Champ and Sandra: The Story of the 1977 Mansi Photo

 Note that some of this text is adapted from an earlier writing of mine, published elsewhere on the internet.

The 70s and 80s were a golden age of cryptozoology, something that is unlikely to be ever replicated again. The notion that these animals of folklore could still be existing in some remote tropical forest or mountain range was actually getting a fair amount of press, not just from the mainstream media but from a few academics as well. The superstars of the art of researching “hidden animals”, Tim Dinsdale, John Green, Bernard Heuvelmans, Grover Krantz, Roy Mackal, and John R. Napier were all active, bitten by that wonderful and childlike belief that monsters do exist not just in our imaginations.

“Yes Virginia, there is a Loch Ness Monster and we’ll find him any day now!”

Those hopeful days are long gone. The cryptids were all no-shows, so society had no choice other than to stop daydreaming and face the unfantastic reality of it all. But it’s certainly worth it to look back at the culture of a bygone era, to continue to tell the stories of sightings of lake monsters. Cryptozoology was and still is, an important part of mankind’s cultural identity as all that sold-out Bigfoot merchandise can demonstrate to you.

For today’s article, we’ll be looking at one of the most famous cryptozoological encounters: Sandra Mansi’s photographed encounter with “Champ”.

Lake Champlain is a large natural lake that’s found where Vermont, New York, and Quebec meet. It’s in a fairly rural and undeveloped part of the country but remains a very popular vacation destination to enjoy various recreational activities. Many an upstate New Yorker owns a nice house on the coast, the most famous resident shall always remain Champ, the New England Nessie. The lake monster has been sighted hundreds of times over the centuries, but Mansi’s encounter remains perhaps the most famous because we actually have evidence that something was seen on that clear summer day.

The uncropped photograph

The photo was taken on July 5, 1977, by Sandra Mansi of Bristol, Connecticut, who was on a summer holiday in Vermont. Mansi claims that at a family picnic on the lake’s shoreline she saw a large long-necked animal surface, with her fiancé and two young children also being eyewitnesses. The object stayed floating at the surface for five minutes, around 45 meters from the shore before it sank back underwater. Mansi took a single picture of the creature during this time; she approximated that it was 4 meters long, very large for an animal living in a lake. She also claims that the animal didn’t seem to react to the sounds the family was making as they observed it. Despite the very unusual encounter, the family did not discuss the event with any scientific authority for several years after the fact.

Mansi with her famous photo

Mansi kept the photograph pinned to a noticeboard in the family home and her children would invite their friends to come and gawk at it. Word of mouth very slowly trickled out. By 1979 a few curious cryptozoologists, those being George Zug and Joseph Zarzynski, heard rumors of a woman who owned a unique photo of Champ. Nautical expert Philip Reines also became aware. These parties tracked Mansi down and were impressed with what they saw.

The photo was still unknown to the wider public at this point, causing controversy among the small group of people “in the know”. Reines was in possession of it, but Zarzynski and Mansi wanted it back so as they could go to the media. Reines had urged caution in his research and was in no rush to get press attention, reportedly he felt like Zarzynski had betrayed him. “[Zarzynski]” had become obsessed with the idea of being a lake monster celebrity,” wrote Reines “and the photo was his best opportunity to achieve it.” In November 1980, the Mansi home was broken into, and some in the “inner circle” feared that the culprits had been after the photo.

In 1981, the press found out about the Mansi Photo. A swarm of media attention grew around it and it appeared in major publications including Time, Life, and The New York Times. Mansi got the photo copyrighted around this point.

A handful of naturalists took interest in the photo, among them “Roy Mackal, professor of biology at the University of Chicago, and George Zug, a zoologist from the Smithsonian Institution.” An explosion of dozens of Champ sightings occurred in the early 1980s in the aftermath of the publication, no doubt the result of a bandwagon effect.

Mackal was a founder of the International Society of Cryptozoology. He had a rather typical career as a biologist until he got Loch Ness mania in 1965. An interesting fact is that Mackal was the inspiration for the cryptid hunting villain in the oft-forgotten Disney film Baby: Secret of The Lost Legend (1985). Mackal’s vocal interest in the notion of surviving sauropods in the Congo largely brought the legends of the mokele-mbembe to the west. Mackal thought that the Mansi photograph was of “'some kind of rare, elusive mammal, probably related to the zeuglodon, which was one episode in the evolution of the whale,” as he explained in a 1981 New York Times Article. ''I've looked at the evidence and I'm convinced that the animals are there… They are seagoing, but occasionally come into fresh water following fish, most often salmon. This picture is genuine in all respects and depicts one of these animals.'' It must be noted here that Mackal did not specialize in cetology, it seems that he was projecting one of his pet theories onto the photo.

Roy Mackal thought that Champ was a zeuglodon. A very interesting figure, I'd pay to read a good biography about Mackal's life and theories.

One contentious issue has been the lack of negatives, specifically what happened to them. Mansi, who died in 2018, was inconsistent on this issue. In some statements, she said that they were simply misplaced, on others she claimed to have deliberately destroyed them. Which is it and why two different stories?

Also concerning is the fact that the exact location the photo was taken on the lake remains unknown. The family was unhelpful in providing this information to researchers. Cryptozoologist Joseph Zarzynski had the family go on a trip in July 1980 to show him the shooting site, but according to him “the Mansis did not look for the site”. Zarzynski claimed that the family said that rain prevented them from doing this, yet metrological records show no rain on the days they were on their 1980 trip. Sandra Mansi was inconsistent on this inability to pinpoint the location. Sometimes she claimed that she had no way of recalling where the site was, yet other statements had her saying that she was deliberately keeping this crucial information a secret. Robert E. Bartholomew writing in the Skeptical Inquirer found it troubling that:

“Even with the publicity surrounding the publication of the photo in the New York Times, no one has stepped forward to say they could recognize the stretch of shoreline where the picture was supposedly snapped.”

Cryptozoologists who pushed the animal identification have a number of theories on what species could be in the photo. There have been guesses of it being a plesiosaur, a whale, a turtle, a giant amphibian, or a sauropod. None of these proposals are very plausible if you are knowledgeable about animal life, a plesiosaur for example could likely never turn its neck in the very awkward angle that it appears to be doing in the photo. I've also seen suggestions that it's a human swimmer and that the "neck" is an arm. 

Many claim that Mansi overestimated the size of the object in the water. Ben Radford and Joe Nickell, authors of the book Lake Monster Mysteries, visited Lake Champlain and took mock photographs in the water. They concluded that the object was only 2 meters long, compared to Mansi’s estimate of 4 meters. The pair also judged that the object was probably no animal, but rather a piece of driftwood that rose to the surface before resubmerging. One could see how the Mansis could mistake an odd-looking piece of wood for an animal from far away, especially if it abruptly broke the surface before re-sinking before them. The photo then would be nothing more than pareidolia aided by the angle from which the picture was taken.

I’m inclined to agree with this. The Mansi photo most likely is not any actual proof of a prehistoric monster, just a strange case of mistaken identity, one powerful enough to have fooled many people.

In the years before her passing, Mansi appeared in a number of television programs discussing the photo, including Unsolved Mysteries, Weird Travels, Weird U.S., Monsterquest, and (sigh) Ancient Aliens. Today the photograph is kept on display at ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, a natural history museum in Burlington, Vermont. By all accounts, ECHO seems to be a fine institution devoted to educating on and conserving the lake’s delicate ecosystem. I suppose that if Champ’s candid snapshot leads some wide-eyed kids down a direction into caring about the environment, then ultimately all of this can only be said to be for the greater good.