Alaska’s Iliamna Monster
The Iliamna Monster
Steven Levi
Ah! Summer in Alaska! Other than the mosquitoes, Alaska is the best possible place in America for a summer vacation. In Anchorage, a hot day it might get all the way up to 80 degrees and there are king salmon streams narrower than the fish is long. Other than more than a million tourist who will flock to Alaska in June, July and August, there is one more reminder that this is summer in Alaska: sighting of the Iliamna Monster.
Alaska, for better or worse, has its collection of biological oddities. In the Arctic there is Tutu man, (pronounced two-two-man), a beast with human legs and the body of a caribou. Kotzebue Sound is the habitat Nuyaqpalik, a mermaid with extremely long hair and is known to drag solitary fishermen from their boats on Kotzebue Sound. Then there are the “little people,” an elusive race of midgets around Elim, the Hairy Man in the Interior and in Southeast, a variant of Big Foot known as the Kustakah. There are others, of course, but let’s just say there have not been a lot of sightings of any of these creatures except after 2 a.m. when the bars close. Then there is the Iliamna Monster. This is because there are continuing sighting of the monster by both Native and non-Natives. Or, as we Alaskans say, tongue in check, when it’s summer there will be Iliamna Monster sightings.
To keep things in perspective, Lake Iliamna is the largest lake in Alaska with a surface area of more than 1,000 square miles. It is 77 miles long and 22 miles wide with some spots being almost 1,000 feet deep. It is so large it has its own weather pattern, to which more than a few pilots and fishing rig captains can attest. The lake was originally named for the Russian Explorer Grigory Shelekov but renamed Iliamna — according to the United States Geological Survey — for “the name of a mythical great blackfish supposed to inhabit this lake, which bites holes in the bidarkas of bad natives.” Thus, began the legend.
What makes the legend of the Iliamna Monster — known as Illie — so historically delicious are the continuing sightings. Natives have described the animal as having an orca-like body with the head of a wolf. Most of the early sightings were from the shore, naturally, but with the introduction of the airplane there have been more than a few sightings of a “large, dull, aluminum-colored fish” from the air. On the surface of the lake, there have been reports of boat propellers being damaged with what appeared to be teeth marks and there have been some reports of people being knocked out of their boats by a large creature surfacing nearby.
In 1967, an Alaskan missionary, spotted the monster from the air and told a friend. The friend decided to go trawling for the monster using 5/16 stainless steel cable and #2 tuna hooks. He baited the hooks with caribou meat and tied off the cables to his airplane’s floats. Then he did what most of us do when we go fishing: relaxed and waited for a bite.
He got one.
A big one.
The bite was so violent it knocked him off the pontoon where he was sleeping. While he was floundering the water, his plane was dragged away and he had to swim for shore. According to Wikipedia, he had to walk for miles along the shore while his plane was being towed around the lake. When he finally retrieved his plane, several of the cables were gone and the tuna hooks on the remaining cable had been “straightened out and these hooks were eight or nine inches long.”
And the sightings continue. In June of 2017, Public Radio Station KDLG in Dillingham interviewed a resident who gave an eyewitness report of the monster, in this case monsters as there was more than one.
There was more than one, at least three. The first was the biggest, maybe double the size of a 32-foot gillnetter. The animal either blew like a whale, or spit water from his mouth or something. The smaller animals behind him did the same but not as dramatic. They were black or very dark gray. They surfaced like whales for maybe two to three seconds about a mile off-shore. I am at a total loss as to what they could be.
Ah, yes. Summer in Alaska and another Iliamna Monster sighting.
Well, is the Iliamna Monster some cryptozoological anomaly, kith or kin to the Loch Ness Monster? Scientist say probably not. More probably it is a large sturgeon. Sturgeons live in fresh water, can grow to 1,500 pounds and be as long as 20 feet. They can also live a century. The sturgeon is bottom-dwelling creature which is reason it is rarely seen near the surface. The back of a sturgeon is lined with teeth-like plating which, if struck by a propeller, would appear to be teeth marks. As to the tales of people being knocked out of their boats by the monster, sturgeons may be bottom feeders but they occasional surface and jump. Clearly the sturgeon does not “look before they leap” which would account for the tales of small boats were struck by the animal or people being swept out of their boats or bidarkas by the waves of such a sounding.
Well, you say, if a sturgeon can only grow to 20 feet in length, didn’t that eyewitness report the monster he saw was “double the size of a 32-foot gillnetter.” Yup. But, you know, things are larger in Alaska.
Steve Levi has more than 80 books in print or on Kindle. He specializes in books on the Alaska Gold Rush and impossible crimes. An impossible crime is one in which the detective has to solve HOW the crime was committed before he can go after the perpetrators. In the MATTER OF THE DESERTED AIRLINER, an airplane with no pilot, crew or passengers lands at Anchorage International Airport. As the authorities are pondering the circumstances of the arrival, a ransom demand is made for $25 million in diamonds and precious stones. Chief of Detectives for the Sandersonville, North Carolina, Police Department, Captain Heinz Noonan, is visiting his in-laws in Anchorage when he is called onto the case. For the next 36 hours, he pieces together the puzzle of how the crime was committed. But can he solve the crime, free the hostages and locate the perpetrators before the ransom is paid? hhttps://www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi
