As I was thinking about this year end review, a link to the Daily Mail coincidentally came in telling me that Nessie had been spotted five times in 2025. Not surprisingly, the word "spotted" was framed within single quotes indicating the article author was advising some caution. The information was taken from "The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register" which went into further details at this link.
Now this is an improvement on the meagre total of three sightings in 2024, though my corresponding review article last year did argue that numbers can fluctuate significantly over the decades. In fact, that review article only had one "at the loch" sighting, but evidently two more turned up later to bring it up to three. So, I expect this five to increase and I am already aware of some accounts that will indeed increase that number by a few more.
The first register account is from the 22nd March at about 7pm and is of interest and I quote the testimony of one of the eyewitnesses visiting from London:
We were right at the point where the River Tarff connects to Loch Ness, on the north bank. At first I noticed a very quiet splash sound as if something was cutting stealthily into the water and this drew my attention to the south side of the water. There I saw something moving through the water. Between 130 and 160 feet away from us. It was paler than the jet-black water around it, but in the gloom it was impossible to determine a hue.
It was large and alive and swimming in the water - it was what I can only describe as a "hump" (as people often say) kind of like if a large seal or walrus was swimming in the water but for some reason it's head was hidden, like just it's back was exposed. Kind of graceful but very slow moving like 2 to 3 meters per second. It was too dark to pick out detail on it, but it wasn't uniform, there was texture there but hard to pinpoint what exactly.
And as we watched I realised that there was a second mass in its wake, perhaps it was hidden by the wake at first, or it had risen up as it moved - it was roughly the same size and shape as the leading mass but perhaps lower in the water. There was maybe 1.5 to 2 meters gap between the humps from my line of sight. I think until I saw the second hump I was thinking it was a seal that was behaving strangely.
It went in a roughly 20⁰ (east-southeast-ish) direction, towards the deeper water of the Loch and slowly submerged as it went and disappeared. It moved very gracefully and silently. Later when we talked about it, my partner told me that from her vantage point it was clear that the two humps were on one creature, that it was one long creature.
Sunset on that day was at 6:35pm, so the eyewitness' description of "gloom" would be correct but this is countered by the estimated distance of 40 to 50 metres which affords a distance that few eyewitnesses have the privilege of seeing the creature at. Nevertheless, clear camera images with such light levels is unlikely without more specialized cameras. But the account lacks some details such as the size of the humps and the duration of the sighting.
I would think this was a prolonged duration without any head being seen, which is unusual for a seal. The appearance of the second hump removes any seal theory because if one seal in Loch Ness is uncommon, how much more then is two. Since the witness says the back was larger than a seal and more the size of a walrus, that suggests the total hump to hump length was more than four metres and that is just the parts visible above the surface!
So we are off to a good start as we move onto the register's next account from the 23rd May at about 3:40pm during the "Quest" surface watches. One of the participants took a video clip of an object in Urquhart Bay from which this still is taken. Something "long and thin" appeared intermittently in the wake of a boat entering the bay before eventually submerging after three to five minutes.
I made an educated guess as to where the person was at the time, perhaps just before the entrance to the Castle car park which places the object and boat to the right of the tip of the headland visible at the opposite side of the bay. That would place the distance to the object at about a mile away with the distance decreasing over a number of minutes. I could not find the original video sequence and so not much more can be done with this. For example, the boat mentioned in the account is not visible in the zoomed image.
The 29th August and 15th October brought us two further accounts accompanied by video clips. The first was a two minute video taken by a long term local of something just under the water at Lochend causing what was described as an "unusual disturbance pattern". Naturally, we would prefer to see something physical above the surface of the water and so such items by definition can only ever be indirect evidence of a biological entity. Moreover, I again only had access to a still image and not the original video and so an assessment is more limited.
