The discovery was 120-feet-tall Ponderosa pines that had grown for hundreds of years and dated back to A.D. “He said, ’There is a tree rooted right under your boat.’ I said, ’Really?’ And he said, ’You can probably see the top if you lean over, and I leaned over, and I could see the top down about 25 feet, and I thought, ’Oh my god.’ saw a piece off, and let’s carbon date this to see what we got.” He didn’t start to talk to his neighbors about the strange snags in the mysterious lake until after he had evidence in front of his very own eyes. You have to be patient, you stick to your guns and you still might be wrong.” “You lose your credibility if you move too far beyond the existing box. “People are likely to put you in a boobie hatch,” he said. Finding mysterious things and telling people about them is fraught with snags, and he’s had to be careful. Since that day, Kleppe says what he found has stirred the pot of scientific debate and sparked the realization that mysterious legendary things of the deep do exist-just not as we ever imagined. “He went down.” And just a few minutes later, “He came up shaken.” “At that altitude, they can only stay down for about 20 minutes,” Kleppe said. The bubbles of breath rose toward Kleppe as he watched the diver kick and fall into the high-altitude lake. The diver splashed in with his black rubber wet suit, tanks and mask, breathing compressed air in long loud heaves like Darth Vader. It was 1997 before he got a diver to go down into the fishing lure Bermuda Triangle. Kleppe will never forget the day he took the bait: “I need to get a diver and figure out what it is.” What invisible force might be clutching his experimental lures and trying to steal them away into the Tahoe abyss? The water below was 150 feet deep, his line was down only 40 feet, and the screen showed the water was as dead as space. He turned to his high-tech fish finder for answers. Until one day, “I looked up and triangulated that I was at the same spot over and over again when it, and I said, ’I need to figure out what this is.’” He would toss out his line and troll around the lake and hit snags like any fisherman would. It’s a true tale: How John Kleppe, a retired University of Nevada, Reno electrical engineering professor, caught the big one, and how he is still wrestling his controversial catches to shore. But this isn’t about the one that got away. It catches, the professor leans closer, the pole bends, but the line snaps, and his hopes sink into the dark water. The line attached to his experimental vibrating fishing lure cuts the glassy water, trolling the deep blue for a big, hungry and unlucky fish. A professor and his boat are just a speck on the surface of frigid Fallen Leaf Lake west of Tahoe.
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