The Loch Ness Mystery | Great Mysteries and Myths of the Twentieth Century

Loch Ness, moody and secretive, is the largest freshwater lake in Britain, gouged out by glaciers thousands of years ago. It is 23 miles long and a mile wide. In places, Loch Ness is over a thousand feet deep. The loch lies between Fort Augustus and Inverness, at the northern end of Scotland's Great Glen, the fault line which cuts across the highlands, sculpting an area of great scenic grandeur. Mystery and romance lurk below the ruined battlements of Castle Urquhart on Loch Ness's northern shore. The play of light on water is never-ending. Loch Ness's waters are cold and dark. Heat washed down from the surrounding hills produces a swirling murk below 50 feet. Even the lights of a modern mini-submarine cannot penetrate the enveloping gloom. The perfect glare, perhaps, for a large reclusive and ancient creature. From the dark ages, sprites and water horses were said to haunt the loch. The story goes that the 6th century Saint Columba was confronted by a monstrous beast, which, in saintly style, he sent packing. In the 18th century, the blasting of a military road beside the loch roused two leviathan creatures from their slumbers. In the 19th century, there were sightings of what were described as giant salamanders. Most of the locals were convinced that there was something odd swimming in the waters of Loch Ness. Two roads run along the shore of the loch. On the south, there is General Wade's Military Road, built in the 18th century. To the north, another road runs from Fort Augustus to Inverness, skirting Urquhart Castle. In March 1933, John Mackay and his wife, the tenants of an hotel at Drumnadrocket, were driving back from Inverness along the northern tip of the loch. Suddenly, Mrs. Mackay saw what she described as a huge black body rolling up and down in the waters below. As the commotion subsided, she saw two black humps moving across the surface of the loch. They rose and sank before disappearing in another thrashing of water. In November of the same year, the first alleged photograph of the monster was taken by a Mr. Hugh Gray. It appeared on the front page of the Daily Sketch newspaper on the 6th of December. The Sketch's rival, the Daily Mail, responded by sending a big game hunter, Montague Wetherall, to track down the beast. Wetherall and his cameraman prowled the shores of the loch. Almost immediately, the intrepid big game hunter discovered a set of strange footprints. He staked his reputation on their authenticity. The spore was dispatched to London under tight security. The mail fanned the flames of public fascination with the Loch Ness Monster, now popularly known as Nessie. On closer examination, however, Wetherall's mystery footprint turned out to have been made by a stuffed hippopotamus foot. So much for the big game hunter. The spring of 1934 saw the publication of a new photograph taken by a gynecologist, Robert Kenneth Wilson. It was to be dubbed the Surgeon's Photograph and appeared in the Daily Mail on the 21st of April. One of a series of photographs taken by Wilson, it became the classic image of the monster. For his part, Wilson never claimed to have photographed the monster, only an object moving on the loch. Scientific opinion was not impressed, but many people were inclined to believe a local man like water bailiff Alex Campbell, who encountered Nessie on numerous occasions. And we were rowing quietly along, crossing the loch to the far side where there's a farm, a sheep farm, about midway to the midway across the loch, rather. We heard this upsurge of water. Mind you, that was after midnight. And poor John, the constable's face was absolutely shattered. I said, don't worry, it'll be all right. It's the creature itself. Well, we listened to it quite clearly breathing. Like that. That was the sound of the breathing. Astonishing. And gradually, it faded, went their way, and it disappeared. I mean, it's a submerge. You could hear the sound. Beautiful. At about the same time, Richard Singh had also seen something unusual. Well, that was in August 1934, when my parents, my sisters, and I were staying at Fort Augustus in the hotel. And I was shaving and looking out onto the loch on a very fine morning with the no wind, the loch as clear as a mirror, and there was a black hump there. At least it looked black the way the lighting was. About three feet across, I should say, and a foot above the water, maximum, and about a quarter of a mile out. Well, I called the others, and as we were watching it, it suddenly started to move off in an orderly direction. I should say making about 15 miles an hour because we paced it with it. We got the car out, and we paced it, and we followed it for two miles up the side of the loch. Singh reported other witnesses. Yes, there were some workmen by the bridge which we crossed in Fort Augustus, and we pointed to them, and they regarded it as a matter of course. They said, oh, aye, that's the monster. An everyday occurrence, in fact. Well, so it seemed then. Theories abounded as to what the monster might actually be. But amid the speculation, the majority of sightings had a familiar ring to them. Prompted perhaps by the surgeon's photograph. The slender neck, flat snake-like head, humps, and rough elephant-like skin occurred time and again. The monster beloved of media and public alike. From time to time, the monster has appeared on dry land. On a warm afternoon in July 1933, the Spicers, a couple from London, were driving along the old military road. Suddenly, about 50 yards ahead, they saw what they