The Lagarfljót Worm

The Lagarfljót Worm is a creature said to live in Lagarfljót lake in northeast Iceland. Annals first mention it in 1345; in 2012 a video of it was published and the local municipality set up a committee to decide whether it is real.

Answering the question for the University of Iceland's Vísindavefurinn in 2011, Hrannar Snær Halldórsson and Ingvar Þorsteinsson wrote that the story of the worm is more than 650 years old, since the annals first mention it in 1345. They added that the worm itself would have to be older still, had it ever existed.

In February 2012 RÚV, the national broadcaster, put out a video filmed by Hjörtur Kjerúlf. The Reykjavík Grapevine, citing RÚV, described it as showing what looks like a long object moving like a snake across the river's flow, where the river runs into the lake. Wikipedia adds that the water in the footage was icy and covered in snow. It also reports that Miisa McKeown, a researcher based in Finland, went through the footage frame by frame and found that the object never moved forward through the water; an optical illusion made it look as if it was swimming.

Later in 2012, the Grapevine reported, the municipality of Fljótsdalshérað set up a 13-member truth committee to look into whether the worm is real. In August 2014 mbl.is reported the result under a headline saying there was no reason to doubt the worm. One of the committee told the paper that the members looked at a photograph and a video believed to show it. They could not agree that the photograph showed the worm, but seven of the thirteen agreed that the video did.