THE LOCH NESS
MONSTER
Nearly 1000 feet deep and 24 miles long, Scotland's Loch Ness is believed by many to be home to the unidentified aquatic creature affectionately dubbed "Nessie."
Since the larger public first became aware of the monster in 1933, the Loch Ness monster has become an international media star, her most recent appearance on a commemorative stamp recently issued by the Maldive Islands. Nessie has attained the status of a classic phenomenon and her popularity endures. No other monster is as tied in with a country's image as Nessie is with Scotland. Nessie has been featured in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, dozens of books, and has starred or co-starred in several feature films and innumerable documentaries, including an upcoming major studio release. She is arguably the best known cryptozoological creature in the world.
Nessie is certainly one of the most-sighted monsters in the world. At the age of 63, Nessie has lost none of her charisma. She often appears in advertisements (usually selling beer and spirits), is the object of sonar searches of the Loch, and/or is exploited by public relations people cashing in on her ability to attract the international mass media. And there are new sightings of the old girl every year.
If Nessie is proven to exist, British bookmaker William Hill faces a payout of over £1 million (over US$1.5). Nessie might be worth over a million to those who gamble on her existence, but to Scotland the monster has been worth millions a year as its premiere tourist attraction. Nessie has certainly come a long way since her birth in the 1930s.
There are many negatives in the search for lake monsters. Despite many credible eyewitness sightings, no live monsters have been caught after innumerable attempts in their respective lakes. No carcasses have ever been found that might be anything other than recognizable animals. It is a fact that giant nets, submarines, underwater cameras, sonar, and loch-side crews of observers have all failed to come up with the solid evidence that will prove to the world that there is a Loch Ness Monster.
On the other hand, the great number of eyewitness sightings--which show no signs of abating--make it hard to easily dismiss Nessie, who remains the Queen of all lake monsters.
WHAT IS NESSIE?
Most of the Nessie witnesses describe something with two humps, a tail, and a snakelike head. A V-shaped wash was also often mentioned, and such details as a "gaping red mouth" and horns or antennae on the top of the creature's head were sometimes noted. Nessie's movements have been studied, and the films and photos analyzed to determine what Nessie might be, if she exists.
There are numerous theories as to Nessie's identity, including a snake-like primitive whale known as a zeuglodon, a type of long-necked aquatic seal, giant eels, walruses, floating mats of plants, giant molluscs, otters, a "paraphysical" entity, mirages, and diving birds, but many lake monster researchers seem to favor the plesiosaur theory. Most scientists believe that these marine reptiles have been extinct for 60-70 million years, but others think it possible that after the last Ice Age the Loch may have been connected to the sea, and some of these dinosaurs may have been stranded. Others, like David Hall, feel that lake monsters could not possibly be plesiosaurs since plesiosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles that would have preferred warm oceanic currents to cold Scottish Lochs.
And we cannot afford to ignore the fact that sometimes Nessie is a hoax. Only one thing is certain about Nessie: that there are as many theories about her identity as there are theorists.
THE SIGHTINGS
On July 22, 1933, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer of London were driving along the Loch Ness Lakeshore Road returning from a holiday in northern Scotland when their car nearly struck a huge, black long-necked creature. The "prehistoric animal," as Mr. Spicer described it, shambled across the road, slithered through the underbrush, and splashed into the murky Loch. Had the Spicers experienced a rare land encounter with the Loch Ness Monster?
To date there have been over 3000 recorded sightings of the celebrity monster, according to cryptozoologist Roy P. Mackal, author of The Monsters of Loch Ness. This figure may be on the high side, but whatever the figure is, Nessie is certainly one of the most-sighted monsters in the world.
British newspapers reported that on June 17, 1993 a young mother, Edna MacInnes, and her boyfriend David Mackay, both of Inverness, Scotland, claimed to have watched the Loch Ness monster for 10 minutes. MacInnes, age 25, told BBC Radio 4's Today program that the 40 foot monster swam around, waving its long giraffe-like neck and then vanished into the murky waters of the loch in what was the first major sighting of the year.
"It was a very light colored brown. You could see it very clearly," Miss MacInnes recalled. The creature was estimated to be a mile away, but appeared huge. Edna MacInnes reportedly ran along the shore in an attempt to keep up with Nessie.
