Back in October 1987 we had the million pound Operation Deepscan run by Adrian Shine. It was a worldwide media event as attention focused on what a line of cruise boats armed with Lowrance sonar units would reveal in the depths of the loch below. If you jump four minutes and zero seconds into this typical media piece on the Loch Ness Monster at this link, it shows an archive piece of Adrian discussing the kind of sonar contact the operation would be looking for. To quote Adrian:
What we really want to see right now is a lovely crescent shape about half way down the chart.
So has Adrian's wish now been fulfilled? That looks like a lovely crescent shape to me. Now speaking of Adrian, in the light of Cruise Loch Ness producing a second, but not as good, sonar image, Craig Wallace of Kongsberg sonar products has offered their services in a more precise search. It looks like my previous article where I suggested his company's products could make a return visit has become a bit prescient.
Well, not quite, he also added "If any groups would be willing to sponsor the attempt, I would love the opportunity to attend with these types of sonar". Sponsors means money and since I stated previously that renting out their equipment and experts could run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, that needs a commercial company or government agency to stump up the cash. Like Operation Deepscan, the equivalent of the Highland and Islands Development Board could stump up the cash to restimulate the Highland economy after the covid-19 recession. If they get stingy and just go for a week's operation, this could backfire.
Going back to Adrian, Kongsberg used the local expertise of Adrian and the Loch Ness Project when they last ran tests here. If this becomes an "official" search for the Loch Ness Monster, who do you want as the spokesman for the hunt? A believer or an unbeliever? My money would be on Steve Feltham. The Loch Ness Project can still offer their services, but they are never going to interpret any sonar data as a large, unknown animal! And, Steve, catfish do not tend to be 15-20 feet long, the record for a catfish is about nine feet long. Whatever this is, it would eat that catfish for lunch.
The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
I think deepscan was more positive than people make out.. Three large contacts that surprised Mr Lawrence and his crew. I cud never understand Mr shine saying they cud be seals.. there was a huge volume of people around the loch that day so seals wud of bin noticed by someone... So what wer these three contacts that Mr Lawrence said wer bigger than sharks but smaller than whales mmmm intrestin...cheers
ReplyDeleteCall me a science freak, but what sort of shark? What sort of whale? Dogfish - 3ft, blue whale - 98ft........
DeleteI agree. They go to all that trouble, spend one million quid and then try and debunk it all away!
Delete{Best Adrian Shine impersonation} What we have here is Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus, which knocked a tree into the loch.
ReplyDeleteI have often thought that as well.
DeleteHow far apart were the 3 contacts on operation deepscan?
ReplyDeleteNo idea.
DeleteExcellent! I do appreciate Shines work around the Loch but these new contacts deserve his consideration and I would like to hear his take on the new contacts.
ReplyDeleteThey do not appear as seals to me.
Seals could dive that deep but need a reason. Also as you know seals do not live in Loch Ness.
DeleteHas Shine said anything else about this ‘nice crescent shape’ he so yearned for? (Other than the tree he was on about.
ReplyDeleteJust in time to dismiss all this sonar nonsense, dependable sceptic, Darren Naish, writes an article telling us how Operation Deepscan disproved all this nonsense in 1987. Nevertheless he admits the three sonar contacts are "unexplained", but then proceeds to explain them to us as perfectly natural.
ReplyDeleteI resect Darren Naish as a science writer, but in this case I just don't see where he's coming from. I understand if the plesiosaur idea is too "exotic" for him. But isn't the most likely explanation for eyewitnesses and sonar at the very least some kind of large fish, rather than "there's nothing there to begin with"?
DeleteNaish is absolutely convinced, based on scientific principles, that there's nothing to see here. That's fine, though his dismissive attitude doesn't further the case for believers or skeptics. We shouldn't expect a sonar trace to compare to a DNA sample or body washed ashore. That's the gold standard.
DeleteNaish invalidates himself by saying the plesiosaur "is too exotic".
DeleteHe should closely examine that encounter of that ww2 disfigured diver who encountered Nessie a yard above him,,..he described a classic plesiosaur,with all four limbs/ flippers. Naish are you listening??
