McLeod begins by pointing out that Paddler sightings date back only to 1944, not to Indian times like the lake-monster reports associated with a handful of Idaho's other 140-some lakes. The very first mention of the Paddler came straight from the Navy's own Farragut Naval Training Station, established on the southwestern end of Lake Pend Oreille in 1942. A later report in the base newspaper poked fun at the sighting and was, McLeod says, "obviously designed to make anybody who thought they had seen something in the lake look like an absolute fool."

After the war, the Navy decommissioned the Farragut station but kept the lakefront site at Bayview for its Acoustic Research Detachment. The Navy found this remote, quiet lake to be the ideal place to try out various acoustic technologies designed to keep its submarines quiet and "hidden" underwater. Methods tested included sonar systems and "countermeasures," devices ejected from submarines to decoy torpedoes away from them or to help them avoid detection.

In 1949 and 1950, a few years after this secret Navy test site opened, the next two accounts of the lake monster appeared in local newspapers. They described a dark-colored sea serpent, anywhere from 15 to 30 feet long, that left a wake as it moved at an impressive speed.

Though people at Bayview continued to speak about the monster, McLeod says, no further reports were published until the early 1970s. The accounts at that time mostly told of large shadows under the water, radar picking up animate objects, boats being pulled all over the lake, and fishing lines snapping mysteriously. During the winter of 1974-75, Department of Fish and Game officials themselves reported some unusual sonar contacts at night at a depth of 500 to 600 feet, below the normal depth of kamloops trout and other known fish in Pend Oreille.

In September 1977, the Pend Oreille monster picked up its modern nickname in a sensational report published by a local paper. A young girl told of being attacked by the monster near the city beach, and an accompanying photo showed a bewhiskered lake monster--dubbed the "Paddler"--approaching the hapless teenager. Ridiculous as it was, McLeod tells me, this account triggered his interest in the Paddler and the cover-story notion. One of his students later showed him an undated clipping of the story, and McLeod decided to find the truth behind the hoax--which turned out to be a 12-foot, paper-mache catfish used earlier in a local play. As obviously fake as it was, the hoax was successful in one respect: "This sensational report apparently left many grade-school students afraid to venture into the lake," McLeod says.