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Alaska, a vast remote wilderness twice the size of Texas.

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There are dangerous, unpredictable forces at work here.

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In one of the most mysterious corners of the globe.

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A lot of things can kill you out here without even trying.

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This is a place hundreds of times more deadly than the Bermuda Triangle.

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Oh my God.

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Stories of alien abductions.

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I believe it was a UFO.

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The paranormal, vanishing airplanes and strange beasts.

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The Alaskan Bigfoot.

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He can rip you in half.

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These accounts are really widespread.

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It peaked out of the tree right there.

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Have hunted those who dare set foot here.

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In the last 30 years, 16,000 people have disappeared without a trace.

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More people have disappeared than the Bermuda Triangle.

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Two to three times the amount.

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Witnesses tell us their shocking stories.

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I was petrified.

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And we've gathered some of the world's leading experts in their field.

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I'm always after scientific evidence that can be independently corroborated.

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To try and unlock the mystery of the Alaska Triangle.

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Just like the Bermuda Triangle, the Alaska Triangle is a place of mysterious events and unexplained phenomena.

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And one of the strangest stories has emerged from the depths of this vast and isolated lake.

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Both outside experts and locals have been left asking the question,

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what exactly is it that lies beneath these waters?

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I was sitting there and all just dumbstruck of what the heck am I looking at?

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There's definitely something big down here.

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In Alaska, there are over 3,000 rivers and 3 million lakes.

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Most still unexplored.

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Local folklore tells of hidden channels slinking the waterways.

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And monstrous beasts slurking in the depths.

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We're not dealing with a mirage, a deluded individual.

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We're not dealing with mistaken identities.

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We've got something that needs explaining.

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The most terrifying creature of them all is said to live here in Lake Iliamna.

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And now, multiple eyewitnesses have stepped forward to suggest that this monster is no mere legend.

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At 77 miles long and 25 miles wide, Iliamna is the biggest lake in Alaska.

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It's the second biggest freshwater lake in the whole of the United States.

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It's also one of the hardest places to get to in the whole of the U.S.

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It's hundreds of miles from the nearest main road.

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When viewed from the air, the lake shaped like a giant fish.

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Could this be a clue to what lurks within?

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Cryptozoologist Cliff Berwickman, one of America's leading bigfoot investigators,

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now has his sights fixed on finding the monster of the lake.

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His first stop is the Lake Southern Shore, close to the village of Kokonok.

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I'm Cliff Berwickman, and I am in Kokonok, Alaska, on the shores of Lake Iliamna, Alaska's largest lake.

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In some places, this lake is over a thousand feet deep.

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There's no telling what could be swimming around in the bottom of this lake.

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Cliff is here to meet the latest eyewitness.

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It's none less than the borough manager, Nathan Hill.

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On this beach, one afternoon in 2017, Nathan was one of a handful of people at this very spot,

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who witnessed the monster out on the lake.

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So, Nathan, the reason I came up here is to investigate some of the stories about the creature that lives in the lake.

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What's your experience with the creature?

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It was a calm day, and as I looked out, and I saw something in the lake.

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And there was at least half a dozen people that had gathered around to see what was out there.

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And at that time, I had my cell phone out, and I was recording in case something was to surface.

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Probably somewhere between three and five hundred yards off the beach, there was something that made some pretty big wakes,

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and everybody there witnessed it, and I got it on a short video clip.

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Nathan hasn't posted his video online.

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In fact, this is the first time he's agreed to show it to any outsider.

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At first, it doesn't look as if there's anything to see, but then, towards the top left of the frame, something strange appears.

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No, look right there. Look at that. Right there.

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See it?

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What is that?

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There is?

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What is it?

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It looks like a giant sea serpent, with three humps breaking the surface.

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If Nathan's right about the distance, that would make just the visible part of this lake creature, 40 to 50 feet long.

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Wow.

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That's cool. That's really cool.

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That's great.

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The quality is poor, so we're going to send off the video for some expert analysis.

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Shortly after, Nathan's right about the distance.

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Really?

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Shortly after this sighting, Nathan's friend, Fanyal, had a monster experience of his own.

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He's a fisherman, and was out in his canoe when the creature's surface just yards from him.

