, at 1,020 m. It is 14.3 km long and up to 75 m deep. Yakut and Evenk tradition speaks of a devil in these waters. It attacks reindeer and hunters. It is said to have eaten a child.

About 20 km away lies a smaller lake, Lake Vorota, on the Sordonnokh Plateau. It is nearly as deep, about 60 m. Seen from the air, it was later called an "unpleasant little spot" of "wild, blackened rocks".

30 July 1953. Viktor Tverdokhlebov headed a geological party of the East Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. With Boris Bashkatov, he watched from the plateau above Lake Vorota. Then something appeared on the water.

"The object was swimming, and quite close," Tverdokhlebov wrote. "It was something alive, some kind of animal." As it came nearer, a strange numbness took hold of them both. A dark-grey oval body rose just slightly above the water. Two symmetrical light patches stood out clearly, like an animal's eyes. Something like a stick stuck out of its body. "A fin, perhaps?" Below, a huge, massive body.

It moved in an arc along the lake. Then it turned towards the watchers. It came in heavy lunges, partly rising from the water, then submerging completely, raising waves. Later retellings put its length at about 10 m, with a tall fin on its back. Another compared it to the size of an orca.

The diary appeared in Vokrug Sveta, No. 2, 1961. Over time the Labynkyr Devil legend absorbed the event, and many retellings now place it on Lake Labynkyr itself. In a letter to N. V. Cherskii, Tverdokhlebov added that his party's workers had seen holes up to 0.5 m across in Labynkyr's ice.

In 1962, Moscow enthusiasts arrived with a purpose-built raft, scuba gear and watches from the shore. "We found no direct confirmation of the facts V. A. Tverdokhlebov reports," they wrote. Ichthyologist Fyodor Nikolaevich Kirillov spent two months there. "There are plenty of fish there," he said. Still, not enough to feed a "fierce predator". In 1963, according to Kosmopoisk, Bashkatov himself led an 18-person team.

In 1999, Kosmopoisk and Vadim Chernobrov made the first winter expedition. Their echosounder reportedly found sloping underwater passages and two vertical shafts at about 40 m. In 2012, Moscow State University biogeographer Ludmila Emeliyanova described sonar showing "several seriously big, underwater objects, bigger than a fish, bigger than even a group of fish". In March 2013, the Russian Geographical Society sent divers under the ice. Dmitry Shiller and Alexander Gubin reached 59.6 m. The largest animals they found measured about 1.2 m.

Kirillov concluded that Tverdokhlebov had seen a mirage, a trick of atmospheric refraction. Writers covering his expedition saw one themselves: "a narrow, glass-like strip stretched the whole length of the lake." Shiller later reported Arctic mirages, but no creature. Yury Gerasimov of the Institute of Freshwater Biology called the giant-pike idea "fantastic". Hydrogeologist Valentina Fominishna Shishkina pointed to wind funnels that raise sudden storms. Others proposed a giant burbot, a relict reptile or an amphibian.

No photograph survives from 1953. No track. No bone. Only a geologist's diary, and two men on a plateau above a dark lake. No one has accused them of inventing it. The Labynkyr Devil lives on, but its defining sighting happened on Lake Vorota.