described as a 30-foot beast emerging from the undergrowth by the road, which it briefly blocked. Mr. Spicer later described it as a loathsome sight. The Second World War thrust Nessie to the sidelines. Although this did not prevent members of the Royal Observer Corps stationed in the area from making a number of sightings. The bombastic Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, also claimed that his bombers had attacked and killed the monster. But this imaginative propaganda coup failed to deliver a death blow to British morale. In the 1950s, a spate of sightings and photographs rekindled public interest in the secret of the loch. Urquhart Castle was a scene of one of the most celebrated, when in July 1955, an Ayrshire bank manager, Peter McNabb, photographed what seemed to be an enormous black creature cruising on the surface. In 1958, BBC television mounted a monster hunt of its own in the same spot. With the aid of an old steamer moored in Urquhart Bay, a favorite haunt of the Loch Ness monster, it brought modern science to bear on the mystery. An echo sounder scanned the water below the steamer. On the deck, the ebullient presenter, Raymond Baxter, marshaled a team of frugmen and arrays of lights and underwater cameras. But Nessie did not come out to play with the BBC's frugmen. It was left to local man, Lachlan Stewart, to describe how he came to photograph the monster. I got up as usual that morning, about 6.30, to mount the cow. And on looking from the window, I saw what I first thought was a boat traveling in the direction of doors from Urquhart Castle. On looking again a few seconds afterwards, I saw another thing appear just behind the first one. It was then that I thought it must be the monster. Did he believe in it? I did not. I grabbed the camera from the sideboard, called to a friend who stayed with me, and I dashed down to the shore. By this time, the monster had crossed the moor and was heading towards foyers on my side of the moor. So I just got the three humps in the viewfinder and snapped. This is, in fact, not very far from where we are now, just across the other side of the loft there. I think then that it saw me because it rushed up at a terrific speed. And that was the last we saw. The BBC failed to find the monster, but the echo sounder installed on the puffer did pick up something unusual. Speaking to the BBC's new radio camera, Baxter described how the echo sounder, which had been developed to help trawlermen locate shoals of fish, was capable of picking up even relatively small individual objects. Excitingly, and perhaps conveniently, a very clear and substantial signal was picked up just as the boat was maneuvering into position. When the technician who was operating the machine was asked to identify the trace, he was unable to say exactly what it might be. The contact had been recorded just as the BBC's boat was coming out of the deep water of the loch and onto the shallower shelf. The marking was... Much stronger than we usually get from the type of fish we've been getting around here. And, well, I wouldn't like to say what it is. I mean, and it's definitely coming. It was submerging as the boat approached. One scientific explanation of the Loch Ness phenomenon was that the loch harbored a breeding population of plesiosaurs, a species of marine dinosaur assumed to have become extinct 65 million years ago. Could some have survived to enter the loch at the end of the Ice Age? The coelacanth was thought to have been extinct for 70 million years until several were fished up in the 1930s. So why not plesiosaurs in Loch Ness? But it is not clear that the loch was ever connected to the sea. Nor, if it was, how a tropical marine reptile would have adapted to the conditions there. And would the loch's fish stocks sustain over 20 hungry Jurassic predators? In the 1960s, new efforts to solve the mystery were made by the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau. Boats equipped with sonar plied to and fro. Auto gyros buzzed overhead. Submarines plumbed the depths. Tim Dinsdale was one of the full-time monster hunters who came to the loch in search of Nessie. In April 1960, he created a sensation by filming what he claimed was the monster. The object he caught on his cine camera seemed to be swimming on the far side of the loch, leaving a zigzag wake. Dinsdale was convinced that only part of the creature he was filming appeared above the surface. If the monster is a plesiosaur-like creature, its appearance would depend on the eyewitness's viewpoint and the creature's attitude in the water. Tim Dinsdale saw what can best be described as an upturned boat shape moving away from him towards the northern shore of the loch. Other sightings have caught what may be the monster at different stages of its progress above or just below the surface of the loch. When one collates the hundreds of sightings of Nessie, the majority build up into the plesiosaur profile advocated by many of the monster hunters. One of them was Robert Rines, president of the Boston-based American Academy of Applied Sciences. In the early 70s, Rines set out to photograph Nessie underwater. Like the BBC, he chose Urquhart Bay. Here, in the summer of 1972, Rines deployed two boats equipped with a system of stroboscopic cameras linked with sonar arrays. The sonar would record the presence of the monster and trigger the cameras, whose flash would illuminate Nessie. This was the result. An object recorded on Rines' sonar and underwater cameras. When computer enhanced, it produced this image. Was this the flipper of the Loch Ness