A Monster In Loch Ness?

Megamouth shark
Unknown creatures of great size and wonderment continue to turn up, such as the "megamouth" shark, which was first identified as recently as 1976.
Fantastic Creatures
The first evidence that a fabled donkey-like creature existed in the heart of the Congo appeared in Henry Morton Stanley's 1860 book In Darkest Africa. Stanley wrote that the Wambutti pygmies, who lived in the Ituri forests, "knew a donkey and called it 'atti.' They say that they sometimes catch them in pits. What they can find to eat is a wonder. They eat leaves." But no one had ever heard of asses in the Congo. The only member of the horse family known from the region was the zebra, and zebras don't live in forests, especially the deep jungle where the pygmies hunted.

Intrigued by Stanley's report, Sir Harry Johnston, then Governor of Uganda, questioned some pygmies he met in 1899. "They at once understood what I meant," he wrote, "and pointing to a zebra-skin and a live mule, they informed me that the creature in question . . . was like a mule with zebra stripes on it." When they showed him the elusive creature's cloven-footed tracks, Johnston changed his mind. "I disbelieved them," he wrote, "and imagined that we were merely following a forest-eland." (The eland is a large African antelope.) Finally, when he got hold of a skin, Johnston changed his mind yet again: "Upon receiving this skin, I saw at once what [it] was -- namely, a close relation to the giraffe."

Okapi The antelope - donkey - anteater - giraffe, otherwise known as the okapi.

From that skin, a pair of skulls, and the pygmies' tales, Johnston was able to conceive what the mysterious animal must look like. It was a strange beast. As the zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans has noted, it reminded one of those mythical creatures comprised of the body parts of various animals. It was like a large antelope but with no visible horns; it had ears similar to but larger than a donkey's; its hindquarters were striped like those of a zebra; and it had an anteater's long tongue.

Could a more fantastical beast be imagined? Few Europeans believed it existed, but Johnston's persistence paid off. In the early part of this century, the animal finally became known to science as the okapi. Named for Johnston, Okapia johnstoni is a heavy-bodied animal with a coat of reddish chestnut, yellowish-white cheeks, and thighs ringed with alternating stripes of cream and purplish black. Johnston's last guess about this oddball creature was right -- it is related to the giraffe. To bring to light a huge, unknown mammal in this century astounded the world. As one scientist has written, we today have no idea of "the romance surrounding the discovery of the Okapi, nor of the excitement caused in natural history circles, first by the vague reports of its presence, and later by its actual finding."


Those who disbelieve in the Loch Ness monster and other fabulous creatures would do well to remember the okapi, as well as certain points surrounding its discovery. To wit:


Narwhals For centuries savvy merchants sold narwhal tusks as the horns of the fabled unicorn.
Legends often hold some truth. In the Middle Ages, ivory horns supposedly taken from unicorns were peddled to European royalty for 20 times their weight in gold. Few if any collectors knew that these long, spiraled tusks came from an actual animal, the narwhal, a cetacean that lives in the Arctic. Scholars believe that the remarkably human aspect that the heads of seals and manatees rising above the waves can take on may have given rise to tales of the mermaid, the fabled half-woman, half-fish of the deep. While traveling across Arabia on his return from China in 1294, Marco Polo heard of a bird on Madagascar that was so large it could carry elephants aloft in its talons. Baseless? Nope. Until they went extinct about 1,000 years ago, Madagascar's elephant birds were the largest birds that ever lived. Though they couldn't lift an elephant, they did stand ten feet tall and weigh close to half a ton.

Experiment with Sonar
Expand your mind with "Hot Science," a fun, interactive way to delve into the world of science. (For ages 9 and up.)

How can you "see" a lake bottom or sea floor if the water is too muddy, too dark, or too deep? You can't, right? Well, not with your eyes. But you can "see" with sound waves. See below.



