Ogopogo

He had a mission.

There was an old legend of Okanagan Lake that a mystical creature named Ogopogo lived underneath the waters.

Have you ever heard of Ogopogo? Ogopogo is a mythical creature that we're not sure if it's real or not.

It's very, very long.

It's kind of like an underwater snake, but mixed with a dragon.

Kai couldn't believe it.

He was talking to the

real Ogopogo.

I agree a hundred percent.

I think you were, I think, cause I wrote a book about Ogopogo and you were mentioned in the book, but I didn't have your name, but Ken Gearhart dropped that.

Can you talk a bit about what, what that was all about?

Yeah.

stripped of its original meaning.

And so I think that cryptids in a lot of ways, not only depict, you know, an archetype of an animal or a creature, but they also depict how we are tied to nature itself.

And I really learned that while researching the book, The Legend of Ogopogo.

And when Eli Watson and I made Cursed Waters to, you know, because where I am, Ogopogo, that's what everybody calls it.

Um, also the cryptid stories.

And so some of my first [laughs] experiences of, of, or seeing like the Loch Ness Monster, or Ogopogo, and of course, Bigfoot, um, especially like the very quintessential Patterson-Gimlin footage, p- picture of Patty the Bigfoot walking, uh, as she did in that still, you know, is just kind of burned into my memory.

Um, but then of course, reading books like Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, watching movies like with Mickey Rooney in Pete's Dragon.

You know, these are always the kind of larger than life, uh, characters, literally larger, you know, than life characters.

Yeah

... kind of the Ogopogo style-

Mm-hmm

... undulate kind of, um, sea monster.

The Rideau Canal.

As far as names go, we got Squamish, Beaver, Ogopogo, Chinook, and Brian Mulrooney.

Nice.

I

but what I'm saying is- Let's set the state.

Are we talking about- pipe up, bring some cash, and try and catch Ogopogo.

Like, what am I charging if I can prove that I've got a good sighting? Yeah.

Dude, I would charge $500 a head.

I mean, it's

better than most river cryptids pictures.

It's better than the Ogopogo.

It's better than fucking Nessie.

In Canadian folklore, a monster that is said to inhabit the Okanagan Lake in British Columbia.

And that is the Ogopogo.

Question number six.

Seven letters.

What else do I have here? Those are probably most of my little kid things.

I know I saw in the email you had a note about the Ogopogo.

The Ogopogo.

Yeah.

So after Creston, we moved to a city called Kelowna, which is in the Okanagan.

The whole Okanagan area.

And Okanagan area...

Dives down into the US across from so goes down into Washington State where Washington State is like burning right now to awful awful stuff, but there is a legend of a lake monster in Okanagan Lake called the Ogopogo which is basically our version of the Loch Ness monster long whatever and So we moved there, and I moved there, and I was going into grade 12.

That's, that's really interesting.

I know, um, uh, my, my, my colleague Jason Hewlett, uh, he a few years ago did a, a documentary on Ogopogo, and when, uh, he took the, the production team that he was with, he took the production team out on the, uh, out on the lake and, and whatnot, and it was interesting because the one thing that he really felt by the end of the, the whole excursion, uh, 'cause so many people, like you were saying, are out there, you know, wanting to hunt this thing or, or looking for some sort of physical thing.

Going back to what we were talking about with, with the Dogman was that there's this sort of spiritual side to the, to it, and that's the one thing that he found with, with even the Ogopogo, was that he's like, "I don't think it's there all the time.

It's, it's not...

It is there, like, something's there." Because there's so many stories.

I mean, it goes back a really, really long time.

And he, he was saying, he's like, "Not only can there not really be a, like, a breeding population of something, uh, you know, in this space," but he said, "The fact that it's appearing and disappearing, and it's there one minute and then not there," he's like, "This doesn't have any hall markers of anything that's physical." Like, what if, you know, this is what you were mentioning before, or it's one of John Keel's window areas or something like that where there's, there's something that's manifesting.

And in the, in the Ogopogo lore, um, when you, you go back to the, the indigenous side of it, Ogopogo was a, the spiritual protector of the water, of, of the lake.