I put the next big question to Guedel: Have any of the Navy's submersibles encountered the Paddler during their dives to the depths of the lake? "We wouldn't pay much attention unless it was noisy," he says, because the Navy's research at the base revolves entirely around sound. Then he drops this tidbit of information: "Now we have had noises interfere with experiments before that we couldn't figure out," he says. "The noises tended to go on but not the way you'd expect from a monster. They would go on for a couple of days and then go away and never come back. These noises have been picked up by our acoustic sensors, and they were noisy enough to interfere with our experiments. It could well have been some of our own hardware, but we just couldn't zero in on it."

Guedel's intriguing answer leaves the door open just a crack, keeping alive the idea that something besides model subs roams the lake. But is Guedel telling the simple truth, or is he deliberately perpetuating the lake-monster cover story dreamed up by the Navy 50 years ago?

There's only one way to find out: I simply ask him if the Navy uses the Paddler as a cover for its activities in the lake. "Not to my knowledge," Guedel replies cautiously. His answer, of course, doesn't rule out the possibility that the Navy may have cooked up the cover story before his time or just decided not to let him in on the secret.

Since Guedel has worked at the Bayview detachment for only eight years, I later pose the same question to John Spina, who has been associated with the Navy tests in Lake Pend Oreille longer than anyone else--since 1959--and is presently manager of large-scale operations. His answer echoes Guedel's. "Up until two to three years ago, though," Spina adds, "our guidance was pretty much don't talk about anything to anybody. But considering what we were doing we felt that, hey, this policy is not really very smart. So we really opened up the place to the public, invited reporters in, and we've been quite open with what we have been doing in here. But the nature of the work hasn't really changed much over the years."

Spina does mention one Navy test that could have inadvertently produced Paddler sightings in the mid to late 1960s. At that time, he says, detachment researchers performed experiments involving towed hydrophone arrays, in which lots of small sensors were mounted on cables ranging from 100 feet to 300 feet in length. These sensor strings were towed as much as a mile behind a boat, typically below the surface, but at times either the tow line or the sensor strings themselves could be seen on the water surface, Spina says. No doubt, these long lines would have undulated as they were towed across the lake, just as many Paddler sighters described.