Saturday 21 August 2010

Summing up the Surgeon's Second Photo

A reprise:

In Alastair Boyd and David Martin's book, Spurling knew nothing about the second photograph of the creature submerging. The authors suggest this is because it has nothing to do with the plot but we have covered the issues with that previously.

Others have offered speculative answers by suggesting the second photo is the toy submarine submerging underwater. This is unlikely due to the destabilising effect of a one foot piece of bouyant plastic wood and the head does not look like the head on the first and famous picture (this is less of a problem if the picture is of a living creature).

The second photograph remains an inconvenient truth to those who believe the Surgeon's Photograph is a fake.

Bu the main piece of evidence calling Spurling's confession into doubt is the alleged motive for the whole episode which I will come to in the next post!

8 comments:

  1. The second picture looks like a plank of wood sticking out the water! It true that it hasn't been explained but I don't think that takes away from the explination of the first picture.

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  2. Thanks for all your comments. This and other unanswered questions regarding the Surgeon's Photograph may not kill the hoax theory, but I would have expected some kind of rational explanation which may be out there but is not forthcoming!

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  3. Well sticking my neck out (no pun intended!) I reckon the rational explination has long been forgoton or not documented by those concerned, it might even have been a first attempt they knew didn't before they got the toy sub. I wonder if there is any evidance that it was a second and not the first picture.

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  4. I agree with you Cosmic Orange. This second photograph appears to be indeed the first photograph taken, as somekind of test. Notice the whole photograph is blured, whereas the famous surgeon's photograph is actually pretty crisp and clear.

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  5. As an update, I now think the "second" picture is a bird flying from right to left across the frame. What might appear as the neck and its shadow are the wings. It was shown by Dick Raynor that you don't get shadows like that on water as rough as this, so whatever this object is, the lower part is not a shadow or reflection as we sometimes assume it is. That suggests the "neck" can't be something protruding from the water, with an associated shadow.

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    1. I note that we have two comments in a short time on an old article. Les, were you sent an alert that a comment had been added or was this coincidence?

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  6. Yes, I had "notify me" ticked so I got an email telling me a comment had been added.

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    1. I see that feature, it's blanked out for me. Then again, being comment moderator, it's probably not necessary.

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