We Finally Solved The Loch Ness Monster Mystery!

Hi, it's Katrina! Imagine scrolling through your home security footage in the middle of the night only to spot something moving across your yard that completely defies the laws of biology. It's a terrifying reality for hundreds of eyewitnesses who have caught glimpses of things that simply shouldn't exist. Welcome back to Origins Explained. Today we are breaking down five fascinating cryptid mysteries from around the globe, and our first stop takes us to the Scottish Highlands, where a 1,400-year-old legend is facing its ultimate modern-day test. The Legend of the Loch Ness Monster Solved After capturing public imagination worldwide for centuries, a new discovery might finally put an end to the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. The founder of Loch Ness Exploration, a lifelong Nessie enthusiast, says he may have uncovered the true cause of hundreds of monster sightings at Loch Ness. That man is Alan McKenna. Alan launched the LNE in 2021 as a means of tracking down and finding Nessie once and for all. The Loch Ness Exploration Group is a volunteer program dedicated to studying the behavior of Loch Ness. Armed with hydrophones, drones, and all the latest technology, the volunteers have been investigating rare occurrences in the waters of Loch Ness for the last five years. During their research, Alan McKenna identified a phenomenon he believes explains away the mystery of the monster. Did you know the first recorded account of the Loch Ness Monster comes from the 6th century? Loch Ness itself is located in an area known as the Great Glen. The Great Glen is deep in Scottish Highlands, a rift valley 60 miles long and home to three lochs. There is Loch Ness, but also Loch Lockie and Loch Oik. Only one of them is said to contain a monster, and only because Loch Ness' waters are so dang deep. It's hard to believe when you're standing on the shore looking out at the calm water, but Loch Ness is deeper than the North Sea. It's never been frozen in modern memory, and it is weirdly long. The incredible depths and length of the loch have fueled the mystery, because up until modern technology, there was no way of telling what might be hiding down there. The loch is also home to the ruins of a very cool castle, which you can visit on a boat tour. I'm not sure if you will see a monster, but you know who did see one? An Irish saint 1400 years ago. The first recorded account of a creature in the loch comes from the story of Saint Columba. He and his retinue of monks were stuck on the edge of the loch for unknown reasons. Saint Columba ordered one of his monks to swim across and fetch a boat for them. Halfway across, a monster appeared and tried to eat the monk. Saint Columba yelled at the beast, invoking the fear of God in it. The monster stopped and fled at the sound of Saint Columba's voice. Ever since, Nessie has been seen periodically. The first major sighting came in 1933, when someone took the very first photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, or at least a photograph of something that looked like a monster. This is the famous photograph of Nessie with her long neck guiding her across the lake. The photograph was taken by a surgeon living in London who happened to be on vacation in Scotland. The surgeon sent the picture into the Daily Mail, and they published the very first photograph of the monster. It was a sensation. Nobody could have imagined how quickly the story would spread around the world, nor how intense public interest would be in the beast. Everyone wanted a piece of Nessie, and soon, quiet Loch Ness became something of a circus. Speaking of the circus, circus owner Bertram Mills offered a reward equivalent to $2 million in modern currency to anyone who could catch the monster and bring it to his circus. Of course, nobody ever caught it, but the chance of a reward brought a lot of folks to the loch to try and find it. Bertram Mills made a lot of money because all the people who flocked to the loch also stopped by his nearby circus and spent money there. Here's where any diligent researcher can crack the case of the Loch Ness Monster without getting off their couch. Bertram Mills operated his circus close enough to the loch that his animals drank the water and bathed in it. Could the Loch Ness Monster have been an elephant? Bertram had all kinds of animals, and they would let the elephants bathe in the waters of the lake. From a distance, wouldn't an elephant's trunk kind of look like a serpent emerging from the water? Drop a 1 in the comments if you see the elephant, or a 2 if you think Nessie is still out there. Elephants sometimes submerge their entire body, using their trunk as a snorkel. Dr. Neil Clark said that many sightings of the monster in the 1930s were people in Scotland seeing elephants in the water. You have to remember, this was long before the internet. In the remote Scottish Highlands, people had probably never seen an elephant before. Even if they had heard of one, and maybe seen an image of one in a book, it wasn't the same as seeing it in person, especially from a distance, in the water. Imagine never