Alaska is a land of countless lakes, many of
them impressively large. Lake Iliamna, however, is like no
other. It might be the grandest physical feature in the United
States that most American citizens are completely unaware of.
Iliamna overhead (USG) and surface level views (Commons)
Fully eighty miles long and with a surface area
over a thousand square miles, Iliamna is approximately the size of the state of
Rhode Island. Iliamna is the seventh-largest body of fresh water in
the U.S., with a mean depth of 144 feet and a maximum depth greater than 900
feet. The lake is connected to Bristol Bay, sixty miles
southwest, by the Kvichak River, through which such marine mammals
as harbor seals and belugas can travel. Iliamna, in fact, supports a
resident population of harbor seals, along with a successful sport-fishing
industry.
The most intriguing thing about Lake Iliamna,
however, is the possibility it houses unknown animals of enormous
size. The lake’s mysterious denizens are nothing like the
classic long-necked “lake monsters” alleged to dwell in other bodies
of water. Instead, the animals reported from Iliamna look like
gigantic fish.
Reports
of something odd in Iliamna began with the indigenous tribes. The few hundred people living at the lake include a mix of cultures, with Aleut, Yup'ik, Tlingit, Dena'ina, and other inhabitants. No no one knows how long ago such stories first took root. None of these tirbes hunted the lake’s creatures, believed to be dangerous to
men fishing in small boats. While some early white settlers and
visitors reportedly saw the things, too, stories about Iliamna did not gain
wide circulation until the 1940s, when pilots began spotting strange creatures
from the air. The flyers’ descriptions generally matched the tales
of the Alaska Natives. The lake’s mystery inhabitants were most
often described as long, relatively slender animals, like fish or
whales, up to thirty feet in length.
In
1988, “Babe” Alsworth recounted his 1942 sighting in an interview with
cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. Alsworth, a bush pilot and fishing guide, saw a
school of animals well over ten feet long in a shallow part of the
lake. Alsworth described them as having fishlike tails and elongated
bodies and described the color as “dull aluminum.” Larry Rost, a survey pilot
for the U.S. government, saw a lone creature of the same type as he crossed the
lake at low altitude in 1945. Rost thought the animal was over
twenty feet long.
There
have been several attempts to find or catch Iliamna’s mystery
inhabitants. In the 1950s, sportsman Gil Paust and three companions
(one a fisherman named Bill Hammersly, who had been in Babe Alsworth’s plane in
1942 and shared in that sighting), tried to fish for the creatures. According
to Paust, something grabbed the moose meat used as bait and snapped the steel
cable it was hooked to. In 1959, oilman and cryptozoology enthusiast
Tom Slick hired Alsworth to conduct an aerial search of the lake, but nothing
was sighted. An expedition in 1966 also apparently met with no success, as no
results were announced. More recently, famed fisherman/TV host Jeremey Wade tried his luck without success.
In 1979, the Anchorage Daily News offered
$100,000 for tangible evidence of the Iliamna creatures. The reward
attracted both serious and eccentric researchers (one man reportedly played classical
music to lure the animals up). Apparently, there has never been a
well-financed expedition with sophisticated sonar and photographic gear.
According
to a 1988 article in Alaska magazine, a noteworthy (but
unnamed) witness was a state wildlife biologist. In 1963, this
official was flying over the lake alone when he spotted a creature which
appeared to be twenty-five to thirty feet long. In the ten minutes
it was under observation, the animal never came up for air. Other
flying witnesses mentioned in media accounts include a geologist who flew over
the lake with two companions in 1960, reportedly spotting four ten-foot fish,
and Tim LaPorte, who reported a sighting in 1977.
