Lake Thunderbird

I, I fish for catfish sometimes, but bass fisherman.

I mean, here lately I've been going to Lake Thunderbird.

They put some hybrids in there five years ago.

Now this is the plug for y'all fishermen.

A world away from the salty coastlines here in New England, this is a story that defies all scientific logic, which is precisely what makes it so compelling.

The so-called killer octopus is said to inhabit several of Oklahoma's large reservoirs, particularly Lake Thunderbird and Lake Tenkiller.

It's described as being the size of a horse with the reddish-brown skin and powerful grasping tentacles of a giant Pacific octopus.

This is no gentle giant.

The details of Glenda Peterson's 1997 disappearance are few and far between, and with the passage of time, those details become harder and harder to come by.

On July 4th, 1997, 40-year-old Glenda Jean Peterson spent the day celebrating at Lake Thunderbird in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with her 16-year-old daughter.

Glenda had just been through a rough divorce from her husband of 15 years, and she was doing everything she could to make the Fourth of July a fun family day for her daughter.

At the time, Glenda had her right leg in a cast due to a break, but didn't let her injury dampen her spirits.

Lake Tenkiller was a river valley with farms in it until the Corps of Engineers closed the dam in 1952.

Lake Thunderbird was creek bottom in Blackjack Oak east of Norman until the Bureau of Reclamation flooded it in 1965.

Eufaula Lake didn't reach its full pool until 1974.

There are men fishing those lakes today who rode a school bus down roads that are now 40 feet under the boat ramp, and the thing that's supposed to live in all three of them is an octopus.

Then he wrote about a swimming resort that had been built on one of those lakes, a place he called Salyers Lake between Binger and Coger, with paddle boats and cabins, and he said it had the highest drowning rate of any resort in Oklahoma, that bodies were lost in the underwater caverns and never recovered, and that the state shut it down as a hazard in the sixties.

He said the Indians in that region wouldn't have gone there if you'd paid them, and he closed by naming three man-made lakes he said had drowning rates nobody could explain.

Tenkiller, Thunderbird, Oologah.

He said you couldn't get him to fish or swim in any of them for gold.

It's been the subject of many speculations and intrigue.

Sightings of this elusive creature has been reported in Lake Thunderbird, Lake Oolaga, and Lake Tenkiller.

And, of course, when you have these people having these sightings in these lakes, it's going to kick up debate about where in the world did a freshwater octopus come from.

Now, according to eyewitnesses, the Oklahoma octopus is a massive creature often compared to the size of a horse.

But I've talked about...

If it's four and eight or worse, I am building the road and the ramp where I can jump my vehicle into Lake Thunderbird and just go down to the bottom of the lake because I can't take anything that bad.

Four or eight or worse, that's what we're going to do.

I was wondering, Parker Thune, what that might sound like, and I came up with this.

We have many new ones.

Many new ones.

Yeah, Steely jumped into Lake Thunderbird today.

That's right, by the way.

This station used to help me get off the cliff.

At this point, I'm coming to help Steely with the ramp at Lake Thunderbird.

Unfortunately, yes.

We have entered that territory.