Tag: Loch Ness Monster

The Biggest Search for the Loch Ness Monster in over fifty years is underway. My only question is, WHY???

The legend of the Loch Ness Monster dates back at least to the year 565 CE when a Christian missionary named Saint Columba traveling near the loch used the power of God to drive a colossal beast back into the water. For the next 1400 years there were occasional local stories about the beastie but to the world at large the Loch Ness monster remained little known.

Loch Ness in Scotland as seen from the air. It’s really not that big and for a ‘monster’ to hide there all these centuries? (Credit: Wikivoyage)

That all changed in the 1930s when first there was a sighting by the manageress of the Drumnadrochit Hotel that was reported in the press as a ‘water beast’ in the loch. But the Loch Ness monster really came to the attention of the world in 1934 when a photo of the ‘monster’ was purportedly taken a London gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson and published in the Daily Mail.

First published in The Daily Mail in April of 1934 this image from Loch Ness made the monster a household word. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

That photo, see above, showed a long necked, large bodied creature reminiscent of something from the age of the dinosaurs. Based on Doctor Wilson’s photo the idea that ‘Nessie’ was a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction of the dinosaurs took hold and since then many attempts have been undertaken to obtain concrete evidence of the monster’s existence.

An aquatic reptile from the age of the dinosaurs the plesiosaur has become the ‘de facto’ Loch Ness Monster. (Credit: Dinosaur Database)

As the years went by those searches became ever more technically advanced with motion picture cameras and even sonar being used to find Nessie. All to no avail as expedition after expedition failed to find anything more than grainy images of something causing ripples in the still waters of the loch. The last big search for the monster was back in 1972 when over a hundred observers spent days keeping watch on every stretch of the 40-kilometer long loch. Nothing was found. Nessie remained a mystery.

In 1969 a miniature submarine was even launched in the loch to try to find ‘Nessie’. It found nothing! (Credit: The Independent)

Which is hardly surprising because, in addition to no solid evidence, there are many good arguments against any group of really large animals living in the loch, especially leftovers from the age of the dinosaurs. First off, the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago but Loch Ness is a glacial lake formed during the ice ages and is less that 100,000 year old! So how did a group of plesiosaurs survive for 66 million years while waiting for Loch Ness to form?

Loch Ness formed back during the ice age as a glacier gouged a deep canyon in the Earth. When the glacier melted it left a lake that we now call Loch Ness. Therefore Loch Ness is less than 100,000 years old and could not have protected any plesiosaurs from the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Even more troubling, Loch Ness is not a very fertile body of water, there’s very little vegetation to serve as the basis of a food chain. It’s been estimated that the supply of food in the loch could not support more than a dozen large Nessie sized animals, far to small for a breeding population. And last of all, that very famous picture of the monster taken in 1934 was finally revealed to be a hoax. The last survivor of the original group that made the photograph confessed in a 1999 book that the monster was in fact a toy submarine they’d bought at Woolworth’s and to which they added a plastic head and neck. The toy was then floated in the loch and several photos taken, Doctor Wilson didn’t even take the pictures but he was in on the hoax, passing the images along to the Daily Mail. Ever since the image had first been published experts had pointed out that there was nothing in the picture but the creature making it impossible to judge how big the thing was.

The reality of that famous picture of Nessie. (Credit: PBS)

Still none of that has stopped people from trying to find the beastie. And now the biggest hunt since 1972 is ready to try again and again with the latest in technology. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (LNIB) has joined forces with Loch Ness Exploration (LNE) to again cover the loch with more than a hundred pairs of eyes but this time they will also have drones surveying the loch from above, some with infrared cameras to help spot Nessie by body heat. (By the way, if Nessie is a reptile then it’d be cold-blooded and invisible in the infrared!)

So here we go again. Another search that will undoubtedly find a few ‘tantalizing hints’ but no real evidence. (Credit: CNN)

Thanks to the Internet even people around the world can join in. Volunteers sitting at home can observe the loch through one of the many cameras that are being set up. If anything unusual is spotted the volunteer can then raise an alarum so that more people and instruments are concentrated to the site of the possible sighting. The ‘researchers’ running this expedition, which has been dubbed ‘the quest’ have even promised that all of the findings will be collated and analyzed for publishing.

The only good thing to say about Nessie is that the monster does bring tourists to Scotland! (Credit: Time)

Why? I’m sorry but I have to ask that question. If there were a group of large animals living in what is actually a small body of water they would surely have been discovered by now. A million people a year visit Loch Ness and every one of them, even the doubters at least look for Nessie. And by this time wouldn’t a dead carcass of one of them washed ashore. Let’s not forget that plesiosaurs are air breathing reptiles, so like dolphins they have to raise their heads above the surface of the water on a regular basis.

Just this year a dozen dead whales have floated onto east coast beaches. If there was some large animal living in Loch Ness, after all these centuries wouldn’t the dead body of one of them been washed ashore??? (Credit: NPR)

So by now it’s really time to give up on Nessie. We’ve looked in every corner of Loch Ness and the creature simply isn’t there. In fact we humans now so dominate this planet that there is little chance, very little chance of there being any animal larger than ourselves existing that isn’t known to science.

A still from the famous movie of Bigfoot. A man in a gorilla suit, what do you want to bet? Like all mythical creatures it’s difficult to separate the hoaxes from honest sightings and in the end no real evidence of anything! (Credit: MendoFever)

And the money that is being spent on searches of Loch Ness, or searches for Bigfoot or other mythical creatures, could be better spent on expeditions in the Amazon or other under-explored areas of the world. If carried out by actual naturalists such expeditions could easily find a hundred totally new species of insect with another hundred of other kinds of invertebrate and maybe a few vertebrate species as well.