In LaPorte’s case, the veteran pilot and
air-service owner was near Pedro Bay, at the northeast end of the
lake. He was flying just a few hundred feet above a flat calm
surface. LaPorte and his two passengers, one a visiting Michigan
fish and game official, saw an animal lying still, its back just breaking the
surface. As the plane came closer, the creature made a “big arching
splash” and dove straight down. LaPorte still remembers watching a
large vertical tail moving in slow side-to-side sweeps as the animal
sounded. Comparing the object to a familiar type of eighteen-foot
boat seen from the same altitude, LaPorte and his companions estimated the
thing was twelve to fourteen feet long. LaPorte described the creature as
either dark gray or dark brown. LaPorte had been a passenger in a
different aircraft in 1968 when the other two individuals in the plane had a
very similar sighting. (In that incident, LaPorte, who was taking
flight instruction and sitting in the left seat, could not see the animal from
his side.)
Many sightings
have occurred near the villages of Iliamna and Pedro Bay. It
was off the latter town in 1988 that several witnesses, three in a boat and
others on shore, reported one of the creatures. In this case, it was
described as black. One witness thought she could see a fin on the back,
with a white stripe along it.
It
is important to note that Lake Iliamna today remains isolated, its shores
largely unpopulated. The largest village, Kakhonak, counts only 200
permanent residents. There is no highway to provide easy access to
(or from) the outside world. (There is a very dangerous portage road from Cook Inlet.) Sport fishermen and other summer
visitors come by boat or fly in to the area’s single airstrip. If
there are unusual creatures in the lake, it’s hardly surprising that a long
time can pass between good sightings.
A
common theory about the Lake Iliamna creatures (sometimes called “Illies,”
although that seems to be a modern media name, not a long-held tradition)
is that they are gigantic sturgeon. These could be either an
outsized population of a known type or an unknown species. Sturgeon
– large, prehistoric-looking fish, with armorlike scutes covering their backs
and a heritage dating back before the dinosaurs - match most descriptions from
Iliamna fairly well. Sometimes the match is
precise. Louise Wassillie, who watched a creature from her fishing
boat in 1989, said, “It’s only a fish. It was about twenty feet long
and had a long snout. Probably a sturgeon.” An earlier
witness named Eddie Behan told writer Kim Fahey of seeing a twenty-foot
spindle-shaped animal with a fish’s tail and rows of lumps on its back – a good
description of what a sturgeon that size would look like.
Biologist Pat Poe of the Fisheries Research
Institute (FRI) at the University of Washington, who has studied the salmon
populations in Iliamna and neighboring Lake Clark, once commented, “I’m sure
there’s a big fish. I think the lakes have a lot of interesting
secrets. We don’t know much about other resident fish in the
lake.” Warner Lew, a biologist with the FRI’s Alaska Salmon Program,
also said the lake seems a suitable habitat for large
sturgeon. Lew told me that several witnesses have told him of
sighting giant fish, but he has yet to see any fish larger than a four-foot
Northern pike in his twenty-four years of research visits to the lake.
There are nine species of sturgeon in North
America. The white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) is the
largest of these, and is the continent’s largest fresh-water fish. The record
claim for a white sturgeon was made for a fish caught in Canada’s Fraser River
in 1912. The sturgeon was twenty feet in length and weighed 1,800
pounds. A fish of 1,500 pounds was reported caught in 1928 in the Snake River
in the United States. An eleven-foot specimen weighing 900 pounds was found
dead on the shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington in 1987.
Sturgeon expert Don Larson, curator of the
Sturgeon Page Website, reports sturgeon over ten feet long are often caught in
the Fraser and Columbia Rivers. Larson comments, “Most biologists I’ve talked
to say that white sturgeon over twenty feet and 1800 pounds is highly
probable.”
White sturgeon are not known from Iliamna, but
have been found in other Alaskan lakes and in coastal waters as far north as
Cook Inlet. There is a single record of a catch in Bristol Bay,
which puts a migration to Iliamna within the bounds of
possibility. It’s also possible that white sturgeon became trapped
in the lake thousands of years ago, when the last glaciers receded, and have
developed in isolation. Jason Dye, a biologist for the Alaska Department of
Fish and Game’s Bristol Bay office, once said, “There’s never been any
documentation that anyone’s caught one in the lake, or seen one, as far as I
know. But that doesn’t mean they’re not in there.”