monster? Experts estimated its length to be about seven feet. Three years later, Rines obtained two more photographs of the monster. The first was of its gargoyle-like head. The second, supposedly, was the creature's upper torso, neck, and head. But underwater or above, the camera can lie and the eye can mislead. At the appropriate distance and in the right conditions, a log, rock, or tree trunk, a dead horse or a swimming deer can metamorphose into a monster. So can a surfacing otter. Was it an otter that the Spicers saw crossing the road on that summer day in 1933? Its size and shape distorted by the heat haze shimmering over the tarmac. The naturalist, Peter Scott, showed how easy it is to create the sudden illusion of something strange moving about in the loch. From Nessie to Frogman in one simple move. At the range of a mile, a small powered boat moving in and out of the bays of the loch can create the wake of the monster. In calm weather, the wake of a boat consists of a number of individual wave fronts which move at an angle to the line of the wake. They can appear as a series of humps traveling across the surface. The wake of a steamer can set a trap for the unwary observer. Skeptics point out that many of the modern eyewitness reports of a humped creature plowing across the loch can be attributed to surface wave action. Natural phenomena may explain some of the famous photographs of Nessie. It's been suggested that Hugh Gray's photo, the very first, was in fact a Labrador dog rolling around in the shallows. Peter McNabb's photograph has been dismissed by some as the wake of a ship which had sailed by just before the picture was taken. The suspicion of fakery also hangs over a number of other photographs of the monster. Frank Searle, a London greengrocer turned monster hunter, claimed to have caught a plesiosaur like Nessie on camera on no fewer than eight occasions in the 1970s. But are these photographs, among the clearest ever produced, no more than dinosaur montages photographed against a watery background? And what of the surgeon's photograph? Robert Kenneth Wilson always maintained that he did not believe in Nessie. In 1994, his famous photograph was revealed as a fake. One of Wilson's collaborators in the hoax, Christopher Sperling, told the press that Nessie had been fashioned from plastic wood and mounted on a toy clockwork submarine. Apparently, Wilson was surprised by a water bailiff after taking the photographs. The evidence was scuttled and now lies somewhere on the bottom of the loch in only three feet of water. Intriguingly, Christopher Sperling was related to big game hunter Montague Weatherall. Cinefilm has also raised more questions than it answers. Tim Dinsdale's film was analysed by an RAF photo reconnaissance team who declared it to be an animate object. Others believe it to be a small powered boat belonging to a local farmer. 1987 saw the launching of Operation Deep Scan, a sonar sweep of Loch Ness with the twin aims of flushing out Nessie and gathering information about the loch's unique ecology. Deep Scan's chorus line of cabin cruisers covered about 80% of the steep-sided loch. The operations director, Adrian Shine, a loch Ness expert, remained suitably sceptical about the existence of its most famous resident. We don't expect a Jurassic reptile to come out of this loch. A large fish, perhaps. But that would be interesting enough for me. Deep Scan's sonars made some tantalising contacts with large targets, but they failed to provide conclusive evidence of the existence of Nessie. The monster remained as elusive as ever. But one element of Deep Scan cast serious doubt on the photographs taken in Urquhart Bay by Robert Rines in 1975. An underwater camera was lowered into the same spot. The water was not as deep as Rines had claimed, and there was something else down there among the slithering eels. This is Rines' photograph of the so-called gargoyle head of the monster. And here, in the same spot, is a rotting tree stump to which the gargoyle head bears an uncanny resemblance. But still, the sightings continue. In 1994, a holidaying Canadian couple's camcorder filmed a strange disturbance on the surface of the loch. Sunlight and shadow cast their spell on the loch as powerfully as they have ever done. In so magical a place, it is all too easy to conjure up a creature swimming just below the surface. And yet Loch Ness still keeps a tight hold on its secrets. And the hunters still come. Extensive searches and the most modern sonar equipment have been unable to produce conclusive evidence of a monster in Loch Ness. Submarines and divers have failed to make what would be one of the scientific finds of the century. Is it possible that a 65-million-year-old survivor could account for the images recorded by seemingly reliable witnesses like Richard Singh, a future Nobel Prize winner, Peter McNabb, and Lachlan Stewart, and the grainy cine film made by Tim Dinsdale in 1960? Or are we all the dupes of the ingenious hoaxer surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson? The plesiosaur theory raises more questions than it answers. But might Nessie be another creature entirely? In 1932, a Miss Macdonald claimed to have seen a large crocodile-like creature with a short head making its way up the shallow river nest towards the loch. Her description suggests a Baltic sturgeon, a migratory fish which can grow to a great size. The early legends of the loch often refer to a strange fish. Perhaps there really is something very large and very old swimming purposefully through the gloomy waters of Loch Ness.