Biologists estimate the half of the world’s insects are still waiting to be discovered. What if the money being wasted on Nessie and Bigfoot and all the other mythical creatures was used to look for creatures we know exist. (Credit: Etsy)

That money would then actually serve to increase our knowledge of the natural world, instead of just being wasted looking for something that was never there to begin with.

The Loch Ness Monster is in the news again. Is there any actual evidence to support the existence of this legendary creature?

The Loch Ness Monster may not get as much publicity as Flying Saucers or Bigfoot do but it’s really the same sort of phenomenon. A few hints of something strange in the historical record, a few sketchy sightings of something that can’t be identified. Once a couple of stories are published in the press it suddenly seems as if everybody is talking about it. Then the number of people who claim to have seen it explodes. Before long the hoaxers join in and you lose all sense of what is legitimate evidence and what has been fabricated in order to make a quick buck.

Toss a hubcap in the air and you too can see a flying saucer! (Credit: SETI Institute)

Finally, after years of sightings with no hard physical evidence to back anything up the public splits into two distinct groups, those who are true believers and those who think it’s all a bunch of humbug. This state of affairs can go on for years with accusations of government cover-ups being added in as an excuse for the lack of real proof.

For the Loch Ness Monster the earliest known report of the creature is from a biography of the Irish monk Saint Columba written about the year 565 CE. In that account a ‘water beast’ in Loch Ness has killed a man and threatens one of the saint’s followers. Columba saves his companion by making the sign of the cross and commanding the beast to leave. Believers in the monster point to this story along with other Celtic folklore about water ‘kelpies’ as evidence that the beast has lived in the loch for centuries.

Legend has it that St. Columba chased a ‘water beast’ from Loch Ness. (Credit: Anomalies)

The monster, commonly known as Nessie first gained worldwide attention in the 1930s with a description of an encounter by George Spicer and his wife who described the creature as being a long snake or eel like creature some 8 meters in length and a bit over a meter in height. Although the Spicers saw no limbs on the creature it crawled across the road and disappeared into the loch.

It was just a year later on the 21st of April 1934 that the most famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster first appeared in the British newspaper the ‘Daily Mail’. The photo came to be known as ‘The Surgeon’s Photograph’ because the Daily Mail had obtained it from a London gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson although significantly Wilson refused to have his name associated with the image.

The Daily Mail headline showing the Surgeon’s Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster. Notice how there is nothing else in the image to give you an idea of the size of the ‘Monster’. (Credit: PBS)

The photo caused an immediate sensation and quickly led to the best-known explanation of the monster as a plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile that went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. The idea that a small population of these creatures had somehow survived extinction and was now inhabiting Loch Ness, and perhaps other lakes around the world gained considerable popularity.

Plesiosaurs are aquatic reptiles that are considered to have become extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. (Credit: Dinosaur Jungle)
‘Champ’ in Lake Champlain is considered to be a relative of the Loch Ness Monster. (Credit: CBS News)

It was only decades later in 1994 that the photo was revealed as a complete fake. The body of the creature was nothing more than a toy submarine bought at Woolworth’s department store to which a neck and head made of wood putty were added. The one-meter long counterfeit was simply floated into Loch Ness and photographed, an object lesson in how easy it can be to fool millions of people who want to be fooled.

Of course one fake, however famous doesn’t mean that there isn’t something unusual in Loch Ness. After all a lot of people have reported seeing something and they’re not all hoaxes.

Indeed they’re not; in fact there have been some legitimate scientific attempts to discover what, if anything is hiding in Loch Ness and a few of them have produced tantalizing hints of something. Perhaps the best known is the 1972 expedition organized by the Academy of Applied Science and led by Robert H. Rines. The team employed sonar apparatus in a methodical search of the loch for any large objects beneath the surface. Then, any time a large object was detected by the sonar an underwater camera with a floodlight recorded an image of the object. On August 8th the sonar detected a moving target some 6 to 9 meters in length. At the same time the underwater camera took a picture of what looked like diamond shaped ‘fin’.

Two images of the ‘Fins’ of the Loch Ness Monster taken in 1972. (Credit: MIT)

That’s the best scientific evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness monster. Problem is that the 6-9 meter target could very easily have been a school of small fish while the picture of the fin is so blurry that it could be almost anything. Still, a half dozen other investigations have produced nothing better.

Now a new approach has been used in the search for Nessie, environmental-DNA (eDNA). eDNA works this way, samples from any body of water will contain some genetic material from all of the species of animal or plant that live in that body of water. Analyzing that DNA tells scientists what species live in that water without having to actually observe or capture a single specimen.

Any animal whose excretions wind up in a body of water can be discovered using eDNA. (Credit: WildlifeSNPits)

Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand have performed such an analysis on over 200 water samples from various places in Loch Ness. In particular the scientists were looking for the presence of reptile DNA that would provide evidence for the existence of a population of plesiosaurs.

The study found DNA from some 3,000 species of plant and animal, even bacteria but no indication for reptile DNA of any kind. They also failed to find DNA for large species of fish such as shark, catfish or sturgeon, animals that have been suggested as possibly being responsible for the monster sightings.

Professor Neil Gemmell with a sample of water for Loch Ness. No Nessie DNA was found. (Credit: Time Magazine)

What the scientists did find was the DNA of the well-known animals of northern Scotland, strong evidence that there is nothing unusual in the loch. The scientists also found what they considered to be a large amount of eel DNA in every sample tested leading the team leader Neil Gemmill to suggest that a giant eel might be the best candidate for Nessie. “It’s a least plausible,” Dr. Gemmill asserts.

The Loch Ness Monster nothing more than a big eel? Not much to show for almost 1500 years of hullabaloo.