Sturgeon are bottom-feeders and would rarely be
seen near the surface, which fits the Iliamna phenomenon. The
appearance of white sturgeon – gray to brown-brown in color, with huge heads
and long cylindrical bodies – appears to match most Iliamna reports. (No one is
certain how the species got the name “white sturgeon,” although some genuinely
white specimens have been reported from salt water.)
It may be a distinct sturgeon population has
developed, distinguished from the known white sturgeon mainly by unusual
size. Whether this hypothetical type is different enough to be a new
species is unknown. There is plenty of food in Iliamna, where up to
twenty million sockeye salmon return to the lake from the sea every
year. (There is serious concern among conservationists that this
number is declining, and that the salmon run is being too heavily depleted by
legal and illegal fishing as the fish migrate via the
Kvichak.) There is also plenty of room. Iliamna has
fifteen times the volume of Loch Ness. At the same time, it must be
admitted there is no physical or film evidence for unknown creatures of any
kind.
A landlocked population of fish becoming larger
than their relatives which are anadromous (dividing their lives between fresh
and salt water) would be unusual. In most cases where a species has
become split between freshwater and anadromous populations, as with salmon, the
freshwater dwellers run smaller. However, this rule may not be valid
for Lake Iliamna, with its huge size and bountiful food supply.
Other candidates have been out forward. Wade initially suggested a Pacific
sleeper shark before setting on a white sturgeon. Others have also make shark suggestions. An episode of Missing in Alaska suggested
(seriously) a fish-like fantasy monster like nothing that ever
existed. (Among the interviewees was a "tribal elder" whose
tribe was never mentioned, a critical thing when putting a story in cultural
context.) Sightings in the present century are rare but certainly have not ceased. Many people have come to look for a creature, but no one has found it. Scientists Bruce Wright and Mark Stigar are out there looking as I write this.
Sturgeon? Monster?
Folklore? Or something completely different? Whatever is going on in
Lake Iliamna, it makes for one of the most unusual and intriguing mysteries in
the animal world. If any of the lake monster cases turns out
to involve a real creature of prodigious size, it is Iliamna, not the more
famous lakes in Canada and Scotland, where I would place my bet.
References
Anonymous. 1988. “The Iliamna
Lake Monster,” Alaska, January, p.17.
Alsworth,
Glen. 2000. Personal communication, November 2.
Coleman, Loren. 1999. Cryptozoology
A to Z. New York: Fireside.
Dihle, Bjorn. "Pride of Bristol Bay: Catching the Iliamna Lake Monster," October 29, 1990.
Fahey, Kim. 2003. Personal
communication, May 19.
Foley,
John. 1991. “Mystery monster tales keep Newhalen
residents on guard,” Anchorage Times, July 8.
Hendry, Andrew
P. 1996. “At the End of the Run,” Ocean Realm,
March/April, p.52.
International Game Fish Association, “World
Record Freshwater Fish,” http://www.schoolofflyfishing.com/resources/worldfreshrecords.htm.
LaPorte, Tim. 2000. Personal communication,
October 5.
Larson, Don. Sturgeon Page, http://www.worldstar.com/~dlarson/html/welcome.html.
Larson,
Don. 2000. Personal communication, January 31.
Lew, Warner. 2000. Personal
communications, September 25 and 26.
Mangiacopra,
Gary. 1992. “Theoretical Population Estimates of the
Large Aquatic Animals in Selected Freshwater Lakes of North America.” Academic
paper.
McKinney,
Debra. 1989. “Believe it or Not,” Anchorage Daily
News, April 14, p.H1.
Morgan, L. 1978. “A
Monster Mystery,” Alaska, January, p.8.
Snifka,
Lynne. 2004. “Monstrous Mysteries,” Alaska,
October.
River Monsters
Missing in Alaska: Swallowed by the Lake Dragon
Monsters and Mysteries in Alaska, 2010, a program I am credited on even though I was recuded to a minute or so (and they never sent me to the darn lake). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988725/
Additional
help: Chris Orrick, Ken Gerhard, Mary Andrew, Loren Coleman