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What did it look like?

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Like a giant snake creature.

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Uh-huh.

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It's wide as the canoe, and three to four times longer than the canoe, and black, leathery-looking kind of skin.

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It had like that arch where, you know, it didn't just go straight, it actually had like a little arch with it or something.

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Like a jaw.

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Like this, now it came out.

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An arched neck means this was no giant fish, and it didn't move like a fish either.

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Where it has like the head, a hump, and a hump, it would do its, like it was like that.

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I was sitting there in awe, just dumbstruck of what I'm, what the heck am I looking at?

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Fanyal's description does seem to match the monster that Nathan caught on video, a giant serpent-like creature with humps.

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It's a lamp.

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And from the safety of the shore, Fanyal took his own video.

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He managed to capture this glimpse of the creature just before it disappeared under the surface.

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Yeah, what is that?

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It's only in modern times that people around the lake have had phones and cameras, but stories of the creature go way back.

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The native people of the area have lived here for nearly 10,000 years.

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For them, the story of the lake monster is no fairy tale.

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It's part of their oral history.

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Raymond Wassily is a native elder.

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I heard stories from all my elders before me of how they sought and stories are the ones that tell the truth for the nomads, because they didn't know how to write it.

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As a young man, Raymond himself had a close-up encounter with the monster when he was out on the lake with his family.

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My dad was on the cabin looking at it. He said it's longer than the boat.

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And the boat, the boat was almost like 32-footer end to end.

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It looked like it had a hump.

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And then I couldn't judge it, but it looked like it had three on the way back to it.

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Then it kind of sloped and it had a tail.

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And the head looked like it could swallow you.

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Three humps, just like in the video filmed by Nathan.

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Anthropologist Robin Levine is an expert on the native folklore.

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As an outsider, she was always skeptical about these stories of a lake monster.

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That is, until one July day back in 2008.

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A colleague of mine and I were flying back into a fish camp where we'd been conducting research.

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And we were on our way down, flying over a bay. We're very close to landing.

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And I saw something in the shallows, something I hadn't seen before.

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At first I thought it were two seals twisting together.

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And then I realized, no, it was one creature.

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Robin's first thought was a beluga whale.

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Belugas do swim in the waters of Alaska, and the size was about right.

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But belugas are almost white in color. The creature Robin saw was dark.

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It was pebble-colored. It had a simuous movement about it, but it was definitely not an eel.

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I could see pictorial fins. I could see tail fins.

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As soon as we landed and we were taxing up to the shore, I asked the pilot,

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well, what was that that we saw just in the bay as we were descending?

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And he got really excited. What did you see? What did you see? And I told him.

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And he said, congratulations. You've seen the Eleon the Lake Monster.

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I was really surprised, but it was at that time then that I recall the stories I'd heard,

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the stories that I dismissed years earlier about something in the water.

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Kiddu Viduak Lichard is a native shaman who was brought up on tales of the Lake Monster.

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So I've heard stories like this ever since I was little. My mom would tell me them.

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And I've heard similar stories from elders. I've heard these stories growing up my whole life.

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Nobody knows how old the stories are, but they go back hundreds, if not thousands of years

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before Western civilization arrived in America. These stories are not new.

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People have been living on Eleon the Lake for generation upon generation.

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The local people would say since time immemorial.

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And the way they pass on their knowledge, local knowledge,

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is from one generation to the next, from elders to their youth.

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And these stories help people survive. These stories help people develop a unique understanding

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of their landscape and their resources.

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This is where stories of the Eleon the Lake Monster have also come from.

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People, while they call it a monster, may be something that was picked up from the more recent

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Euro-Western visitors when they came and they heard some of these stories.

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But I imagine that the local people have stories about the Eleon the Lake Monster

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that helps them understand their natural environment.

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Since I was a baby, I've heard stories of these strange creatures.

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But instead of being thought of as fake or maybe they're real,

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Native Americans tend to take them very literally like we know they're real.

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They're just a part of life. They're a part of the world.

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Native communities accept it as part of reality.

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And that's how I grew up.

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I want our stories and our knowledge to be taken seriously.

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They go way further back than when Westerners came here.

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The Native people knew about them for a long time.

