McLeod first became involved with the the Paddler mystery when he tracked down the truth behind an obviously bogus photo of the Paddler. Despite the fake picture, Paddler sightings abounded, and so did McLeod's curiosity. With fellow North Idaho College professor "Duke" Snyder, he formed the Cryptozoology Club to help students learn how to evaluate wild claims in a reasonable fashion. In 1984, the club members spent several days talking to people on the lake about their Paddler sightings. This "Cryptoquest" garnered local and national media attention, but its conclusion disappointed many: The club deduced that 98 percent of the sightings could be chalked up to sturgeon, which are prehistoric-looking fish that have five rows of bony plates along their bodies, can grow to more than a dozen feet in length, and sometimes live for more than a century.

No one has ever caught a sturgeon in Pend Oreille, but Idaho Fish and Game officials concede that it's possible that the fish are there anyway. "When you have a lake that is that deep and that huge," regional fisheries manager Ned Horner tells me after I meet with McLeod, "a large sturgeon could live their whole life in there and never really get caught." He points out that other large fish, including a record-breaking 37-pound rainbow trout, have been pulled out of Pend Oreille.

When sturgeon aren't responsible for the Paddler sightings, the Cryptoquesters concluded, the Navy and its so-called unmanned submarines probably are--with the exception of a handful of sightings. "We left the door open slightly," McLeod explains, "because there are a number of reports that are really arresting in the sense that they are unexplainable in terms of either sturgeon or what the Navy is doing. Julie Green's Memorial Day weekend testimony is one of the episodes that makes me wonder if there might not be something more to all this. It's one of three reports I have of people talking about a coiling motion and moving rapidly in a typical serpentlike manner."

Even more intriguing than sturgeon or lake monsters, McLeod tells me, are the sightings that fall into the third category--Navy submarines--because of the possibility that nuclear technology is involved. When McLeod asked the Navy base commander, an old acquaintance of his, about nuclear technology being used at the lake, the commander told him to "sit on that." Shortly afterward, he received a call from the detachment's head project engineer, John Spina, who, McLeod says, downplayed the Navy's activities in the lake.

Piquing McLeod's interest around the time of the Cryptoquest was a photograph that one of the club members brought him, which shows what appears to be a missile emerging from the lake. According to McLeod, a friend he consulted told him that the photo was taken in the early 1980s from a barge on the lake. The photograph was sent to the Brookings Institute, which identified the missile as a D-25, at the time the most advanced ICBM submarine-launched missile in the world.

"We began to feel like we were in over our heads," says McLeod. And perhaps a little paranoid as well. On May 7, 1985, McLeod tells me, he got a call from someone at the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin headquarters in Carderock, Maryland, whose name McLeod could not remember. The caller asked McLeod two questions: What does "cryptoquest" mean? And why do you think the lake is deeper than it is? "The guy made me real nervous," McLeod says. "It sounded like he was trying to figure out what we were up to and what we knew."

McLeod remains very suspicious about Pend Oreille's depth. The Columbia Lipincott Gazetteer of the World and other authoritative references list the lake's depth as some 2,500 feet. But the Navy insists that it's only 1,200 feet to the bottom. McLeod believes that the conflicting reports help to keep the capabilities of U.S. submarine technology secret and tie in with the Navy's cover-up of what's really going on at the lake.

Which, paranoia about mysterious phone calls from the government notwithstanding, brings us back to McLeod's cover-story hypothesis. Is the Paddler a creation of the Navy to mask its top-secret activities, possibly involving nuclear subs and/or missile tests?

McLeod's Crypto Club partner, anthropologist Duke Snyder, thinks so. "This Naval activity, which they have not wanted to share with the rest of us for probably obvious reasons," he speculates, "has been misinterpreted by people who are not sure what to think. And if somebody begins a story about a monster in the lake, then that's a pretty handy explanation for strange things that go on. Of course, that raises the question: What the heck is the Navy doing in the lake?"