seeing an elephant before, living in a quiet, rural community where sheep outnumber people 12 to 1. One morning, while the circus is in town, you walk down to the lake, and there before you is a monster splashing around in the water, with its trunk flailing like the head of a sea serpent. You wouldn't know what you saw, and you would tell all your friends it was a monster. People were so superstitious in the 1930s, half of Europe still believed in vampires. Historians have already come forward to say that Bertram Mills created the Loch Ness Monster as a PR stunt. His own circus performers were fearful of a monster in the waters already, thanks to that legend from the 6th century. It was easy for Bertram to turn their superstition into a full-blown monster circus. He got rich by offering an impossible reward for something he knew wasn't real, because of all the business he received. You always need to follow the money. Ask yourself, who profited from a monster in the loch? The answer is Bertram Mills, the man with the elephants. Now, I know what you're thinking. If the Loch Ness Monster was nothing but an elephant's trunk, what about all of the other photographs taken long after traveling circuses went extinct? For example, another famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster was snapped in 1951. This time, it was captured by Lachlan Stewart, a forestry worker who lived right next to Loch Ness. His photo wasn't quite as impressive as the first one, but it did kind of look like a sea monster. He saw three humps in the water appear in a straight line. He ran back into his house to get his camera and snapped a picture. After one photograph, his camera shutter jammed. Even with the one photograph, Lachlan made front-page news. His picture was touted as further evidence that Nessie did exist and was still hiding somewhere in Loch Ness. Over the following years, interest in Nessie grew to feverish intensity. In 1961, the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau was formed, with two submarines brought out to search with sonar equipment. The 1960s were probably Nessie's biggest decade, and it was because of what those submarines found. One of them, the submarine Pisces, was diving just off the edge of that castle I told you about when it found a vast underwater cavern. The water off the coast of Urquhart Castle is about 950 feet deep, and the cavern appeared to be bottomless. In the hunt for Nessie, this was huge. It was like finding Bigfoot's house in the forest. Everyone assumed the underwater cavern was where the monster lived. Nobody ever found the creature, but the discovery of the deep underwater cavern was still a big deal. It propelled the myth into superstardom. The Loch Ness Monster was already famous, but by the 1970s, the creature had become a household name. In 1975, four firemen got together with a plan to lure Nessie out of her underwater cavern and to the surface. But they figured that Nessie wasn't a lady like she's so often thought of, but a male. The firemen thought if they built a 300-foot-long papier-mâché female version of the monster, they could trick him into showing himself. The giant fake monster with its false eyelashes and pre-recorded mating call from a male walrus didn't work. To be honest, not many people thought it would. In 2007, a lab technician named Gordon Holmes took a video of something mysterious moving in Loch Ness. He described it as a jet-black thing about 45 feet long and moving with some serious speed. The video was convincing enough that it was broadcast by BBC Scotland. It was an intriguing video that clearly showed something large and black in the water, but it could have just been a log, or possibly an eel. There was no way to prove it was a monster. Alan McKenna now says there is no monster. His group set out to find Nessie but ended up debunking the legend. Instead of a prehistoric dinosaur, Alan says the only thing people have been seeing since the 1930s are standing waves. Standing waves occur when two boat wakes with the same frequency and amplitude smash into one another. Identical waves hit and create humps above the surface, which to the untrained eye can easily be mistaken for something alive. To prove his point, Alan captured video footage of standing waves on the southern shore of the Loch. It's definitely a real thing, but can standing waves really be responsible for so many Nessie sightings over the years? Is this it? Is the case solved? Is Nessie nothing but an elephant trunk, the legend of the monster perpetuated by carnival owners and newspapers? Let me know what you think in the comments. The Terror of the Fresno Nightcrawler I'd like to talk about a cryptid so weird that it's most often described as a walking pair of pants. This is the Fresno Nightcrawler, a humanoid cryptid. The nightcrawler is basically a pair of legs attached to a torso without any arms with a rounded head at the top. It looks like someone with a sheet over them wearing white parachute pants. It sounds too ridiculous to be true, right? Yet it's been seen so frequently that people are starting to take it seriously. The first known sighting took place in