Flathead Monster

I’ll be telling spooky stories at the Belgrade Public Library tomorrow (Thursday, October 18)  at 6:30. The program is a Humanities Montana sponsored event and is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

Captain James Kerr, piloting the U.S. Grant on Flathead Lake in 1889, made the first recorded sighting of a mysterious creature in Flathead Lake. He and his passengers saw a 20-foot object swimming in the steamboat’s path. Passengers panicked. One man fired at it and missed. The boat nearly capsized and the creature disappeared. Since then, there have been nearly 100 sightings.

Documented sightings of "something" in Flathead Lake
Compiled by Laney Hanzel, from Montana Outdoors

One of the most credible was that of retired army major George Cote and his son Neal in 1985. Trolling in Yellow Bay, they saw an object "…as long as a telephone pole and twice as large in diameter." As it slowly undulated, they counted four to six humps above the water. It then sped away, stopped, looked back, and disappeared underwater. They knew that no one would believe them and kept quiet. Then in 1987, Major Cote again saw the creature as he drove along old Highway 93 near Lakeside. This time the entire head, body and tail were visible. Cote wrote of his encounters to Fish Wildlife and Parks in 1990. As a veteran fisherman, he knew what he saw. He had no doubt that it was a huge creature. FWP biologist Laney Hanzel has never seen the monster but has observed huge holes in nets officials have pulled from the lake. Even renowned Whitefish author Dorothy Johnson believed there was something in the lake. In a letter to the editor of the Flathead Courier, Johnson wrote: "I don't think the monster should be done with tongue in cheek. You have eyewitness accounts by people who were scared and didn't think it was funny. I remember hearing about something in Flathead Lake more than forty years ago, so don't give the Polson Chamber of Commerce credit for dreaming it up…."  And back in the dim past, the Kootenai Indians had a name for the lake they passed down through generations. They called it “Monster Lake.”



Homestead Horror!

A Plentywood rancher once told of a childhood experience that made a lasting impression. Before the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to many ranches in the late 1930s, the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration helped Montana farmers by channeling some ten million dollars worth of contract money into the desperate economy. Some families who benefitted from this new money splurged on automobiles. This particular family was proud of their new car, and in the evenings they would go visiting. One warm spring evening as the family returned home after such a visit, they drove into the driveway. As they approached the dark house, the headlights flashed upon the attic window, and they saw a white figure moving back and forth in the light. As was the family custom, the children drew straws to see who had to go into the dark house first to light the kerosene lamp. The short straw fell to this youngster. He was terrified, but his father told him to get to it, and so he approached the house with weak knees. Instructed to discover what was in the window, the youngster slowly made his way up the stairs, taking the treads one by one. He thought he would faint he was so scared. Finally he got to the top stair, took a deep breath, and flung the door open. Relief flooded through him. During the cold winter months, his mother used the attic to hang the laundry, and hanging in the window was a forgotten pair of long johns swaying in the breeze.

Great Falls UFOs

Historian Jon Axline has extensively studied and written about a famous incident in 1950. On the morning of August 15, Nick Mariana, the manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team, spotted two shiny objects hovering over the Anaconda Company’s Black Eagle smelter across the Missouri River from the Legion Ballpark. Mariana captured the two objects on his hand-held 16mm movie camera before they sped off and disappeared into the clear blue sky.

Image from National Archives via nicap.org

The grainy film footage is reportedly the first ever shot of unidentified flying objects and is still a mystery. For several weeks, Mariana showed the film to local civic and sports organizations before he submitted it to the air force for further study. At first, the air force offered contradictory explanations when it returned the film to him, but eventually concluded that the objects on the film were probably two fighter jets known to be in the vicinity at the time. Mariana didn’t agree with the air force’s conclusion and enthusiastically promoted his amazing film for the rest of his life. Private and government investigators periodically interviewed Mariana about the film and what he saw that day in August 1950. Even today, researchers have not determined what the film actually shows. The objects were not reflections of birds, weather balloons, or meteors. They might have been military jets, but most believe they moved too fast and seemed to generate their own light. The grainy film footage is legendary in UFO lore and has never been scientifically explained. Axline concludes that the film may actually be what Mariana claimed it to be—the images of two visitors from outer space.