Lake Khaiyr Monster

An expedition from Moscow University, surveying the mineral deposits of eastern Siberia from June to October 1964, paused at Lake Khaiyr to check out rumors of a resident monster. According to a Komsomolskaya Pravda article written by G. Rokosuev, deputy leader of the team, biologist N. Gladkikh "literally ran into it quite unexpectedly." Rokosuev explained:

Here is how it happened. Gladkikh went out to the lake to draw water and saw a creature that had crawled out onto the shore, apparently to eat the grass-a small head on a long gleaming neck, a huge body covered with a jet-black skin, a vertical fin along the spine. 

Greatly alarmed, Gladkikh hurried back to the team's base with his news. Members of the unit, arming themselves with cameras and rifles, rushed down to the lakeshore. But the monster was gone; nothing remained of its passage but trampled grass and a slight ripple on the surface of the water. Quickly, Gladkikh made a sketch of what he had seen, little knowing that his monster would have looked remarkablv familiar to witnesses of the creature in Loch Ness.
 

Any doubts about Gladkikh's credibility vanished when the creature reappeared and was seen by the leader of the expedition and several team members as well. Wrote Rokosuev: 

"Suddenly a head appeared in the centre of the lake, then a dorsal fin. The creature beat the water with its long tail, producing waves on the lake. You can imagine our astonishment when we saw with our own eyes that the stories were true".

(Peter Costello, In Search of Lake Monsters , pp.224-25; Tim Dinsdale, Monster Hunt , pp.36-38)

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