Fresno in 2007. The story goes that a man named Jose woke up in the middle of the night because his dog was barking. He rushed to check his surveillance footage because someone had clearly been creeping around his home. Captured on grainy film was what looked like a walking pair of white pants. It's hard to even call the Fresno Nightcrawler a creature, but there it was on the CCTV footage. Right behind it was a similar creature, but only about half the size. When Jose went outside, he supposedly found small footprints moving across his yard exactly where the figures in the footage had been. But by the time investigators arrived, it had rained and washed away all traces of the mysterious beings. After the footage went viral, even appearing on the History Channel, the Fresno Nightcrawler became a national celebrity. But is it real, and have there been any other sightings since? Amazingly, there have been other sightings captured on video. The biggest problem with trying to confirm the Fresno Nightcrawler is that every video it appears in is grainy security footage. In 2011, it was spotted again, a small family unit seen in more blurry footage. This time, it looked like they had a baby with them, and there was a larger creature in the footage that looked like it had some weird webbing connecting its knees to its upper body. Shortly after, an extra blurry handheld video from Poland showed more of the creatures. How did they get to Europe? One of the more recent sightings was in the town of Billings, Montana, in April of 2020. A home surveillance system caught a creature shuffling across the ground that looked like a pair of sentient pants. At one point in the footage, it appears to have left the ground and hovered above it. To make the 2020 sighting even more disturbing, the homeowner that captured the video found a dead deer with a weird hole in its side. The hole clearly wasn't from a bullet or any known projectile, so maybe it was from the Fresno Nightcrawler feeding on it. This is one of the weirdest new cryptids because it's showing up all over the world. It doesn't even look like an animal, and nobody has an explanation. These things are like ghosts, showing up only on CCTV footage and nowhere else. As of yet, nobody has seen one of these beings or entities with their own eyeballs. Every sighting is through security cameras. In December of 2014, another creature similar to the Nightcrawler but a little different was spotted near the town of Carmel, Ohio, not on security footage. The witnesses were a marine and his wife on a long drive. They spotted a weird thing walking over a hill and didn't know what to make of it. The creature, assuming it was alive, looked like the Fresno Nightcrawler, but it was taller, was kind of muscular, and was gray rather than pure white. Its knees were also bent backwards as it walked, making it look far more frightening than just a pair of disembodied pants. The couple who saw the cryptid, now known as the Carmel Area Creature, think it was an alien. They said there's now a circle of grass in their front yard that is always green. Even when there's dry weather, even in the heart of summer, the patch stays green without being watered. I'm not exactly sure what the grass has to do with anything, but it does sound strange. Could the Carmel Area Creature be related to the Fresno Nightcrawler? Do they belong to the same family of creatures? There is no right answer because nobody even knows if these things are real. Some say they're aliens. Others say it's a hoax. One theory claims the Fresno Nightcrawler is nothing but literal white pants being controlled with wire like a pants puppet. If you have any theories about the Fresno Nightcrawler, or if you know something I missed, be sure to tell us in the comments! Have you seen the crying squonk? They call it the squonk. It is one of the rarest and most unusual of the North American cryptids. It cries like a baby, looks like a pig, and can dissolve into a puddle of its own tears. According to accounts from the 20th century, the squonk is very real, and it skulks the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania. The squonk is a pretty ugly pig. Instead of having clean, pink flesh like most pigs, it has a bizarre, wordy hide that looks too big for its body. The squonk is a private creature, generally believed to travel alone through the dark trees as it weeps softly to itself. That's the thing with this cryptid. It cries constantly. You can track a squonk by following the trail of moisture through the forest left by its tears, like a breadcrumb trail of sorrow. Don't follow too closely, though. If you corner the squonk, it completely dissolves into a puddle of its own tears. And I have to say, that puts it in a very different category than other cryptid creatures. If the squonk is real, it has the most incredible natural defense mechanism on the planet. It's easy to hear about a creature dissolving into its own tears and dismiss it as pure fantasy. But honestly, is that any weirder than a platypus having venomous elbows? When you think about it, liquefying yourself isn't any stranger than echolocation, camouflage, or breathing