Pictish carvings of creature Carvings of this unidentified animal, made by the ancient inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands some 1,500 years ago, are the earliest evidence that Loch Ness harbors a strange aquatic creature.
Birth of a Legend
by Stephen Lyons

"Many a man has been hanged on less evidence than there is for the Loch Ness Monster."
-- G.K. Chesterton
When the Romans first came to northern Scotland in the first century A.D., they found the Highlands occupied by fierce, tattoo-covered tribes they called the Picts, or painted people. From the carved, standing stones still found in the region around Loch Ness, it is clear the Picts were fascinated by animals, and careful to render them with great fidelity. All the animals depicted on the Pictish stones are lifelike and easily recognizable -- all but one. The exception is a strange beast with an elongated beak or muzzle, a head locket or spout, and flippers instead of feet. Described by some scholars as a swimming elephant, the Pictish beast is the earliest known evidence for an idea that has held sway in the Scottish Highlands for at least 1,500 years -- that Loch Ness is home to a mysterious aquatic animal.

In Scottish folklore, large animals have been associated with many bodies of water, from small streams to the largest lakes, often labeled Loch-na-Beistie on old maps. These water-horses, or water-kelpies, are said to have magical powers and malevolent intentions. According to one version of the legend, the water-horse lures small children into the water by offering them rides on its back. Once the children are aboard, their hands become stuck to the beast and they are dragged to a watery death, their livers washing ashore the following day.

The earliest written reference linking such creatures to Loch Ness is in the biography of Saint Columba, the man credited with introducing Christianity to Scotland. In A.D. 565, according to this account, Columba was on his way to visit a Pictish king when he stopped along the shore of Loch Ness. Seeing a large beast about to attack a man who was swimming in the lake, Columba raised his hand, invoking the name of God and commanding the monster to "go back with all speed." The beast complied, and the swimmer was saved.

When Nicholas Witchell, a future BBC correspondent, researched the history of the legend for his 1974 book The Loch Ness Story, he found about a dozen pre-20th-century references to large animals in Loch Ness, gradually shifting in character from these clearly mythical accounts to something more like eyewitness descriptions.

Daily News front page The Loch Ness Monster has been headline news all over the world for more than 60 years.

But the modern legend of Loch Ness dates from 1933, when a new road was completed along the shore, offering the first clear views of the loch from the northern side. One April afternoon, a local couple was driving home along this road when they spotted "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface." Their account was written up by a correspondent for the Inverness Courier, whose editor used the word "monster" to describe the animal. The Loch Ness Monster has been a media phenomenon ever since.

Public interest built gradually during the spring of 1933, then picked up sharply after a couple reported seeing one of the creatures on land, lumbering across the shore road. By October, several London newspapers had sent correspondents to Scotland, and radio programs were being interrupted to bring listeners the latest news from the loch. A British circus offered a reward of £20,000 for the capture of the beast. Hundreds of boy scouts and outdoorsmen arrived, some venturing out in small boats, others setting up deck chairs and waiting expectantly for the monster to appear.


Wetherell Big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell
The excitement over the monster reached a fever pitch in December, when the London Daily Mail hired an actor, film director, and big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to track down the beast. After only a few days at the loch, Wetherell reported finding the fresh footprints of a large, four-toed animal. He estimated it to be 20 feet long. With great fanfare, Wetherell made plaster casts of the footprints and, just before Christmas, sent them off to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis. While the world waited for the museum zoologists to return from holiday, legions of monster hunters descended on Loch Ness, filling the local hotels. Inverness was floodlit for the occasion, and traffic jammed the shoreline roads in both directions.

The bubble burst in early January, when museum zoologists announced that the footprints were those of a hippopotamus. They had been made with a stuffed hippo foot -- the base of an umbrella stand or ashtray. It wasn't clear whether Wetherell was the perpetrator of the hoax or its gullible victim. Either way, the incident tainted the image of the Loch Ness Monster and discouraged serious investigation of the phenomenon. For the next three decades, most scientists scornfully dismissed reports of strange animals in the loch. Those sightings that weren't outright hoaxes, they said, were the result of optical illusions caused by boat wakes, wind slicks, floating logs, otters, ducks, or swimming deer.

Saw Something, They Did


Nevertheless, eyewitnesses continued to come forward with accounts of their sightings -- more than 4,000 of them, according to Witchell's estimate. Most of the witnesses described a large creature with one or more humps protruding above the surface like the hull of an upturned boat. Others reported seeing a long neck or flippers. What was most remarkable, however, was that many of the eyewitnesses were sober, level-headed people: lawyers and priests, scientists and school teachers, policemen and fishermen -- even a Nobel Prize winner.


