In Veliky Novgorod, a local resident Aleksey Mokrov filmed a certain waterfowl with his camera. According to the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda", Alexei was walking along a pedestrian bridge across the Volkhov River in the center of the city and noticed a man who, dangerously hanging over the railing, was trying to shoot something with a video camera.
Mokrov made out in the waves some kind of gray-white-green "monster". He seemed to be frolicking in the water - rolling at the very surface in light rings. And he looked like a huge snake. Or a crocodile about 2 meters long. “The man, because of the thick falling snow, could not bring the lens into focus,” Mokrov says. - And I had a digital camera with me. I put it into video mode and started filming."
An incomprehensible creature swam near the bridge for an hour. When it was already completely dark, Alexei stopped watching him. And before that, he made several videos and photographs of the "Loch Volkhov monster", the newspaper writes.
“Perhaps there were several creatures - they settled down one after another,” said Mokrov, who works as the head of a metallurgical plant section and approaches everything unusual only from a scientific point of view. - Seals? They are found in Ladoga. But how did the animals swim more than two hundred kilometers against the current, passing the sluices of the Volkhov hydroelectric power station and hundreds of fishing nets? And it's hard to believe in a water snake or some ichthyosaur."
Konstantin Milto, an employee of the herpetology department of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that "in the vicinity of Volkhov there are few species of snakes, of which waterfowl are only snakes, and they do not exceed one and a half meters in length." “Plus, snakes hibernate in winter. Therefore, the video frames are most likely a mammal,”the scientist said.
“Cryptozoologists sometimes come to us for advice looking for giant snakes and other monsters. Recently we consulted about a flying kite. Video materials that are brought in in such cases are always fuzzy, nothing definite can be said about them. But it looks like Mokrov's footage shows an otter or seal pushing a log. Or maybe it's the mating games of otters. They are playful animals. The behavior is very characteristic. Although it is strange, mating games at such a time … This is what the abnormal warmth in winter can do … - Milto thinks.
Viktor Kirillov, a hunter of the society of hunters and fishermen of Veliky Novgorod, believes that most likely it was a Ladoga seal. “Mom is sailing ahead, and two kids are frolicking after her. Seals have pups during this period. And they are usually white. In such an abnormally warm winter, seals could go along the Volkhov in search of cold. But in general, this is the first time I come across this in my life. The seal has never swam into our waters before,”said the game manager