Mysterious 50-foot ‘monster’ spotted in lake in China

A tourist in China captured on video what she claimed was a 50-foot-long silver “monster” breaching the water surface of a small lake long believed to be the home of a mysterious creature that has drawn comparisons to the Loch Ness monster.

The woman, Ms Li, from Shanghai, claimed she encountered the beast while visiting Lake Tianchi, which means “Heavenly Lake,” in Xinjiang Region in northwestern China on August 31.

Li said she was strolling along the lakeshore at around 4:00 p.m. local time when she suddenly heard what sounded like fish splashing in the water.

She looked into the distance and saw a giant creature in the lake, about 600 feet away from her.

Cellphone video shot by Li shows the still surface of the alpine lake being disturbed by something swimming underneath and causing waves and ripples.

After about 10 seconds, the ripples stopped and the lake returned to being as serene as before, Li said.

“At first, I thought it might be several fish, but upon closer inspection, it was just one long, silver-colored creature,” the tourist claimed.

The woman added that the unknown aquatic creature was moving in a regular pattern, and it was swimming quite fast.

Staff at the scenic area later responded to Li’s monster claims, saying that due to the unclear quality of the video and the lack of a precise description, they could not determine what exactly the creature was.

The staff added, however, that similar sightings have been reported by other tourists in the past, but it has been impossible to identify the species because of the distance.

“Imagination is quite vivid,” local officials said. “We hope there really is an aquatic creature that can satisfy everyone’s curiosity, but whether it exists or not is hard to say.”

The staff noted that none of the known fauna in Lake Tianchi, including rainbow trout, exceeds 3 feet in length.

In the fall of 2020, a worker at the Changbai Mountain national park filmed a black round object he believed to be a “monster” floating on the surface of Lake Tianchi — a protected volcanic lake that lies between China and North Korea.

Xiao Yu, 28, told the Daily Mail that he spotted the 7-foot-wide creature while filming the lake in October.

“I had similar sightings before but they were clearly fishing boats,” the witness told the outlet at the time. “But this time, I could not tell what it was. It definitely wasn’t a boat.”

The average depth of the lake is nearly 670 feet and its deepest spot is more than 1,223 feet.

The elusive beast of Tianchi, which has been likened to the Loch Ness monster, was first sighted in 1962. Since then, dozens of visitors claimed to have caught a glimpse of the creature.

In 2007, after a photographer alleged to have captured the “Tianchi monster” on camera, a senior researcher with the National Academy of Science of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea said in an interview with the Choson Shinbo newspaper that the creature in the photo was probably a mutated offspring of trout stocked by North Korea 40 years prior.

Last month, it was reported that two people claimed to have photographed the legendary Lock Ness monster in Scotland just days apart in August 2018.

One of the snaps made by a 12-year-old girl from Leeds in the UK was touted at the time as being the “best” photo of Nessie that had been seen in years.