The Naitika or Ogopogo has been allegedly sighted by lots of people since the 19th century and interestingly reports of it go back to even before the Loch Ness monster. The description is a bit similar too.

THERE is nothing more intriguing and exciting than the modern-day possibility of an existing monster. It is sinister, it is nerve-racking and a heart-pounding mystery in real life. The name of our cryptid under scrutiny here sounds a bit light-hearted for a beast of gigantic proportions, but what’s in a name? As they say.

Nevertheless, we shall clear the part about the name first. It is from a 1924 English song called “The Ogo-Pogo: The Funny Fox Trot” by Cumberland Clark and Mark Strong. The fox trot, by the way, is a popular dance form done by two people. Why a serpent-like monster was given the name of a song is due to the fact that the album cover showed a strange creature with antennas, playing a banjo and wearing boots. So the huge beast residing in Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada, was given a modern name. The original, however, is ‘Naitaka’, meaning lake demon given to it by the Native American tribe called Okanakane.

It has been allegedly sighted by lots of people since the 19th century and interestingly reports of the Naitika or Ogopogo go back to even before the Loch Ness monster. The description is a bit similar too. Just like most sea serpents from folklore and legends, it has been described as being 40 to 50 feet long with a goat-like head.

Karl Shuker, a British crypotozoologist says it has many a hump and might be a ‘primitive species of serpentine whale’.

But for those who claim to have seen it, there isn’t anything like a whale about this beast. In 1926, the creature was seen by 30 cars of people at Okanagan Mission beach. Then in 1968 film footage by Art Folden, showed a long shape moving across the water and a computer analysis of the film showed that the object filmed was a three-dimensional and solid object. Could it really be a living, huge and thousands of years old prehistoric creature left over from the Ice Age?

Fossils of dinosaurs have been found in British Columbia and Okanagan Lake is said to have been a glacier 10,000 years ago. So could this large serpent be living inside the lake all this time? After all what do thousands of sightings of a strange creature reported since the 1800s mean? Is it a surviving species of the prehistoric plesiosaurus? Not easy to believe as they have been told to exist millions of years ago in the Jurassic period and went out with all the other such creatures during their mass extinction. The species were supposed to be meat-eating marine reptiles ranging from three to 30 metres.

Now we come to the legend. The mystery about the mysterious creature. The Naitika or ‘Lake demon’ also thought of, as ‘the sacred creature of the water’, was believed by the Natives to be a man who was possessed by a demon. When this man committed murder, the aboriginal gods punished him by sentencing him to live his existence in Okanagan Lake. They believe that this huge monster lives in an underwater cave in the stretch of water near Squally Point near Rattlesnake Island, a small island near the lake.

People who are interested in searching for the monster should remember that there are some specifics to look for. It is 15 to 50 feet long, one or two feet in diameter and is dark green in colour. Its head resembles a horse or a goat with a beard. The Ogopogo is a bit shy and moves at high speeds in the water, against the current. It has its own standing as being Canadas best-known lake monster and got noticed by the media in 1926, seven years before the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.

Roy W. Brown, editor of The Vancouver Sun wrote about the Ogopogo; ‘Too many reputable people have seen the monster to ignore the seriousness of actual facts.”

Maybe the name Ogopogo is a bit disrespectful for this amazing and fantastic creature that has endured so many changes in its world and eons of existence. Or maybe the monster is just a creature of fantasy only worth a song and a dance or another large species of marine life perhaps.