underwater. Every animal has a talent, and if the squonk is real, its talent is quite literally crying you a river. But has anyone actually encountered this tragic creature? Or is it just a modern fable born in the dark corners of the internet? Surprisingly, sightings do exist. Eyewitness reports typically cluster around Pennsylvania, specifically the heavily forested regions of the Pocono Mountains and Mont Alto. These dense, sprawling woods offer the perfect canopy of privacy. Because, let's be honest, nobody wants an audience when they're crying their eyes out, not even a lonely monster. Tales of the squonk also predate the internet. The first recorded mention of the squonk comes from 1910. There's another mention of the squonk in a book about Paul Bunyan from 1937. That book paired the squonk with Babe the Blue Ox, like some cryptid team-up. Given how old these stories are, it's possible the legend of the squonk dates to earlier times, perhaps to Native American folklore. Hunters during the early logging industry in America supposedly heard the squonk crying through the trees at night. Nobody was ever able to catch one, though, because when they got close to the creature, it disappeared. All that was left was a puddle of salty tears. Singapore's Bukit Timah Monkey Man Let's now go to Asia, where one of the weirdest cryptids in the east dwells in the forests of Singapore. The creature is some kind of ape-human hybrid, almost like the Sasquatch of the Big Northwest but less gigantic, and with fewer places to hide. Singapore is one of the most modern places on the planet, not exactly somewhere you expect to find an elusive creature called the Bukit Timah Monkey Man. Sightings of the monkey man are rare and scattered. The earliest accounts of people seeing the creature date to the early part of the 20th century, when Singapore was still home to isolated villages and wild terrain. More than 100 years ago, people living in those isolated villages reported witnessing strange figures moving through the brush on two legs. They looked like monkeys, but they didn't move like monkeys. They moved more like men, but they were shorter and covered in hair, just like monkeys. Scientists who hear these stories like to dismiss them as total nonsense, saying the villagers were just misidentifying macaques or gibbons, which are both common in the area. But it's kind of rude for scientists to tell villagers who had been living in the area all their lives that they didn't know the animals in their own backyard. There's a big difference between a gibbon and the legendary monkey man. The monkey man is said to be about three and a half feet tall with a broad chest, and it looks distinctly more human than animal. There probably was a mysterious monkey-like species living on the island of Singapore. It was probably something similar to monkeys with human-like traits that scientists have never identified. The reason I'm convinced is that sightings of the Bukit Timah Monkey Man spiked in the 1950s and 60s and then petered out. In Singapore over those two decades, urbanization exploded. The untamed forest was cut back as industrialization spread across the landscape, with high-rises replacing trees. During this time, people kept witnessing bizarre human-shaped figures, often near areas that were turning from jungle into city. A motorist almost hit one. The motorist described the creature in perfect detail because he almost ran it over. He was driving down the Bukit Timah Road, which is where the cryptid gets its name. The creature had grayish hair all over its body with long arms that weren't very proportional. At the same time, it looked powerful. The animal's body seemed to ripple with muscle, as if it was working out at a gym in the jungle. Before the motorist could do anything, the animal was gone, vanished into the forest. He never saw it again. Could the motorist have seen a mysterious creature that lived peacefully in the jungle up until humans began expanding aggressively? The reason it feels so realistic is that the sightings didn't pick up until its habitat started being erased. What if this was a real animal who was pushed into extinction by humans? It's not like it would be the first time this kind of thing happened. Just look at the dodo bird. There could still be a few monkey men left. Even though sightings decreased dramatically after the 1960s, there have been some as recently as 2020. Someone snapped a photo at a nature preserve of an unidentifiable creature standing on two legs next to a tree. That photograph went viral. It looks like every blurry photograph of Bigfoot I've ever seen. But does it show the legendary Bukit Timah monkey man? Let me know what you think in the comments. The yaoi of Australia's outback. Creatures similar to Bigfoot can be found all over the globe. There are so many Bigfoot alternatives that I'm starting to think these creatures may have once ruled the world. There's the Sasquatch in Canada, the Skunk Ape in Florida, the Yeti in the Himalayas, and in Australia, they have the yaoi. From the moment Europeans settled in the Queensland region of Australia, they started seeing the yaoi. Long