For a reason that isn't so clear to me I have a deep fascination with Siberia and in this post I will focus on Lake Labynkyr which is situated in the Sakha Republic - or Yakutia region, it is a deep fresh water body of fridged water located in a very remote part of the afore mentioned area. Lake Labynkyr is so remote that in-fact it is around 100 miles in any direction from what one might recognise as habitation. For me there is something very magical about the idea of being so remote, somewhere where there is very little chance of bumping into another human-being.
Now the reason that I have brought up the subject of Siberia and in turn Lake Labynkyr is the rumour that like the more famous Loch Ness in Scotland it contains its very own lake monster known affectionally as The Devil of Lake Labynkyr. Although unlike the Loch Ness monster which came to public knowledge in the 1930's with the famous surgeons photo, reports of a large unknown creature have been trickling in since the 19th century.
Recently I came across reports on The Siberian Times website about Lake Labynkyr and the monster that is reported to dwell there within, as well as a story about an adventurer named Andrey Solovyev.
After hearing reports of what has been called the Siberian Nessy Andrey set out on an epic ten day hike through the Siberian wilderness, battling temperatures that threaten to fall below minus 50c and trying to keep one step ahead of brown bears before they take to their dens for their winter slumber as well the threat of hungry wolves who are always on the prowl looking for a tasty morsel of meat.
Andrey set out on his dangerous adventure back in 2016 to spend the winter in vigil in a small cabin at the water edge surviving only on fish that he caught at the winters edge as well as wild onions that he pickled and berries and mushrooms that he found on the way to the lake, before the snows settled in.
He only had a short time before the lake iced up so the window of his chance of spotting the monster was a short on, but he is quoted by the members of the Oymyakon branch of Russian Geographical Society (who had briefly traveled there to check on his progress) as saying 'Two weeks ago when the ice was still not completely frozen some dark creature swam out of the lake - but I couldn't identify it'. Sadly as always seems to be the way when people sight a cryptid creature he did not manage to capture it on camera. Apart from his un-photographed sighting the Russian explorer did report that his fishing nets had been torn apart he says 'Some strange things were happening here, like in September when I set very robust nets and they were torn to shreds, like I could never imagine, I saw huge - meters in diameter - holes on these nets. It definitely wasn't done by a fish, even a pike couldn't bite through this net.'
Andrey's brief sighting is by no means the only one and neither is his expedition. Speaking to the Siberian Times in 2012 Associate Professor of Biogeography Lyudmila Emeliyanova told of her own encounter with the beast whilst on a trip to the lake, she said 'It was our fourth or fifth day at the lake when our echo sounding device registered a huge object in the water under our boat. The object was very dense, of homogeneous structure, surely not a fish nor a shoal of fish, and it was above the bottom. I was very surprised but not scared and not shocked, after all we did not see this animal, we only registered a strange object in the water. But I can clearly say - at the moment, as a scientist, I cannot offer you any explanation of what this object might be.'
Lyudmila's sonar hit was not with out precedent because once more the sonar picked up another big ping causing her to speculate that there might be more than one creature living in the 50 meter deep lake, 'I can't say we literally found and touched something unusual there but we did register with our echo sounding device several seriously big underwater objects, bigger than a fish, bigger than even a group of fish.' she said 'I would love to take part in another visit to this lake. I know how to organise it and know enough good local people who can help on the spot. It is a hard trip I must say but it is definitely worth doing it again. This mysterious and very deep lake still has some secret to tell us.'
Explanations for the identity of the monster range from an extant population of ichthyosaurs and some people saying they could be a pod of landlocked killer whales, or even giant pike but these seem unlikely, but the land locked sea creature theory aside from the fact most sea creatures can't survive in fresh water, is that the lake is over 1000 meters above sea level and even at the end of the last ice age when vast swathes of the world would of been covered by raised sea levels they wouldn't of reached the the altitude of the lake. Also a giant pike seems rather unlikely as a fish would need not only a nurturant rich diet, which the lake would need provide but also warmer water, which it does not even in the summer months.
So, what then can the creature be and do we have any other evidence other than fleeting sonar contacts and anecdotes? Well the answer might just be yes. In 2013 reports from a team of divers who were the first to to make their way to the bottom of the lake. It was whilst they were exploring reported coming across unidentified jaws and other skeletal remains research team geologist Viktor Tverdokhlebov was quoted as saying: 'There have been all sort of hypothesises about what kind of creature it could be: a giant pike, a relic reptile or an amphibia. We didn't manage to prove or to disprove these versions..... we managed to find remains of jaws and skeleton of some animal.'
Of course skeptical minds have weighed in and given their opinion with Yury Gerasimov, of the Institute of Freshwater Biology at the Russian Academy of Sciences saying: "If we trust the stories about this 'Devil,' there must be about 1.5 meters [5 feet] between its eyes. It means the length of its body must be about 7 to 8 meters [23 to 26 feet],"
So what then could are mystery creature be? Well at present the identification of the skeletal hasn't been made and photos of the creature haven't been taken. I feel that as much as I would like the mystery to be solved the mystery is much more fun and will endure longer than a discovery......
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