The second appears to be one or more photographs taken by a Peter Hoyle from Moray at 1:30pm who over an interval about 30 seconds observed "a dark shape sticking out of the water, moving from right side of loch to left from the middle". One of the images is shown below and it is evident it is a zoomed image indicating the object was a long way off and so little can be deduced from it.
The final item from the Register was from the 28th October when Mishawn Kiekle from Texas observed something from Urquhart Castle:
I first saw it and was like wow, that looks just like images I saw from the sightings website. It didn't look like a wave, it actually looked like the head of something popping up. it made a distinct pattern in the water I couldn't see anywhere else, kind of like its own wake. And than it was gone. From that distance I'd say the water pattern was at least 3 m long.
The picture displayed is again verging on pixelation and of little use. One wonders if it is the infamous pipe that resides just under the water to the south of the tower and appears depending on loch water levels and weather conditions? In this case, I would say not given the wake seen. That is the five accounts on the Registry site, but these days we now have the website of the Loch Ness Centre receiving potential reports from visitors and during the Quest weekend.
At their page another six accounts are listed which are different to the five on the register website. The first by "Annette" is likely that pipe by the Castle which one day will be removed! The next by "Diana" were some photos without any account and which the Loch Ness Centre tentatively identifies as a waterbird. The next is more interesting being a film of a wake taken by "Bob" on the 12th April.
Apparently, nothing broke the surface, although the Loch Ness Centre does not link to the video to verify that. I am beginning to think an archive of all these videos needs to be stored and made available online rather than fleeting appearance on forums which are designed to roll continuously like teleprompters. I do attempt to save images from Loch Ness, but some are missed, if they ever are fully published.
One final image from the Loch Ness Centre was taken by Graham from Abriachan on the 27th June. The website states that:
While walking his dog on a peaceful morning, Graham noticed a dark brown shape appear suddenly in the loch, around 150 metres from shore. It wasn’t drifting — it seemed to move. He managed a single photo before it vanished. From the image, it looks like it could be a shoreline rock, and some details are a little unclear — but the moment certainly left an impression.
The image itself looks like a zoom-in and is bereft of any frame of reference. I may be wrong but the rocks I have seen around the loch look more grey than brown and so I have asked if I could see the original. Context is everything and it may turn out to be something else mundane, but an uncropped image is always the first thing to ask for.
There is another sequence of photographs which have not been mentioned. They were taken by myself, or rather by one of my trail cameras one early morning back in June, collected at the end of August and finally discovered in October after trawling through tens of thousands of SD card images. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, don't bother asking to see them, they'll turn up soon enough!
To this array of claims of Nessie sightings, I now turn to the members of Loch Ness Exploration. I must give credit to founder Alan McKenna for his part in bringing the group to where it is now. I thought monster hunters were more like tigers than lions - they hunt alone, but I was proven wrong having met the people who I believe have been rewarded for their joint efforts with some singular experiences.
We start back in May with the third annual Quest event run by the Loch Ness Centre. I recounted my perspective on that weekend in a trip reported linked here. The third Quest weekend is a part of an annual review in and of itself but attached to that event came individuals seeking their own glimpse of the creature. So on the night of Friday 23rd May slipping into Saturday, Alan and Dave had gone over to a small inlet near the Castle to explore the waters there and had thrown some rocks into the deeper parts to see if something would stir. In Dave's own words:
As we started to walk away, we heard an almighty kind of splash right behind us! Obviously, it wasn't a rock because we weren't throwing anything in. We both turned around at exactly the same time to see. For me there was a split second of almost, like a slimy black hump that went very very quickly straight down into the water.
It was like it had come up and it had gone straight down with such a force that it created such a massive splash, almost like a torpedo. We both said at the time like a torpedo effect. Up and straight down and there was a massive wash, a massive splash that came after it and we could see that quite clearly because we had our torches on it as well and both at exactly the same time.