Seeing Steve Feltham as a young man makes me appreciate how much time has passed since he set up camp at Loch Ness. Back when Steve believed the "Flipper" pic was genuine, as did I. Who knows, the LNM may still posses some type of flippers or fins. Will we still see Steve there in his rocking chair overlooking the Loch with steely eyes in 20 years? Only time will tell. Adrian Shine got his wish after all these years
ReplyDeleteThe three sonar targets on deepscan wer obvs quite sizeable.. While it's possible that on rare occasions summit comes up from the sea..whats the chances things came in from the sea the same time as deepscan was getting done? Not much me thinks.. I think the targets wer more likely to be permanent residents in Loch ness... Cheers
ReplyDeleteAccording to the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald, Craig Wallace said after the second recent sonar contact that he would be willing to launch a new sonar search at Loch Ness. He is a senior applications specialist at Kongsberg Maritime AS and is the person who discovered the "lost" prop monster used in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
DeletePerhaps the two recent sonar contacts are about to prompt a new period of investigative activity at the loch. If so, this will be good news for believers, agnostics and sceptics alike.
Chris Morris
Ah, just as I predicted in my previous article. He did add a caveat however. I have updated this article with related thoughts.
DeleteGame changer.
ReplyDeleteYou have a front row center seat Steve. I hope they bring the search to the water column with the best sonar and you get to be there.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteSo, if I read into the revision of your review correctly, reading between the lines, are you suggesting/hinting that you alone are the obvious candidate to front an unbiased sonar hunt here at Loch Ness Roland?
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, laughing aside, your talk of the Highland council potentially stumping up for a major sonar expedition is a pretty impressive leap of the imagination.
Relatively remote as we are compared to Glasgow, we too had the impact of covid on the Highland council economy, and unfortunately our Highland council is skint.
They are pretty much currently calulating which street lights they can afford to turn off to try and save a bit of money in order to make it through the winter.
What was it you just said?
"If they get stingy and just go for a week's operation, this could backfire."
Really?
Anyway, meanwhile, turns out these sonar contacts are starting to look more like a "game changer" after all aren't they.
I predict that whatever happens next will happen quietly.
...
NO, you can have all the glory, Steve. I prefer you to Adrian telling the world there is nothing there. Just so long as you don't go on about catfish. lol
DeleteI am being serious about government funding here. The Highlands and Islands Development Board gave Operation Deepscan a cool £1 million to fund the operation. They were a government quango doling out taxpayers money to stimulate the Highland economy. If the Highland cooncil are no good, think more broadly Steve!
BTW, £1M in 1987 is worth nearly £3M in today's money. A tidy sum for Nessie research, Mr. Feltham. So don't dismiss it so easily. The authorities are desperate to revive the Highland economy after this covid debacle.
So let us see where Mr Craig Wallace's not so quiet pronouncements take us.
You have never heard me telling the world there is nothing there!
DeleteGoogle like finding things, and mapping things... they might be interested in sponsoring a Kongsberg? Somebody on here must know somebody who knows somebody who knows Larry or Sergey? @Steve F?
ReplyDeleteDown to money and who has deep, generous pockets
DeleteDeep Scan = Deep Pockets. Too bad there's no 2020 version of '50s Texas millionaire Tom Slick, who had a thing for hunting cryptids. Elon Musk is too busy going to Mars. Disney would be averse to spending money in today's climate, to set up an Epcot village around the Loch. And no university or scientific society would risk their reputations by sponsoring such a search. 3D sonar and HD cameras might provide evidence, but no one is about to pay for them without evidence -- a vicious circle.
DeleteNo evidence, no search. Classic Catch-22 situation. And the evidence there is, is regarded by agnostics and skeptics as highly questionable and inconclusive at best. Maybe Jeff Bezos of Amazon would be interested, after all, he funded the recovery of Apollo Saturn V Moon rocket engines from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and that took some money. What a coup that would be for him to help solve the mystery of the Loch and surely turn it into some profit. And who has more money than Bezos? Well, maybe God or Musk do. In the end, like everything else in life, it's all about the money
DeleteTony Harmsworth says we cant put a size on a sonar contact so 4 me its pointless having another sonar sweep, it wont proove anything.
ReplyDeleteI think they're talking about using more advanced 3D sonar that can actually show the shape of the target instead of just a crescent "blob"...
DeleteYes, but the manufacturers themselves estimated the size at up to 20 feet remember.
DeleteDidnt the BBC claim a game changer when they swept the loch with sonar and covered every area and found nothing?
ReplyDeleteGeza the BBC one was a bit misleading!! They didn't do it in one go.. they did it over three days I believe!anything cud of swam in or out at night in the parts of the Loch they had gone over with sonar whilst the sonar operators wer aving dinner or supping tennents and sleeping.. Ha . So in my humble if anything was pointless it was that!!
ReplyDeleteThere has not been a 100% coverage of the Loch in any search. Even Deepscan left pockets and areas uncovered in their sonar scan. That many boats may just drive any Nessies to a hiding place and wait out all the commotion.
DeleteSearching the Loch in different areas over three days is inconclusive. Not much point when it is so easy for large animals to travel across the Loch at any given moment. That BBC search is full of too many holes. If they didn't discover the sunken Nessie prop then how close they did search?
