OGOPOGO - Canada's Lake MONSTER

The origins of the monster

Ogopogo 2 Lake Okanagan Ogopogo Monster.
Photo by Dan Basaraba

Indian legend has it that the large lake creature, Ogopogo, was originally a demon possessed man who had murdered a well known and respected local man named "Old Kan-He-Kan." In memory of this man, his people named Our beautiful lake "Okanagan." To pay for his sins, the Indian gods changed the murderer into a lake serpent so he would forever be at the scene of his crime and suffer eternal remorse. The creature's name became "N'ha-A-Itk" which roughly translates into sacred creature of the water, water god or lake demon.

His mind was full of dark thoughts and the demons spoke to him. His wild eyes and words frightened his people, and he became an outcast, shunned by all. One day in a fury of rage and pain, he attacked old Kan-He-Kan, a local wise man. The demon-possessed man killed the venerable sage on the shores of a beautiful lake near his home, and then ran away, afraid of what the people would do to him when they found out.

Daniel Tammet - The Man with the INCREDIBLE BRAIN

Daniel Tammet

British high-functioning autistic savant, Daniel Paul Tammet is gifted with a facility for mathematical calculations, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy and has been "studied repeatedly" by researchers in Britain and the United States. He was the subject of several peer-reviewed scientific papers. Professor Allan Snyder at the Australian National University has said of Tammet: "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can describe what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the 'Rosetta Stone'."

His 2006 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, about his life with high-functioning autism and savant syndrome, was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association. Tammet's second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best selling books of 2009. Thinking in Numbers, Tammet's third book, was published by Hodder in the UK on 16 August 2012, and by Little, Brown in the United States and Canada on 30 July 2013. His books have been published in 20 languages. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2012.