Loch Ness Monster, the Scottish legend 

loch ness monster

Where is it

Loch Ness and it monster are both found in northern Scotland
nessie
 
What is it
 
Loch Ness is part of the Great Glen, an enormous fissure in the earth that just about splits Scotland into two. There are a series of lochs, rivers and canals that link the Atlantic with the North Sea. this is the most eastern of these.
It is the largest freshwater lake in the Britain. It is twenty four miles long and a maximum of one and a half miles wide. Its maximum depth is around 750 feet and its average depth 450 feet. Because the waters are very cold, and also very cloudy it is difficult to see underwater more than a few feet. So there is a lot of murky water in which Nessie could hide

Monster legend

Said to have started with an account of Saint Columba, in 565 A.D rescuing a swimmer from a  lake creature. From then on stories of such a creature emerged periodically, but little is actually recorded until the 20th century
It was only after1933, when a new road was built along the lake shore and people were first able to visit the area in large numbers, that reports of sightings really took off

Mackay's and Campbell 1933

The MacKays owned a pub at Drumnadrochit, and on April 14th saw an "enormous animal" in the Loch. They told the man responsible for controlling salmon fishing in the Loch, a Alex Campbell. Campbell, because of his job spent a lot of time observing the Loch, and he saw Nessie a number of times.
Campbell put it at 30 feet long and described it as having "a long, tapering neck, about 6 feet long, and a smallish head with a serpentine look about it, and a huge hump behind..."
 
scot nessie3.jpg (9081 bytes)

Hugh Gray photo 1933

The monster was first photographed by a Hugh Gray in 1933. Gray claims "I immediately got my camera ready and snapped the object which was then two to three feet above the surface of the water. I did not see any head, for what I took to be the front parts were under the water, but there was considerable movement from what seemed to be the tail."

The Surgeons photo

This photo was the most famous of them all, and was reputedly taken by a surgeon who was a pillar of the establishment,  Colonel Robert Wilson.
Christain Spurling later admitted that he had taken part in a hoax. He made the confession on his death bed in 1993 when he was aged 90. His story was that he had helped make a model out of a toy submarine and photographed the model. Spurling claimed that his stepbrother, Ian Wetherell, and Ian's father, Marmaduke ("Duke") Wetherell, had been hired by the Daily Mail to find Nessie. They made their "monster" out of a 14 inch toy submarine and plastic wood. The photo was taken so seriously that they dared not own up to the hoax at the time
You can take you pick as to whether this confession is proof that the photo is a fake or not.

Seen on land 1934

Arthur Grant, a veterinary student, saw the thing crossing the road as he rode along on his motorbike. His decryption matched that of a Plesiosaurus - small head, long neck, big body with flippers and a tail. The Plesiosaurus, a relative of the dinosaur, has been thought to be extinct for some 65 million years.

On moving film in 1960

An indistinct moving picture was taken by an an aeronautical engineer, Tim Dinsdale in 1960. The film may not have convinced the world, but Dinsdale gave up his job, and spent the next twenty years trying to prove they existed. He saw it twice more, but never got the photographic proof

Sonar Sweeps in 1970

The American Academy of Applied Science, funded a search by Dr Robert Rines, using sonar and automatic cameras. In 1972 one of their cameras photographed, in the murk, what appeared to be a flipper about 6 feet long on just four frames of film.
Various sonar contacts followed, but it was not until 1975 that they got a vague, very blurred image of  what might possibly have been the face
 

Submarines

In more recent years mini submarines have tried to find Nessie, without success In   1987, 20 cruisers methodically swept the Loch with sonar equipment bouncing sound waves from the surface down to the bottom and electronically recording any contacts. Many salmon were found, but no Nessie.

Conclusion

None of the evidence so far shows proof of Nessie's existence.
On the other hand the waters are big enough and deep enough to hide such a creature
And there again it is impossible for one to exist, there would have to be a breeding population of say at least 10 to 20.
Certainly no bones or bodies have been found, so the myth lives on.