'1,000% Convinced': Filmmakers Put Their Champ Drone Footage Before a Science Panel, With Names Due Oct. 5

PORT HENRY, N.Y. (Sept. 30, 2026) — Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor were making a movie about a girl and her grandfather searching Lake Champlain for its legendary monster. Now they say their drone may have found it, and they want five scientists to check their work.

The filmmakers are seating a private panel of experts to study the full, unedited drone reel behind a 10-second clip that went viral in June. They say it shows Champ, the creature said to live in the lake, swimming just under the surface behind their rowboat. Per the calendar the filmmakers published, the five panelists are to be named Oct. 5, and the full footage and the panel’s findings are to go public Nov. 9.

“We are completely convinced that what we caught on camera that day was Champ,” Rossi told the Adirondack Explorer. To the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, the pair put it at “1,000% convinced.”

✓ What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

• The footage. An overhead drone shot from Bulwagga Bay, near Port Henry, shows a rowboat carrying Rossi and actress Emma Pearson, with a large gray shape below the surface behind it. A 10-second excerpt is on Rossi’s YouTube channel, where it had about 130,000 views on Sept. 30.
• The movie. The shot was filmed for Lucy and the Lake Monster, which Rossi directed and co-wrote with Tabor. Pearson plays Lucy.
• The panel. The filmmakers invited accredited marine biologists, oceanographers, zoologists and independent video-forensics experts to apply. The panel is capped at five, and applications closed Sept. 14. Panelists are to get full but private access to the roughly 12-minute-57-second master reel and its original camera metadata.
• The calendar. Per the YouTube description: the five “seated institutional experts” will be announced Oct. 5, and the full reel and the panel’s findings released Nov. 9.
• The year is in dispute. Sun Community News reported in October 2025 that the scene was shot “during the summer of 2022.” The filmmakers’ YouTube description and website call it “2024 aerial drone footage,” and the Enterprise reported “a sunny day in 2024.” The YouTube excerpt lists an upload date of Aug. 2, 2024. Dead of Night Dispatch has not been able to confirm the filming year.
• On television. The footage was featured on History’s The UnXplained with William Shatner, in the episode “Terrors of the Deep,” which aired Oct. 3, 2025, per Sun Community News.

? What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

• That it’s Champ. Rossi and Tabor say the shape is an animal, and the lake’s famous one. “It looked to me like it had a really long skinny neck and then the body got larger,” Tabor told the Enterprise. She described an appendage on each side propelling it forward, and a neck “oscillating back and forth.”
• The size. The filmmakers say the shape is larger than the boat, which they measure at 142 inches long, per Sun Community News.
• Shatner’s scientists. Rossi told Sun Community News that experts brought in by the show found “the morphology of the body matches what they consider to be a plesiosaur,” and that “Shatner said this is perhaps the best contemporary evidence for Champ.”
• No editing. Rossi says the footage is real and the metadata backs that up. Tabor calls it “real footage, not manipulated in any way.”

Found in the edit

The filmmakers say the shape went unnoticed until Tabor was going back through shots in post-production. The drone was brand-new, donated to the production, Sun Community News reported.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ that awesome creature is right behind me,” Rossi told the Enterprise. “It was a weird experience, a retroactive panic.”

Tabor, a Crown Point native, says she has looked for Champ her whole life. “I immediately thought, ‘This is it,’” she said.

The movie behind the monster

The footage and the films travel together, and the filmmakers’ own materials promote both. They describe Lucy and the Lake Monster as the first part of a planned trilogy, with the drone shot appearing just after the four-minute mark. A sequel, The Secrets of Lake Champlain, is in post-production, and a third film is scripted.

“Our award-winning ‘Lucy and the Lake Monster’ film is an allegory for humanity’s spiritual search, but the physical footage we caught is a matter of hard data,” Tabor told the Adirondack Explorer.

Why a panel

The pair know the theories people have offered, from a large sturgeon to a rock or log, and want credentialed scientists to weigh in. “We want the data to face rigorous, mainstream scientific scrutiny,” Rossi told the Enterprise. “Hard science is preferable to just unverified commentary from people.”

They’ve asked the panel to study the water before and after the shape appears, to rule out boat wakes and wind, and to examine the metadata for any digital editing. Both say they’ll accept the panel’s finding, whether or not it backs them up.

What comes next

The five names are due Oct. 5. The full reel and the findings are due Nov. 9. Dead of Night Dispatch will be back when the panel is seated, and again when it reports what it saw beneath Bulwagga Bay.