Sandra Mansi's Photograph of Champ — Lake Champlain, Vermont (1977)

On July 5, 1977, Sandra Mansi was picnicking with her family on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain near St. Albans when she spotted what she described as a large, unknown animal surface in the lake approximately one hundred and fifty feet from shore. Mansi grabbed her Kodak Instamatic camera and captured a single photograph showing what appears to be a large, dark, plesiosaur-like head and neck rising from the lake's surface, with the Green Mountains visible in the background. The photograph was not published until 1981, when Mansi shared it with researchers. The image became the most famous piece of evidence for Champ — the legendary lake monster said to inhabit Lake Champlain, a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-mile-long lake straddling the borders of Vermont, New York, and Quebec. Analysis by optical physicist B. Roy Frieden of the University of Arizona concluded that the object in the photograph was a solid, three-dimensional figure between twenty-four and seventy-eight feet from the camera. The original negative was lost, limiting further analysis. Lake Champlain, up to four hundred feet deep in places, is one of the largest freshwater lakes in North America. More than three hundred sightings of an anomalous creature have been logged since Samuel de Champlain's 1609 report of a large serpentine creature.