The girls used their special powers to transform into a ball and a buckskin target to escape the monster, but half of the tribe drowned in the lake, which is said to be the reason why there are so few Kutenai people.
The monster is usually described as a large eel-shaped creature, round with a wavy body like a snake, twenty to forty feet long, having brownish to blue-black skin and grayish-black eyes.
According to Fugleberg, “When I was editor of the Flathead Courier at Polson, author Dorothy M. Johnson, then secretary of the Montana Press Association, advised me not to treat sighting reports lightly in newspaper and magazine articles.
You have eyewitness accounts by people who were scared and didn't think it was funny.”[3] One local story that received much publicity described how a 3-year-old boy apparently fell into the lake, and when asked how he had extracted himself, told his mother “The Flathead monster lifted me up".
Fugleberg wrote that claimed sightings of the monster have been blamed on "hyperactive imaginations, playful pranks, natural phenomena such as wave action, shadows, lighting effects, logs and a number of animals, including bears, horses, deer, elk, dogs, a dead monkey, a loose circus seal and even an escaped buffalo".