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And they weren't considered a mythology for the Native people.

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They're just considered a fact of life.

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You respect them. You don't mess with them because they're powerful.

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Come on, take our word for it. We've been here for a long, long time.

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We know what's in our own backyard.

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All over the Alaska Triangle, there's talk of undiscovered species and strange animals.

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The best known is the monstrous beast said to live in Lake Iliamna, the state's biggest lake.

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But the mystery surrounding this lake go beyond what lurks beneath.

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School teacher Sarah Armstrong lives overlooking the lake.

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But she grew up most in fear of Iliamna's bigfoot creature, what the locals call the hairy man.

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I remember growing up as a little girl, we would tease each other when we were out late at night.

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Watch out for the hairy man. And it would kind of give you this spooky feeling and the chills.

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But it was as an adult that Sarah had a first-hand experience.

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Myself and two of my friends, we were going on a camping trip.

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And Ray, who's up in the bow, says, what the hell is that?

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And we're all looking in this direction and our mind are just wondering what it is we're seeing

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and trying to focus your eyes.

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And within just a blink of an eye, it was gone.

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It just disappeared and we were just kind of in awe and stunned for a moment.

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And then we look at each other like, is that what we think we just saw?

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Did we just see this?

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It just looked like a tall black figure.

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I didn't really feel scared. I was just maybe more curious about the whole thing and kind of amazed at what we saw is what we saw.

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Something I've heard about my whole life I actually witnessed.

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There have been sightings of other strange cryptids around the lake too, including a bird the size of a small plane said to resemble a prehistoric pterodactyl.

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But the greatest is the lake-illumina creature. If it exists, it would dwarf anything in Alaska.

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In fact, there's only one obvious comparison, the most famous lake monster in the world, the Loch Ness Monster.

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Does Lake Illumina in Alaska really have its own prehistoric monster?

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Dr. Robert Alley is a retired professor from the University of Alaska and an expert cryptozoologist.

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Everyone's heard of the Loch Ness Monster. Well, it stands to reason if there could be a monster in the Loch Ness, there could be monsters elsewhere too.

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There's definitely something there. There have been photos, sonograms, pictures that have caused waves around the world.

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Many researchers have hypothesized that Loch Ness could hold a relic population of plesiosaur, that is extinct marine reptile.

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The head of a plesiosaur would be an exact match for the monster spotted by Fanyal Kiesling when he was out in his canoe.

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It had like an arch, like a jaw.

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It was like the snout came out.

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And it's a good match for the traditional image of the Loch Ness Monster.

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And this Loch Ness photo from the 50s seems to show a huge water creature with humps, just like the monster seen by Nathan Hill.

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Every year, a million people visit Loch Ness in the hope of catching a glimpse of the mysterious beast.

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Compared to Loch Ness, Lake Iliamna is remote and isolated.

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Few tourists come here and only about 600 people live on its shores.

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The lake is also over 50 times bigger than Loch Ness.

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If finding the Loch Ness Monster is difficult, then what are the chances here?

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There's one man who thinks the monster may already have been found.

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We got a quick giveaway here. This Memorial Day weekend, Americans will take time to remember and honor those who died while serving our country.

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Local radio DJ Bob Bird has unearthed evidence that back in 1967, the monster of Lake Iliamna was not only found, but caught.

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In a plane like this, Chuck Crappershott, who was a missionary, Christian missionary, spotted from the air and radioed some friends.

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I've got this large fish swimming right underneath the surface.

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Word quickly spread around the airwaves that this could be the lake monster, and the idea was mooted to try to catch it.

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Somebody, with a sense of adventure, took a float plane, put on some probably very strong halibut line with large hooks, and cinching them to a cleat like that, tossed the meat into the water.

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Well, as he lollygagged on the floats itself, well, before too long his plane was being towed around.

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Beneath the surface, some giant creature with immense strength was pulling the plane across the water.

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Eventually, the monster broke free. On inspecting the damage, it was clear that it was well beyond the capabilities of any known lake creature.

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His plane was towed around. He looked at the hooks. They'd been straightened out, and maybe others had been bitten off.

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It would take unbelievable strength to straighten out the large tuna hooks and bite through the thick, stainless steel cables.