The only way to be sure would be to cover 100% of the Loch and then do it all again. Every bay, crevice, and cavity of the Loch walls and bottom would have to be included. Not an easy task.
Plus Adrian has always said that deepscan covered 65% of the loch, the BBC was much less.
ReplyDeleteBut if 'Gezzas' not happy with it then maybe its best we just forget about it.
Steve Feltham so what do you think of Dickie Raynor's suggestion?
ReplyDeleteWe are still arguing over operation deepscan that was over 30 years ago.How would any new sonar sweep take us forward?
ReplyDeleteSurely sonar technology has moved on a bit? I have a hunch that military level sonar would not be able to leave room for ambiguities. The problem with this current hit, as has been the case for many years, is that it is open to too many interpretations. I personally think it is very interesting, to say the least, but it would be nice to narrow down the possibilities.
ReplyDeleteAssuming that funding can be secured, what would an ideal Kongsberg sonar search to verify these recent contacts look like?
ReplyDeleteIt could possibly show form and shape of some life form from which to extrapolate and deduce what type of creature we are dealing with.
DeleteJust been looking on the LN web cam, saw a dark object in between the 2 trees approx the middle of the screen. I clicked snapshot, but it didnt capture it. I want to say it looked like an upturned boat, but without being able to review the picture I cant be sure. As the camera updates every few seconds, i would hav eseen any marine traffic on the loch in the vicinity and I havent.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I'm kicking myself that I didnt click the button fast enough, I never expect to see anything on that camera and today I just didnt react quick enough.
Been watching it since, nothing more, but I have seen a white boat appear just below where I saw whatever it was, then next image it was across the screen. What I saw was about half to three quarters the size of the boat.
DeleteI think its one of two things:
1. Bug on the camera (though I do think I saw a wake around the object)
2. Some large object in the water
Given the camera refreshes seemingly every 10 seconds, whatever it was either submerged / travelled across the loch really quickly in 10 seconds (fast black boat perhaps, didn't see a wake behind it though) / or flew away (if its a bug on the camera lens)
They really need a better camera on there. Better resolution would have shown a bug on the lens or better details of whatever it was if its on the loch.
I have been unable to see any image on that web cam for quite some time now. How are you doing it?
Deletehttps://www.lochness.co.uk/livecam.html
Delete3D sonar scans are all well and good, but they'd need be done over the course of weeks, not days. Boats out every day. While they're at it, add HD cameras around the Loch in strategic locations.
ReplyDeleteOf course I don't see that happening here, but it's amazing what can be accomplished with ghost money and wishful thinking.
Hi Latman,
ReplyDeleteYou would be better recording the screenshot.Its a shame the snapshot did not capture the image.I have not seen anything on the webcam for 7 months.What time was did you see the dark object at.
Eoin O Faodhagain.
I saw whatever it was around 10:15 and 15 seconds (the screen cap is 25 seconds), I only noticed it just before the camera refreshed (was too busy working hah) when I did I couldn’t believe what I saw then my brain engaged my fingers but it was too late.
DeleteLike I said, could have been a bug on the lens, I did see a few bugs on the lens that morning, but none struck me as being in the loch unlike the one I missed capturing.
I too have been watching this camera (best I can when working) for a while and never saw anything before.
I spent about an hour trying to find cached images within chrome but with no luck.
I took a screenshot of *something* on the webcam a few weeks ago. I actually emailed Roland for his opinion as, clearly a) the image is of very poor quality, and yet b) as whatever-it-is simply appeared out of empty water (I have the previous screenshot too, and there's nothing around) and disappeared a few seconds later, it is hard to explain except as being something animate. And though I could not tell you how far away it is, it is a good distance across the loch and yet still very clearly visible, so it must have been of some size. Interestingly a bug appeared on the camera at the same time, so it's possible to compare the two in terms of 'depth of field' (at least to what is probably not a particularly objective degree!). At the time I only noticed the bug - I didn't clock the smaller black dot until later.
DeleteRoland very rightly pointed out that really, there's not much more you can say about such poor quality images, so I left it there! But it still intruiges me
Thanks The Latman for that.
DeleteThe way the Webcam is at the moment makes Nessie hunting is extremely more difficult, because you have no live video.When you see something of interest you have to wait and see how it is going to develop,and sometimes the image flash goes into 20 second or 30 second intervals and then the image is gone.A lot of sightings are under a minute and that leaves you with no time to see or record anything.
Eoin O Faodhagain.
Guys, webcam nessies are not for me. The odd rare one may be interesting, but they will not solve the mystery. As said before, we need one on the castle.