"I was scared when the wash from its wake lapped on the shore, but I just kept running behind it. By the time it plunged below the surface I was running as fast as I could go," Miss MacInnes exclaimed. She and her boyfriend ran to get a camera and binoculars from a relative's house nearby and returned to the Loch. Shortly thereafter they had another sighting. This time the creature was only 20 feet from the shore, and David attempted to photograph Nessie. Unfortunately, the resulting photos showed a wake but no monster.
Later the same evening, James MacIntosh of Inverness was returning from a fishing trip with his son, also named James. Young James first sighted the unidentified object, telling his father, "Dad, that's not a boat."
"I was concentrating on my driving but I looked over the loch and I suddenly saw this brown thing with a neck like a giraffe break the surface. It was an eerie experience. It was swimming quite swiftly away from the shore at the time," recounted the elder MacIntosh.
Based on the strength of the sighting, bookmakers William Hill cut the odds against Nessie being found from 500-1 to 100-1. If Nessie was proven to exist, William Hill faced a payout of over £1 million (over US$1.5).
On November 12, 1933, a British Aluminum company worker named Hugh Gray watched "an object of considerable dimensions" rise out of the murky waters of the Loch and when it was two to three feet out of the water, Gray photographed the unknown thing. Gray's ambiguous photograph was published internationally. In the year following the release of the Gray photograph, there were over fifty sightings of Nessie.
While the world first learned of a Loch Ness Monster in May, 1933, there had been numerous earlier sightings of a large unidentified creature in the Loch, dating back to St. Columba's oft-mentioned encounter with an unknown creature in the River Ness in 565 A.D.
Generally cited as the first Nessie encounter, the case was studied by Charles Thomas, Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, England, who published his findings in the Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology. Thomas concluded that the significance of the supposed encounter should be discounted as misleading since a critical examination of the original text (reported from oral tradition 110 years after the event) reveals that St. Columba probably encountered a large, stray marine mammal in the River Ness, rather than a monster in the Loch.Thomas's findings are based on sound scholarship and reasoning, and would lead the unbiased researcher to conclude that the first non-retrospective sightings of the Loch Ness Monster actually occurred in the 1930s.
The Surgeon's Hoax
The most famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster, a grainy black and white photograph showing a long head and neck emerging from the Lake, turned out to be a hoax.
In 1993, Christian Spurling, stepson of the flamboyant movie maker and big game hunter "Duke" Wetherell, admitted he'd made the "monster" out of some plastic and tin toy submarine.
The picture (Often called the "Surgeon's Photograph," because Colonel Robert Wilson, a doctor, claimed to had taken it by the Loch in April of 1934) had withstood careful scientific examination. Monster fans had speculated that the pictures showed a plesiosaur, while skeptics said it must have been an otter head or tree trunk. Nobody seems to have suspected a toy submarine.
According to two Loch Ness researchers, David Martin and Alastair Boyd, in 1993 they'd heard Wetherell's son, Ian, had alleged that his father had faked one of the "Nessie" photographs. Since by then Ian Wetherell was dead, the two men located Ian's stepbrother, Christian Spurling. Spurling, then 90, admitted he'd been approached by Duke Wetherell to build a fake monster. Construction was done with plastic wood over the conning tower of the toy submarine. The neck, estimated by some from the photograph to be over three feet high, measured 8 inches.
Duke Wetherell apparently concocted the plan as revenge upon the Daily Mail newspaper. In 1933 the Daily Mail had hired Wetherell to find the Loch Ness Monster. Soon after arriving at the lake Wetherell found strange tracks in the soft mud near the water. Plaster casts were taken and sent to the Museum of Natural History. Apparently Wetherell himself had been hoaxed because the Museum announced that the tracks were that of a baby hippo foot, probably part of an umbrella stand. The Mail was angered at Wetherell and Wetherell was embarrassed.
It was soon after this that Spurling was approached by his stepfather to build the "beast." "We'll give them their monster," Duke told his son. Ian Wetherell and father took the completed device and a camera to the Loch and photographed it on a quiet bay, then sank the evidence. The undeveloped photo's were then passed to a friend of a friend, Colonel Wilson, who had them developed and sold the photo to the Daily Mail. The group was quite unprepared for the publicity the photo generated and apparently decided not to admit the hoax. The story stayed unknown for over sixty years.
How the fake photo was taken: A computer simulation of Wetherell's "monster." The results appear at the top of this section ( The Surgeons Hoax ).
