Could it be, that a great horned serpent reared up through the mists over Lake Champlain in 1609 inspiring Samuel de Champlain to decry the lake home to a prehistoric creature of chilling countenance? Was it a trick of the light, or did he need glasses, which would only begin to be in widespread use about 200 years after his death in 1635? Was he hallucinating??

The mystery of Champ remains a folk legend, but is it myth or a mysterious truth.

To this day, some people still insist they’ve seen Champ trolling the lake’s choppy surface, just as some people believe that all babies are born with blue eyes! Spoiler Alert: They’re not, they just may appear to be blue as a baby’s melanin builds up over the first 12 months of life.

People also believe that two parents with brown eyes can’t have a child with blue eyes. In fact, it’s now thought that you can’t predicts a child’s eye color based on the parent’s eye color at all, as possibly more than 16 different genes are responsible for producing a person’s eye color.

More Eye Myths and Persistent Mysteries

In the 1934 film “It Happened One Night,” Clark Gable strikes what may have been a throwaway pose in his trademark fedora chomping a carrot, had Bugs Bunny not donned a strikingly similar debonair style in 1940 also munching a carrot!

Rabbits are known for their exceptional hearing, but their eyesight, while practical to their position, is not improved by the vitamin A they might supposedly get from eating so many carrots!, which in fact they don’t do. They do, however, eat a ton of leafy greens also rich in vitamin A, but it is yet another myth that eating carrots will improve your eyesight.

While vital to your overall health and an essential element in maintaining healthy vision, eating carrots will not improve your eyesight or keep you from needing glasses if your vision requires.

Carrots can be an urbane orange, a rusty red, or a self-possessed purple if given the audacity, but would a color blind person ever know or even care?

It is another myth that only men can be color blind. In fact, women can develop or inherit color blindness, though they almost always carry the gene from a color-blind parent with the potential of passing that gene on to a child. Ophthalmic science, like all science, is definitely not black and white, and neither is colorblindness. Some people believe incorrectly that a color-blind person sees the world devoid of color entirely, only perceiving shades of gray. That level of colorblindness is exceedingly rare; instead, most people with color blindness have difficulty distinguishing between greens and reds.

The myths and misconceptions of eyecare and vision are nearly inexhaustible, and with misinformation spreading faster than light these days, it’s no surprise that some people are still convinced that reading too much will damage your eyes, or wearing glasses will weaken your vision, or that 20/20 vision means your eyes are perfect, or crossing your eyes might make them stay that way!

It's even true that some people still believe in Champ! But who knows, that one might be true… Weed out the fact from all the fiction by making an appointment with your eye doctor and asking a professional. They might even have thoughts on Champ…