The children were playing in the lake. While Anthony Mansi went back to the car, Sandra Mansi kept an eye on the children. What she described as "turbulence" in the water made her look more closely, and a huge creature with a small head, long neck, and humped back surfaced in the lake.

When Anthony returned, he made the children get out of the water and all retreated back up the six foot lake bank, but not before Sandra took an Instamatic photograph.

They later reported the whole sighting lasted six or seven minutes, until the monster was possibly startled by an approaching motorboat. When the picture came out, the Mansi's simply put it in the family album, lost the negative, and feared talking about it until a friend persuaded them to show it to Champ Investigator Joseph Zarzynski.

The Mansi account remains the most detailed encounter with Champ, or indeed, any lake monster. As you can see above, it is more plausible looking than the famous fake picture of the Loch Ness monster.

John Kirk's book, In the Domain of the Lake Monsters, writes that "The monster of Lake Champlain . . . has the distinction of being the only lake monster of whom there is a reasonably clear photograph. It . . . is extremely good evidence of an unidentified lake-dwelling animal" (Kirk 1998, 133).

Joe Zarzynski, author of Champ: Beyond the Legend (1984), considers the photo "the best single piece of evidence on Champ."

Jerome Clark, a well respected paranormal investigator, writes in his Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Physical Phenomena, "By any standard the Mansi photograph remains a genuine mystery and a serious obstacle to any effort to reduce the Champ phenomenon to mundane causes." (Clark 1993, 67).

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Champ Science

In 1984, the Spirit of Ethan Allen, an excursion boat which takes many trips across the lake, had aboard the captain and at least 80 passengers when Champ made another appearance.

The captain described a dark object about 25 feet long and three feet wide that paralleled the boat, its ''three or four humps'' causing a wake, until it was disturbed by an approaching speedboat.

''Then it turned 90 degrees to the left and dove, and the wake stopped,'' he said, ''and that's what convinced me I saw something. As a [former] airline pilot, I'm trained to be observant, and I know what I saw.''

In 1981, a conference focusing on the existence of the aquatic reptile was held in Port Henry, New York, where Champ had long been protected by law.

New evidence offered to prove Champ's existence now includes video and sonar findings.

No one knows what the future will hold for Champ.