Lake Iliamna: My Favorite Natural Mystery

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