Tuesday 28 July 2020

Audio Interview on the Famous Nessie Fakers




My latest online interview is with Scott Mardis on his "Monster X" channel and you can listen to that here. It is entitled "Fearless Frank and the Fakers" and I guess you can figure out who the Frank is in that title. We cover recent fake news photos from the catfish fraud by Steve Challice all the way back through Loch Ness Monster history including the infamous Frank Searle. By way of a bonus when I was at the loch last week, I produced this short video clip of where Frank used to be stationed and I give a commentary on his last days there.


During the interview, I told Scott I had met Frank Searle back in the 1980s but the details were vague now. However, I later on recalled I still had my monster watching log book from those days and dug it out to find out what I had written about Frank. Sure enough, the entry for 19th July 1982, day 4, details my bike hike over to Foyers from the Youth Hostel at Altsigh. Not an easy trip by bike, but I quote:

Decided to cycle to eastern side of loch, or Foyers, to be exact which was 24 miles away. The gear wire gave me some trouble but after miles of bike pushing I made it to the Foyers beach at about 1:15pm or a  hour trip. I set up my equipment on this pebble beach near the old aluminium works and watched till about 3pm.

Then I visited Frank Searle's exhibition just round the corner. It was an old hut affair which has newspaper clippings, drawings, articles, information sheets and his photographs on the wall. Some of the material was anti-propaganda on THE Loch Ness exhibition and Rines' expeditions. When I talked to him in his drab, adjacent caravan, he was critical of the British media and his own critics; saying that he had given up on showing his material to British newspapers, etc and now only shows them to Japanese, American and other media.

As to my suggestion that he was a complete faker, he just said that he saw what he saw (in his belief, an evolved member of the plesiosaur family) and photographed them (and in one instance, a cine film). So I bought two of his photos, stated my beliefs (shrugged his shoulders) and left.

It was not exactly an epic meeting and I never went out to meet him again. The only thing of interest to me now was this claimed cine film he took. I would like to see how that was produced but I am not aware of any medium on which that is available to view.  I am glad I get around by car now, that is for sure. As you can see, it is a good idea to keep a log of your activities around the loch as the details are sure to fade over time, especially after thirty eight years in this case.

I made three trips to the loch over that time when I was a student at Glasgow University studying Astronomy. Getting a degree from there was easier than seeing Nessie! After I graduated, the trips stopped when I started my computing career down in England for the next ten years. I probably only visited the loch a few times and certainly not for two weeks of monster hunting.

Enjoy the talk.


The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com








17 comments:

  1. I still remember in his book claiming he had seen and photographed some "baby monsters" who were scuttling from a burn into the loch, and had even tried to trap one. It was at that point I knew he was lying.

    I was 9.

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    1. Yes, he always carried a camera, so where are the pics?

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    2. The sad thing is that these fakers think they can get away with this chicanery before they are finally exposed. Such misguided behavior speaks volumes about their mentality and skewed mindset. Psychologists could have a field day with these guys. And notice how they are always men. Little men with big egos.

      Frank Searle as lovable rogue? More like buffoonish lout. Can't help but feel sorry for him though.

      You were lucky to get away from your encounter with Searle without getting punched out GB. LOL

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    3. If he had trapped one, then I would believe him.

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  2. Well, maybe they are evolved members of the plesiosaur family regardless of what the scientific community says. I don't know if any of you have been following the recent New York Times articles on UFOs; with all the pandemic and race riots hype this has strangely had a low profile, but the US Government has more or less admitted it has crashed alien spacecraft. And this after decades of the scientific community advocating budgets of billions to find and listen to ET radio signals and finding microbes on Mars and how it is scientifically impossible for aliens to reach us. So I think all bets are off on the LNM...

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    1. The US Government has not more or less admitted that. You can easily find headlines like "Pentagon Has ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made on This Earth’" but those words do not come from the Pentagon. They come from a physicist, Eric Davis, who gave a briefing to the Pentagon. He has given other briefings. He thinks the Pentagon should be spending taxpayer's money on researching wormholes for interstellar travel. Most scientists think that would be crazy.

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    2. From Frank Searle to Area 51, can you post a link to these NYT articles?

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    3. I read it, so we have the equivalent of eyewitnesses who say they saw something but do not have physical proof. So its a bit like a Nessie sighting vs a piece of Nessie. Its really down to whether you trust them or not.

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    4. Yes, how did we get from Searle to UFOs? But anyway, I never shy away from discussing another of one of my favorite subjects. This guy Eric Davis was one of the scientist involved in the paranormal research at the Skinwalker Ranch. After years of study they came away with zilch. Nowhere near offering a definitive explanation to all the paranormal activity, including UFOs manifested there. As for crashed/retrieve UFOs and their supposed occupants, I suppose it all boils down to whether one is open minded enough in the possibility of what one is told. Not full tilt gullible or wacko mind you, just open minded to accept any possibility.

      At this point the discussion and theorizing about Nessie is rather like the subject of UFOs. A lot of good maybe guesses, but no cigar.

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    5. This is the most recent article and its central theme is also applicable to the LNM and other cryptids: Do we believe in the LNM? That is the wrong question.

      It is an easy tactic to try to personally discredit individuals who provide information that goes against scientific orthodoxy and are involved in research that is not considered mainstream by the conventional scientific community which has at stake vast amounts of money for maintaining the status quo. It was Thomas S. Kuhn who argued in his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that the discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms, but the new paradigm was not adopted until essentially the old guard scientists died off...

      https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/insider/UFO-reporting.html

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    6. Replying to Olrik's post that mentioned Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn may have been right in some cases but not all. Special and general relativity were large paradigm changes that were widely accepted within a decade after the evidence was obtained. Also if there were vast amounts of money available to maintain the biological status quo, how was the coelacanth allowed to slip through the net? There are plenty of young and not-so-young biologists who would just love to report on an unknown species in Loch Ness.

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  3. Total liar. Did far more harm than good. But... He put in a decent shift. If I'm being generous he probably tried to earn more fame because he felt entitled. Maybe he was there years and never saw it and wanted to shake things up? Whatever, it's clear he was a bit nuggets. Did well with the ladies though. Probably why he stuck around for so long.

    I'll listen to your interview as soon as I get the chance GB.

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    1. Did well with the ladies. Hmm...yeah. Just goes to show that some shallow-minded women like and are lured in by “Bad Boys” No matter how despicable and unattractive they are. Go figure. I wonder how many he actually bagged, or shagged as the saying goes over there. Yikes! LOL

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  4. I have a good book collection on the mystery and unfortunately Frank's photos appear in a couple of them!! How these fotos got any attention or got taken seriously surprises me.. Even as a kid I laughed at them.. Most obvious fakes ever lol. I'm surprised that sum good authors on good books I have on the mystery actually included them!.. Cheers

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  5. To my eyes Searle's first alleged LNM photo looks reasonably interesting in the sense that it doesn't look like an obvious fake. That can't be said for his other photos!

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    1. We'll never know if he genuinely saw or photographed anything mysterious, he took any truth with him to the grave.

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    2. I'd tend to agree with that Paddy. Maybe he had initial (genuine) success, but it just got more ludicrous as time went on with him.

      I have the dubious privilege of owning a signed copy of one of his books!

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