Getting to the bottom of a mystery

"Lake Monsters of the North" is an episode of "MonsterQuest", a never-ending "scientific" series on unknown animals and paranormal creatures originally aired on History Channel.

According to local legend, Lake Crescent at Newfoundland in Canada is the home of a lake monster nicknamed Cressie. "Lake Monsters of the North" features several teams of researchers attempting to get to the bottom of the mystery (pun intended).

Perennial skeptic Joe Nickell fails (for once) to trick the eye-witnesses into misjudging the size of a log in the water, while the MonsterQuest investigators fail (as usual) in finding a monster. The best they can come up with this time is a swimming beaver!

That being said, Cressie is nevertheless more believable than other lake monsters, since it supposedly looks like a gigantic eel. Some eels are very large, and could conceivably come into the fresh water lakes of Canada from the sea. One biologist speculates that perhaps a sterile conger eel might become substantially larger than the fertile variety, since it doesn't need to dispense with any energy for reproduction.

Most episodes of "MonsterQuest" are available on DVD collections or even at Youtube, so you don't really have to invest in this single-episode DVDs, which is unavailable anyway.

Personally, I consider "MonsterQuest" to be quite boring and dragging (pun intended again), but if you are a crypto-zoology geek, you might find this particular episode somewhat interesting. I therefore give it three stars.