I was looking for the telltale bulge in the water, a head, a hump, or a sinuous tail. I’d been watching some very persuasive amateur videos of something very large, very energetic, and very close to the cameras of excited tourists. But Nessie didn’t pop up for us, and we were forced to console ourselves with the historic ruins of Urquhart Castle, high above the loch

Now, some years later, comes news of another sighting of a mysterious creature supposedly living in Lake Champlain. Eric Olsen of Burlington, out for a sunrise stroll along the shore of the lake, was filming the tranquil scene with his cell phone, when out of the corner of his eye he spotted a movement. Something was swimming from his left to right in the water just offshore. His two-minute video of the something shows what appears to be a large head occasionally lifting above the surface, with a long body behind it surfacing now and then when the head dips briefly. The shape is quite reminiscent of the figurehead on Hagar the Horrible’s Viking longship. The creature moves slowly toward the shade of trees along the shore, as if planning a landing; but as it nears the shore, the video, frustratingly, ends.

Predictably, the brief clip has attracted many thousands of viewers to YouTube, and probably almost as many reactions. True believers consider it evidence that “Champ” does exist; skeptics pooh-pooh it as a hoax (scuba diver underwater towing a mockup), a Photoshop creation, or a deer or moose swimming toward shore; others are intrigued by the possibilities, remain noncommittal, and are ready to be convinced. The reactions remind me of nothing else so much as the variety of human responses to alleged religious revelation. Champ is a Rorschach test.

Lake Champlain, as most of us know already, was fairly recently an arm of a post-glacial sea that, as the surrounding land rose after the ice sheets retreated, was gradually landlocked. The lake currently discharges northward through the Richelieu River into the St, Lawrence; but since the land at the northern end is rising faster than that at its southern, a tiny bit more tilt will cause it to discharge through the Hudson River. That switch is a long way off yet in human terms, and will at the time it occurs, spark much debate about status quo, change, and engineering possibilities. Be that as it may, we know that the skeleton of a beluga whale was once found in Charlotte by workers building the rail line between Rutland and Burlington. None of this is meant to argue for Champ’s alleged presence in the lake, except to suggest that the possibility exists.

But, really, couldn’t we find a better name than Champ, and a more dignified depiction than the cartoonish figures we see everywhere – a grinning, high-fiving, finned amalgamation of dragon and Tyrannosaurus rex? If some creature really has survived in Champlain’s chilly depths for millions of years, its image deserves better treatment than we’ve been giving it.

Mysterious creatures whose existence has not been proven are universal. Well, not quite universal; it’s only where human beings live on the edge of the unknown or inscrutable that they seem to crop up. People who study these phenomena – though it’s difficult to understand how you can study a biological entity whose existence cannot be verified – are called cryptozoologists, and there’s some disagreement among mainstream scientists about their credibility. Among the credulous, it hardly matters

Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, is popular among many folks, as are Sasquatch and Bigfoot, supposed to roam the wilds of western North America. Photos of these creatures are invariably grainy and indistinct, as are the oral descriptions of the witnesses who claim to have seen the creatures themselves. Two North Georgia men caused some excitement recently when they claimed to have preserved in a freezer a genuine Bigfoot corpse that they had found far from its normal haunts. Several experts concurred that the excitement was warranted, and the various media had plenty of filler material for several days. The “corpse,” when thawed, was revealed to be a dummy in a black rubber suit. And it wasn’t the only dummy in the room.

The list goes on almost forever: from river monsters in the Amazon Basin to a serpentine monster named Ogopogo in British Columbia’s Lake Okanagan, to the Frogman, a giant homicidal creature with the lower body of a frog and the upper body of an Irishman, who haunts the coldwater swamps of far northern New York State. A few surprisingly solid citizens have solemnly declared to have been abducted, educated, measured, and released by aliens in hovering space vehicles. Many of us, apparently, desperately wish to know, or at least believe in, what cannot be, or at least is not yet, known It seems pathetic in a way; yet our imagination is what separates us from our relatives on the family tree. As for me, I don’t expect ever to see incontrovertible evidence of Champ’s existence, but I can’t help looking over Mother’s shoulder whenever we cross the lake.