The Mysterious Iliamna Lake
Throughout human history lakes, rivers, ponds, and of course the ocean have been a prime location for the supernatural and the fantastic to flourish. Perhaps it’s the depth, as one can only see so far into the swirling brine, or, the fact that water moves of its own accord, fickle to all and allied to none, water slides about as if under its own command. Water is mysterious, unknown, and in such uncertainty and in murky depths oddities abound. Under the waves and in the shallow bays we find strange creatures, fish of all types, multi tentacled slithering octopi and crusty lobsters, these organisms peculiar and alien, their weird anatomies easily agitating the imagination.
Likewise, and as if pulled from the pages of the Bible, monstrous serpents reoccur in dozens of watery legends, with the Loch Ness Monsters, the Norwegian Kraken and the mythical Wani from Japan all global notables.
Here in the United States have some slippery serpents in our waters as well, with the 1,000 square miles of Iliamna Lake in Southwest Alaksa legendary for containing an unknown aquatic creature.
Larger than Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, Iliamna Lake a beauty, the water isolated and wild, with America’s 7th largest lake still home to a healthy salmon population as well as a large indigenous community who continue to rely on this resource for their survival. Besides salmon Iliamna Lake is also home to an isolated and unique number Pacific Harbor Seals, with freshwater seals rare in nature, with this population now number at about 50 and at one time estimated to have been over 500.
Still, even more peculiar to Iliamna Lake is the story of the “black fish” a sea serpent like monsters which has been seen in waters since time immemorial, the celebrated USGS cartographer G.C. Martin noting, “a mythical great blackfish supposed to inhabit this lake, which bites holes in the bidarkas of bad natives.”
Over the decades reports concerning the black fish have varied, its size forever changing and its maliciousness inconsistent, the fish sometimes looking like an Orca, sometimes looking like a dinosaur, and other times appearing like a large shark with a dangling, gangly jaw.
Of course, like so many other supernatural or preternatural phenomenon sightings of the black fish of Iliamna Lake increased in the 1970’s, though no photographs or videos of the creature were recorded at that time. Sightings of the creature continue, though no one really seems to know what they are seeing in the depths of the cold waters of Iliamna.
In 2012 a YouTube video surfaced of what some thought was the legendry black fish, with this footage quickly dismissed as the organism in the film was eventually identified as a Pacific sleeper shark, a species common to the Artic Circle and one likely to access Iliamna Lake as it is connected via a river to the Gulf of Alaska.
Iliamna Lake is so infamous that Animal Planet’s show River Monsters decided to investigate, with the host, Jeremy Wade, reluctantly concluding that the creature in Iliamna is most likely a white sturgeon, a fish that has been known to reach 20 feet in length (6 meters) and weigh over 400 pounds (180 kilograms).
Wade has credentials. He has a degree in zoology and teaching certificate in biology, making his acumen in fisheries obvious and his conclusion reasonable though not very numinous, his denouement the icy logic of hard sciences.
In the end uncertainty lingers of what inhabits Iliamna Lake, a place the indigenous people of Kvichak Bay and Cook Inlet have lived beside since ancient times. For sure science has brought us many benefits, electricity, medicine, bountiful foodstuffs, the automobile. However, perhaps ancient wisdom remains to teach us something as well, to remind us that mysteries still abound, and even though we have tried to catalogue all natural phenomenon, somethings that will forever remain unknown, with the black fish of Iliamna Lake one of them.