STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Three new sightings this summer of a lake monster said to inhabit Sweden's Great Lake have rekindled hopes of solving a 360-year-old mystery, said an organizer of a conference on the creature on Saturday.
The new eyewitness reports, detailed to the conference in the central Swedish town of Ostersund, all echoed previous descriptions of the suspected monster said to lurk in Sweden's fifth-largest lake."Three local people reported seeing something this summer, all on occasions when the lake was as calm as a mirror. They saw something suddenly come up from the lake," conference organizer and researcher Olle Mattsson told Reuters.
"All of them described this creature as long and dark, like a snake, with a small head like a dog. This fits previous descriptions of the monster."
Sightings of the monster, Sweden's answer to Scotland's Loch Ness monster, have been reported on nearly 160 occasions by more than 450 people since 1635 when a local parson mentioned the creature in a parish register.
By the late 19th century, the frequency of sightings rose and in 1894 a group from Ostersund set up the Company to Capture the Great Lake Monster and tried, unsuccessfully, to track down the creature using traps baited with pigs and calves.
Last summer, the most extensive search ever of the lake at Ostersund in Jamtland County, 370 miles northwest of Stockholm, also failed to find the monster, which is called the Storsjodjuret in Sweden, translated as the Great Lake Monster.
A 15-boat flotilla equipped with an underwater video camera and using sonar to scour the lake, which is up to 330 feet deep in parts, failed to come up with any new evidence.
The search was joined by the director of Scotland's Loch Ness project, Adrian Shine, who has hunted for Nessie for the past 20 years.
Mattsson said Saturday's conference was to hear details of the latest unsuccessful search.
It is not just Scotland and Sweden that can boast a lake monster but also China, Russia, Canada, the Congo, the United States and Russia, to name but a few.