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The creature would have to be gigantic, as big as a dinosaur, perhaps.

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If we're talking about a plesisaur, a creature like this would absolutely have no problem towing a plane around on the surface of the lake.

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These creatures were huge, up to 50 feet. To them, a float plane on the surface of the lake would be like a toy.

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If there is a giant dinosaur-like creature hiding in the lake, then cryptozoologist Cliff Berwickman is determined to find it.

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He's decided to put all his trust in local fisherman Richard Walton.

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Thank you for letting me on your boat and showing me around a little bit. Safe to say, you know this lake pretty well.

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We've traveled this lake quite a bit over the course of a lifetime, you know, because it's kind of what you do here.

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This is your road system. This is how you get around all the different communities.

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Like Loch Ness, Lake Iliamna is exceptionally deep, and what lies beneath the surface is largely unexplored.

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There's anywhere a lake monster can lie hidden in the depths. It's here.

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But for Cliff, comparisons with Loch Ness go deeper than you might think.

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All throughout British Columbia and Alaska, there are literally hundreds of lakes that have reported lake monsters living in them.

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And what I find interesting about that is that the latitude is very similar to that of Scotland, where the Loch Ness monster is.

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Similarities of climate and water temperature may partially account for this.

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And in these colder parts, it's easier for creatures to remain hidden, as there's more wilderness and fewer people.

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But there are times when something strange is spotted, even in a populated area.

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In the Alaska Triangle, it's not inconceivable that strange, unknown creatures could be hiding in the forests or lurking in its waters.

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Even large new animals are still being discovered.

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In June 2016, this 24-foot whale washed up in Alaska and was found to be an entirely new species.

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Now, journalist and researcher Andrew Goff has pinpointed the Alaska Triangle as being ripe for new discoveries of river and lake creatures.

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It's really a perfect storm, a remote location with huge bodies of water.

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It's full of species that we've yet to identify or even begun to understand.

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So the natural reaction is to call them monsters.

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You can understand that, but really, they're just new species.

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And they probably have been here even longer than we have.

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It's the ideal spot for species to go unnoticed for hundreds of years.

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In November 2016, there was a sighting that created an online storm.

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This video appeared linked to the Alaska Bureau of Land Management.

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Within days, it racked up over a million views.

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The location? The China River Fairbanks, right in the middle of the Alaska Triangle.

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Where government worker and keen photographer Craig McCaw happens to be based.

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He was out on a routine job inspecting the river from this bridge.

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I was walking out on the bridge that you can see behind me there

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and taking some photos of ice beginning to form.

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This was in late October, which is early winter in Fairbanks,

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and took out my camera, pointed at this direction,

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and my attention was caught by movement in the river right beneath me.

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I looked down in the water and I did a total stop.

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When Craig looked down, he saw something extraordinary.

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So he got out his phone and took this video.

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Right below him was what looked like a giant serpent-like ice monster,

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strong enough to be swimming upstream in the fast-flowing current.

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So I'm looking at it now, right in the river, right over there.

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It's a little strange to see this thing swirling back and forth in the river.

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It's got a rough texture. You can see that it has ice on it,

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and a lot of the rest of it is obscured by the murky water.

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Close analysis of the video puts this strange creature at about 20 feet long,

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but that's just the visible part.

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There's no known animal in this river with the size anything like that.

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Send this shiver down my spine. I'd never seen anything like that.

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Is this an unknown species or a relic from prehistory?

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It's certainly true that prehistoric creatures do exist in these waters.

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These blood-sucking fish, known as lampreys,

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were around 200 million years before the dinosaurs.

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And they can still be found in Alaska, even here, in the middle of Fairbanks.

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In fact, in June 2015, bizarrely, they began falling onto the streets of the city.

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Fish literally started raining from the sky. How on earth does that happen?

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In Cardiff, in the United Kingdom, Dr. Rhys Jones is a senior lecturer in biosciences

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and an environmental researcher.

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When I say fish, I mean fish like this one here. This is a lamprey.

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Superficially, it looks a little bit like an eel,

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but actually, if I turn it around, have a look at the face on there.

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These are sharp tooth, foot-long, blood-sucking eel-like fishes.

