The late Lord Beaverbrook was an odd cove but great at newspapers. He had many rules.

One was any story about the Loch Ness Monster was fake. Always.

It is a pity he is no longer around to deal with the current story at Kanas Lake, an area inhabited mainly by Tuvans, who are famous among world-music fans for their throat-singing prowess and who, according to legend, are the descendents of Genghis Khan.

(There is some possibility of truth in this. A Y-chromosomal lineage is present in about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia which is about 0.5% of the men in the world. It has been suggested that the pattern of variation within the lineage is consistent with a hypothesis that it originated in Mongolia about 1,000 years ago. Such a spread would be too rapid to have occurred by genetic drift, and must therefore be the result of natural selection. It has been postulated the lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan, and that it has spread through social selection. Check in the mirror and see if there are any resemblances. You could be a descendant.)

That is enough of a legend to start with.

Now we come to the Kanas Lake Monster. Its habitat, within sight of the Soviet Union, was a sensitive border zone until the 1980s, and only with the opening up of Xinjiang has the monster been known to the outside world.

Depending on whom you talk to, it might be a giant fish, or it might be a mammal, or the lake might have both monstrous fish and monstrous mammals. There may be only one monster or there could be eight or more. It could be 30 feet long, and it could be longer than a football field.

State-run media reported that tourists from Beijing had seen it and even caught it on video. (The clip has now been viewed more than 900,000 times on YouTube and sort of could be something much as all photos of Nessie looked sort of possible.)

According to Xinjiang TV, the tourists were sitting in a boat on the lake when ‘two huge black aquatic animals with the length of more than 10 meters sprang out from the surface in succession.’

A retired border policeman, Tolugen Zikeli said, ‘The monster is fake, it’s a lie. It’s just to attract tourists.’

The monster, real of not, is called Hobzhk, which means something like ‘always changing’ or ’strange’ in Tuvan.

The park’s director, Tan Wei Ping,  swears he HAS seen the monster. Indeed, he claims to have seen four of them at once, each 45 feet long. He said, ‘The monster has been here for a long time, as long as the Tuvan people have been here. But monster is just the word that the Tuvans use — it’s just an animal with no name.’
Source: Slate