before that, tens of thousands of years earlier, Australia's indigenous Aboriginal people were encountering the yaoi on a regular basis. They passed down stories through countless generations of an enormous beast they called the Hairy Man of the Woods. Since Australia doesn't have any monkeys, the Aboriginal people didn't have anything other than themselves to compare the creature to. In modern times, the yaoi is still being encountered by Australians. In December of 2021, three men nearly jumped out of their skins when they came face to face with one of these legendary cryptids on a dark street. Sterling Slowcock Bennett said they were in utter disbelief of what they were seeing. He and his friend Seamus Fitzgerald, along with a third man, all worked on a Queensland plantation together when they saw the beast. They encountered the creature while on their way back to camp. They first noticed something slouched underneath a streetlamp. It had long arms and an ape-like face. But the men didn't think they were looking at a monster or a monkey. Their interpretations kept shifting from an animal to a man. They thought maybe it was a boar or a drunk guy. It was really hairy, though, and the scene just didn't make sense. It was as if their brains couldn't register what they were looking at. The three men slowly approached the mysterious figure. Their brains just could not come to terms with the fact they were looking at what appeared to be a hybrid gorilla-human. Once the three men got close enough, the yaoi took off. And not like a man running, it took off like a monkey, flinging itself into the shadows and disappearing. It was such a powerful and profound experience that Seamus Fitzgerald was left shaken and questioning reality. He had never experienced something paranormal or strange like that in his whole life. He said he hardly slept that night, and nothing was the same after. He saw something he had never believed in, and it changed him in a big way. If you've ever seen a ghost, maybe, or a UFO in the sky, you know the feeling. When you see the impossible, or when you encounter something that isn't supposed to exist, it has an effect on your mind. It was especially strange for these three guys because they already knew the legend of the yaoi and thought it was nothing but a fairy tale. Seeing it in the flesh was enough to make Seamus Fitzgerald begin investigating it on his own. Seamus learned that the earliest European accounts came from 1790, but the Aboriginal accounts go back to the Kuku Yolandi tribe of northern Queensland. That tribe is still around today, and they claim there was a time when they coexisted with the yaoi, like early Homo sapiens living alongside Neanderthals. Could the yaoi be a primitive human, maybe like Homo erectus? And could there have been a time when similar species roamed Australia? It was around 60,000 years ago when Earth was home to at least five distinct human species, possibly more. Scientists still don't know all of the different humans who have shared this planet. We are the only ones left today, but there used to be lots of us, and we were all a little different from one another. According to the Kuku Yolandi's lore, there were two different types of yaoi. One could grow up to 10 feet tall, but the other capped out at around 5 feet tall. That sounds like two different species, but were they human? Ancient Aboriginal cave art depicts tall, hairy humanoid beings alongside regular people. That seems to confirm what the Kuku Yolandi's say about living alongside the yaoi in peace. Homo sapiens lived alongside Neanderthals, and the same for the Denisovans. What if the yaoi was just another form of human living in harmony with the natives? It's certainly possible, and there are more than enough sightings, but some of them are just downright bizarre. Check out this recorded sighting from 1842. The natives of Australia believe in this being they describe as resembling a man, with long white hair hanging down from the head over the features, long arms ending in talons, and feet turned backwards. This account suggests the yaoi's feet face the wrong way so that its tracks confuse people who try to hunt it. Unlike many other cryptids, the sightings of the yaoi have never stopped. Dean Harrison from Australian Yaoi Research said hundreds of people have reported their sightings in recent years. Dean has even seen one himself. According to Dean's firsthand experience, it was like nothing he had ever seen in his whole life. He got dangerously close to it, and then it roared like King Kong. He thought he was going to die because the yaoi was going to attack him. It started running towards him, but then ran past Dean into the trees and was gone. Just like Seamus, the encounter changed Dean's life forever. So, what do you think? Does the yaoi exist? Do these eyewitness accounts convince you that the paranormal is sometimes just normal? Could cryptids like the yaoi, Bigfoot, and the skunk ape represent a lost lineage in human history? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for watching! Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you soon for more amazing stories. Bye!