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These are vampire fishes that attach themselves to other animals and suck their blood.

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Now, they're rarely seen, let alone caught,

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but here they are falling from the sky miles from any river.

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How can that be?

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It's hard to imagine what these ordinary people would have thought.

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They must have been terrified, mystified, and utterly freaked out.

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How the lamprey came to be falling from the sky has never been established.

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But could the serpent-like ice creature be a kind of giant prehistoric blood-sucking fish?

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When I started filming this object in the river, I didn't really know.

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I still don't know what it was.

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It moved like a giant fish. I have to say that the way it undulated in the current,

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and it kind of held its place.

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Generally speaking, what's in the Chino River is some species of freshwater fish,

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like Arctic graling, north of the Chino River.

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There's some mammals that pass through the river or a beaver that live in and around the river.

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But I can't think of anything that's more than three or four feet long,

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and what I saw was much, much larger than that.

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Nature still provides these mysteries from time to time that force you to stop

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and think, what am I looking at? How can I explain this?

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Whether a strange giant fish or not, could this creature be related to the monster of Lake Iliamna?

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The Chino River is a tributary to the mighty Yukon River,

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which connects many of the waterways and lakes of Alaska to the coast.

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And then from there, it's a short journey upriver to Lake Iliamna.

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This means that there's a ready network for these creatures to disperse throughout the triangle.

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But is there any evidence of more than one lake monster?

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The local radio station has been taking calls on the subject.

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Welcome back to the Birds Eye View on Lake Iliamna.

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Welcome back to the Birds Eye View on KSRM.

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Uh, Celtic.

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DJ Bob Bird has had one call that suggests the Lake Iliamna creature is not alone.

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We saw three,

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identical creatures.

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And these things were just, absolutely, he was going to have no idea what they could have been.

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Rounded, slightly rounded,

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long, darkish, blackish gray,

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is well over 60 feet.

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Increasingly, the calls to Bob's show aren't just about Lake Iliamna.

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Bob's many listeners have added to the evidence of monsters elsewhere in the region too.

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There's also similar sightings in other large lakes.

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Lake Clark, which feeds into Lake Iliamna, has its own legends.

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Basharov Lake, which is south of Iliamna, had a very credible sighting.

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Bob's now convinced that witnesses to the monster are genuine.

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We're not dealing with a mirage, a deluded individual.

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We're not dealing with mistaken identities.

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We've got something that needs explaining.

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Bob's own investigations have led him to what could be a secret government report on these lake monsters.

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As I understand it, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game kept once a file on the sightings

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to see what sort of consistency there might be in the reports.

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I don't know if that file exists anymore because as a journalist, two years ago,

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I asked them to find it for me and they didn't have it.

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I have no doubt there was once a file.

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What was in that file? We don't know.

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But the caller to Bob's show has agreed to tell his story on camera.

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These things were awful big and there was a lot of them.

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One clear afternoon in the late 90s, local businessman Gary Nielsen was out on the lake with his wife.

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My wife was looking over the side and she screams and she's on my side of the boat in my lap

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screaming at me to go faster so I just automatically hit the throttle fast forward.

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And as I looked back to where she was looking, there was these two heads.

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Probably about that long and about that wide and I was just the heads.

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And they were traveling like that and they were looking at us as we were going by.

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The heads were maybe two feet long, maybe longer, 16 to 18 inches wide.

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Triangular shaped, very sleek looking and the bodies were awful long

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but I couldn't tell the body length because I was too busy trying to get into the shallow water.

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These things were big.

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Gary's detailed description matches that of other witnesses and also that of the Loch Ness monster.

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For the scientists, multiple monsters is a given.

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If there's one monster, there has to be more than one.

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There has to be a breeding population. There can never be just one.

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When you have a biological population, you've got to have significant numbers for maintaining a gene pool.

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There's one particular aspect of the lake creatures that haunts Gary to this day.

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The eyes were so huge.

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They were just big, round.

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The best description is dead black eyes.

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Like they were made for deep water where there's less light.

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Huge eyes made for deep water could be a clue to how these monsters are connected to the triangle.

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There's an old native belief that the separate waterways and lakes are linked by underground channels.