DeleteSonar scans will not solve the mystery either.
DeleteMaybe one in the area of Dores, where that "Huge" eel was sighted a few weeks ago. A Nessie could be a creature of habit and show itself there again.
DeleteUnknown - Sonar scans may well prove the existence of large animals residing in the loch. Higher quality sonar will be required though to give a shape and better image though. Instead of a crescent an outline and shape.
DeleteWas it not the case that the Operation Deepscan attempt in 1987 picked up two objects that could not be explained? I think Adrian Shine said that they were at depths that no air breathers would normally inhabit, although I had the impression he was not committing himself to saying what he believed the contacts actually were.
ReplyDeleteShine said that he did not understand what they were. Too small too be a whale and too big too be a shark. He said that Deepscan only covered approx 65% of the Loch. Maybe all those boats drove any Nessies into hiding away from all that commotion. The search did not cover Urquhart Bay and other areas.
DeleteApparently plesiosaurs might be amphibious.
DeleteSteve Feltham says this is a game changer. It must be then! Lets get the ball rolling, we will know the identity of these animals very soon.
ReplyDeleteSteve has been corresponding with some experts in the sonar game and he also has experience with reading sonar independently, he knows what he is talking about. Great to see him excited about this new contact.
DeleteThe mystery shall endure however....
I like your enthusiasm Gezza but very soon may not be the case. I hope so too but this mystery has been evading and elusive like crazy ! Slight clues here and there but nessie has uncanny luck on her side. A protective spell may have been cast over her decades back lol.
These sonar contacts are a great recent development though, big things are in the Loch!! And they are there now.
Operation deepscan did not cost £1 million at most it cost about £10000 - the boats were loaned for free by caley cruisers,the people who manned them volunteered for free and the sonar sets were loaned from lowrance for publicity for the company the only money that was spent was on food and accommodation for the boat crews and fuel for the boats.on the matter of the latest sonar target sound waves in water are reflected best from objects which have higher densities than the surrounding water such as the skeletons of animals or gas or air pockets in their bodies so the large target is unlikely to be one discrete animal as the flesh of its body would have the near same density as water and would reflect poorly it is highly unlikely it would have a swim bladder or lungs large enough to give a return of that size but it is far more likely that lots of small targets crowded together could give a target of the same size in other words a large shoal of fish with all of the combined gas from their swim bladders reflecting back the sound waves sizeable shoals of arctic char are known from the loch and would give such a return
ReplyDeleteI have a video where Adrian is questioned on the £1M and he did not deny it.
DeleteAlso, deep water shoaling does not happen - period.
@UNKNOWN... sorry, but your shoal explanation is nonsense.
DeleteA shoal would at best give a much a much more blurred contact, not this sharp single crescent, that would be if they were in a tight ball, at worst the image would show a multitude of crescents.
These machines are pretty good, this is clearly a contact with a single large object.
A token attempt at punctuation for Christ's sake! ...almost unreadable...sorry!
ReplyDeleteThe manufacturers of the sonar equipment used said of the first sonar contact that it was a solid object and not a shoal of fish.Obviously some people cant grasp this fact.They just do not want to accept there are unknown animals living in Loch Ness, denying sonar, photos, webcam and eyewitness accounts.These peoples answers will always be negative and flat, like a pint of beer left too long on the counter.
ReplyDeleteAlrite UNKNOWN...so if these shoals of CHAR or other fish give off this type of sonar contact deep down in the loch why isn't the cruise boat picking these contacts up more often?? They wud be a regular thing surely??? the boat skipper says he has never seen anything like it before . despite doing hourly cruises all day every day for years and going the same journey??... Cheers .. ROY
ReplyDeleteThe issue with any scan is still quite obvious: hypothetically even if you were to track an object under the water that was clearly animate, showing fluctuations in body structure indicating it was swimming, over a period of 10 years continuously, it could still not be scientifically categorised. All it can achieve is to at best assert unequivocally that there is a "monster" there. Ironically that would only move the game, as it were, back to the position of the 60s/70s when it was more universally acceptable to have a belief in... "something". We still need a photo/video/body/tissue sample to solve the mystery. The effort to acquire this may only come after sonar achieves the first step of getting the mystery taken more seriously and removes the stigma in belief. With this in mind I hope that a renewed effort to move forward with sonar searching happens sooner rather than later.
ReplyDelete@kyle...
ReplyDeleteYou say, "All it can achieve is to at best assert unequivocally that there is a "monster" there. "
That sounds like a pretty good step forward to me... game changing even.
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteI already know there is a monster in Loch Ness.
Eyewitness reports are already listed in the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register.
Eoin O Faodhagain.