Filmmakers Claim They Captured Images of Champ the Lake Monster in Upstate New York

Two filmmakers are claiming they captured images of Champ the Lake Monster, the legendary creature long rumored to be living in Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

Dubbed America’s Loch Ness Monster, Champ has long eluded searchers — until Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor spotted it while filming a children’s movie about the creature.

Tabor describes it as unlike any fish she’s ever seen. “It was like a skinny neck, and … the body got larger,” she told the Daily Mail. “It looked like the skinny neck was oscillating back and forth, as if it was grazing underwater.”

She only noticed Champ lurking behind their small boat when she was reviewing the footage two years after filming it. “My eyes were just popping out!” she says.

Rossi admits he was skeptical when Tabor first told him she’d spotted the creature, but when he watched the video, he was convinced it was Champ.

Sightings have been reported for centuries.

According to the report, one of the earliest dates to 1819, when a Captain Crum was aboard a scow on the lake when he spotted a 187-foot-long black monster with a head resembling a seahorse’s. He claimed it had three teeth, eyes that resembled a peeled onion and a white star on its forehead.

Then in 1873, a railroad crew claimed they saw the head of an “enormous serpent” bobbing in the water, The New York Post reported.

Since then, hundreds of other sightings have been reported.

Believers speculate Champ could be a plesiosaur, a long extinct marine reptile, or a zeuglodon, an ancestor of whales that lived millions of years ago, according to the Daily Mail report.