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It's a story that Robin Levine has come across as a part of her work with the native people.

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One of the stories I heard when I was out there was that there's a possibility that the elders say that there may be an underwater passage,

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a tunnel from Iliumna Lake to the saltwater inlet.

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Could it really be possible that these links exist?

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Well, there's some firm science that suggests they do.

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And with access to the sea through large underwater passageways, any number of giant creatures could be in there.

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Bruce Wright is a former professor from the University of Alaska, and he's been researching the bed of the lake.

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It's so deep. It's at least 1200 feet, but nobody knows. Nobody's taken a rock tied to a string and dropped it down to the bottom.

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As well as being of unknown depth, the lake lies on top of unstable bedrock.

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It's a geologically active area. There probably are cracks down at the bottom of the lake.

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Kind of makes you wonder, well, maybe there's a link to the ocean through these things.

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From the coast, any number of creatures could navigate their way up into Lake Iliumna.

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For Gary Nielsen and his wife, spotting two lake monsters was just the start.

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As I was watching them, I saw all these other wakes all around and up in front.

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And some of the ripples were, or wakes, were like two feet high.

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Multiple wakes two feet high, they could only be caused by something massive moving in the water.

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We didn't bother to go out and try to see how big those big ones were, because we were busy trying to stay alive in shallow water.

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They wouldn't go in the shallow water for whatever reason.

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When I say shallow, my skiff draws about 14 inches with the motor down.

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I had my motor jilted up to stay in the shallow water, so I was probably in the flipperless water.

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I mean, I was literally scraping over the rocks where the seals were.

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And I didn't care if I'd dinged up my prop or anything, because I just did not want to be out there in the deep water with whatever the hell those things were.

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I neither did the seals.

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I had my rifles, I had two rifles, a .22 and a .06.

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And I could have got everyone on those seals if I wanted to, but I had no interest in the seals at that time.

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I just wanted to stay away from those creatures.

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I go into the shallow water just enough for my, so my kicker doesn't hit.

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Trying to avoid these fish.

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There's a little island there, and it's full of rocks.

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There's got to be a hundred seals up on the rocks, just to scare them off of us or whatever it was in the water.

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They would not go in the water.

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Their rivers, we could have reached out and touched them, because they would not go in the water.

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If they went and they come right back out on the rocks, because these fish were out there circling, just waiting for them to get into the water.

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And we were there by the island, and we couldn't stay there.

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There were these wakes between us and the mainland.

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So we waited until the wakes went by.

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We went into the mainland, into the shallow water, followed the beach for about three miles.

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There were no more wakes. We went to Pal Bay.

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But that's the scariest I've ever been when I saw something in the water.

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I don't really get scared.

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I crawl into a brush after a wounded animal, big wounded animal like bears and moose that are not happy.

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That's a different kind of fear.

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You know, you're scared, but you're aware, you're hunting.

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This was a different kind of fear. It was like, I can get the hell out of here kind of fear.

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You don't want to be here kind of fear.

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It wouldn't take much for them to use to jump up near us.

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They were that big.

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I'd been in extremely rough weather and a sinking skiff, where everything I had in the skiff washed overboard, except for me and the tank that my kicker was connected to.

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I'd been after wounded animals.

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They knew would probably kill me if they had a chance.

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I was scared, but I'm not that kind of scared.

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But there's another scientific question that needs answering.

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If the lake has a large population of giant prehistoric beasts, what are they feeding on?

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How are they surviving?

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The answer lies in the water.

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The answer lies in Alaska's abundant wildlife.

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Alaska has a really wide variety of marine animals because it's so productive up here.

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A lot of that's driven by the cleanliness of the waters off of Alaska, but also there's high oxygen levels.

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So we have good phytoplankton bloom and that energy drives this really rich, valuable set of organisms that live up here.

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And lots of fish.

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If a large unknown species was to exist anywhere, this would be the place.

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Food is plentiful.

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And one fish in particular provides a direct link to Loch Ness in Scotland.

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There's five million salmon that are entering this big lake, moving up into the rivers or spawning right along the shoreline.

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And the salmon really drive the terrestrial ecosystem.

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The energy from the salmon moves through the ecosystem via bears and eagles that eat the salmon and move those nutrients up into the ecosystem.

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In fact, if you go out and you look at the stable isotopes of certain atoms in the trees, you'll find out that they're mostly made of salmon.

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Like Loch Ness, because of the salmon, Lake Iliamna could sustain any number of fish eating plesiosaurus and multiple monsters would increase the danger out on the lake.

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It's a theory that Gary now holds to because of his own encounter.

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And there's old stories about that that I never ever believed from way back when of them pulling people out of kayaks or boats even.

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I never believed until that moment.

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Out on the lake, cryptozoologist Cliff Berwickman is determined to investigate what's going on beneath the surface.

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If there was just one lake creature, it could be anywhere.

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But multiple creatures would significantly increase his chance of seeing something.

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And the boat's sonar can detect anything big moving beneath them.

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A lot of fishermen rely on tools like this, you know, for their livelihood, you know, to find big schools of fish for the same nets and all that stuff.

421
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But this would also be a very effective tool to see any large animal under the surface too, not just smaller fish, but like something large like one of these lake creatures.

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Mysterious shapes pass by beneath them, but it's impossible to identify what they are.

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Is this a plesiosaur? Head up, swimming deep beneath them.

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It's something moving across the screen.

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That's a big one, whatever it is.

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The best image Cliff has is the video taken by Nathan Hill, the local borough manager.

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It's this video we're keen to have analyzed, and we're showing it to Dr. Alley.

428
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:43,000
I'm looking here at a video of Lake Ilieumid, and we can actually see three objects above the water that appear to be curved and not linear like a wave would be.

429
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:57,000
So it's suggestive of a biological creature, and in fact, if you had to compare it with something, with any one thing, you'd want to compare it with those three hump little statues that you see in the water.

430
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:04,000
There's a picture of them in the gift shops at Loch Ness showing head, middle, bump, one, two, three.

431
00:43:04,000 --> 00:43:11,000
And you know you don't have schools of porpoise jumping in Lake Ilieumid, and a stelfel of three sturgeon are going to arise.

432
00:43:11,000 --> 00:43:21,000
What this suggests is something that's swimming in the manner, not of a reptile or a fish with a lateral undulation or amphibian, but rather a mammal.

433
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:24,000
This is a tremendously exciting thing to watch.

434
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:35,000
Possibly unidentified species or fossil mammals that we think are extinct may actually still be living trapped in fresh water.

435
00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:42,000
It would suggest just as equally aplesiast are. So there are those who say it's a mammal, there are those who say it's no, it's got to be a reptile.

436
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:47,000
We know it's got to be something, something's in there, but what is it?

437
00:43:48,000 --> 00:43:55,000
Out on the lake, Cliff and Richard find no conclusive evidence.

438
00:43:55,000 --> 00:44:01,000
Considering the size of the task in hand, this is no great surprise.

439
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:10,000
According to scientists, even with a large number of lake monsters, sightings could still remain very rare.

440
00:44:11,000 --> 00:44:27,000
If you have salty water at the bottom of the lake that is oxygenated by some geological phenomena, you could have some really unusual animals living down there that could stay down there, be inactive.

441
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:33,000
And then when the salmon show up, go eat your 5,000 pounds of salmon and then just go back down there.

442
00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:40,000
For those who've seen the monster, an unknown species certainly fits the bill.

443
00:44:40,000 --> 00:44:48,000
It's easy to dismiss what we call myths, what we call legends, until you've actually witnessed it yourself.

444
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:57,000
And then you realize that what people might refer to as a myth, what people might refer to as a legend, is actually local knowledge.

445
00:44:58,000 --> 00:45:08,000
What I saw was perhaps its own unique type of species, as yet undiscovered.

446
00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:20,000
At first I wasn't convinced. I'm pretty skeptical scientists. I like to hold in my hand what we're talking about.

447
00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:27,000
But it's hard to talk to anybody out there that hasn't interacted with this animal or seen it.

448
00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:32,000
You talk to all these people and it's just convincing there's something out there.

449
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:41,000
We have so many more questions to answer. And that's the wonder of Alaska.

450
00:45:43,000 --> 00:45:48,000
Be aware. A lot of things can kill you out here without even trying.