I can vouch for their excitement when they shortly came back to us and related what had just happened. It was late, dark and raining and only infra-red equipment would have any chance of resolving anything with the desired clarity for quality images. Nevertheless, I think that experience must have stuck like glue to Alan and Dave, it's the kind of fuel that powers future trips and indeed we were all back at the loch at the end of August to continue the underwater video and hydrophone experiments. An account was written up here and one stand out event was the experience of the lads from Glasgow who were camped out near Invermoriston:
However, the news from the campsite was that the Glasgow boys had had an unusual experience after we had all left for bed the night before. About 2AM, they were chatting away with a drink or two in hand when a huge splashing noise startled them from the shoreline down below. Not surprisingly, they were not too keen to go down and investigate the matter. Before anyone begins to think about the hallucinatory properties of alcohol, one of the chaps is teetotal.
This required some investigation and later we were back at the shoreline. There was nothing around that could be connected with the noise but if it had occurred further out in the loch, nothing probably should have been expected. Either way, we had our alcohol-averse colleague sit where they had been at night while we tossed various rocks into the water down below. We would then get his response from above as to how that sounded compared to the "big splash".
The first moderately sized rock we tossed in, he did not hear it from the tents. A larger one of about 10kg he did hear but it was a lot quieter than the 2AM noise. We stopped there realizing we needed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to throw something larger a sufficient distance into the loch to take this experiment further.
One can speculate about unscrupulous people fly tipping large items of garbage into the loch, but from what I have seen, anything rolled down from above is more likely to have its progress stopped by trees or just hit the beach below with little splashing going on. But, of course, nothing was seen and so all one can do is prepare for such a future happening by setting up infra-red cameras to record long segments timestamped which can be correlated to audible events.
But things took another turn on a return trip on October 31st when another midnight hunt by the Castle took place. Alan's video account is on YouTube at this link. Now I was not there, but four eyewitnesses were there as the baited underwater rig with the GoPro camera was lowered into the loch and the waters were scanned awaiting something to come along. Loud splashing noises had been heard to their left early on, but as the night progressed, the source of the splashing would soon be resolved. As one eyewitness, Chris, related:
As we stood (or sat) waiting patiently over the next 20 minutes or so, we heard what I can only describe as a childlike wail or a high-pitched woman’s scream coming from our left-hand side where all the splashing activity had been situated. It was very unnerving, and it sent chills down my back and made the hairs on my arm stand up.
I was standing next to Alan at the time of this chilling sound, just slightly back from the edge of the pier and we both looked at one another and asked each other what was that we just heard. I shone my torch onto the area where we heard the chilling sound, however, I could not see anything at all. I moved closer to the front of the pier after a minute or so and shone my torch out on the Loch.
Within the next few minutes, this “animal” appeared out of nowhere silently approximately 20 to 25 feet away from the piers edge in front of me. I was stunned! My torch was primarily focused on the front of this “animal” which was facing forwards towards the castle and suddenly it turned its head and looked directly at me. Its eyes lit up immediately with white eye shine, and I thought I could see what can only be described as a nose situated between its eyes.
I would reckon the head was the size of a football or basketball even and in my own opinion it was dog like. I did not see the body turn to face me; it was only the head of the animal that turned. I moved my torch light to the left-hand side of this “animal,” and I could see a slightly humped body shape. I would reckon the humped body shape was approximately six feet in length.
I cannot say with absolute certainty but I thought I saw gray colouring on the body with black speckled dots, however, I could be mistaken about this as it was dark, the “animal” was close to the water and only my torch shined any light onto it.
It submerged within seconds with a later splash to announce its final departure. Further baiting on the waters couldn't make it resurface. Meantime the GoPro video camera underwater recorded sounds which sounded like a guttural growl and which I believe are still being analyzed. Unfortunately, it did not capture any video of the animal. Chris sketched what he recalled of the animal.
The four eyewitnesses agreed it was not a huge animal akin to the thirty footers of the literature, but still big enough with the back estimated at up to six feet long. Was it the juvenile of a larger adult or was it a big seal, bigger than the grey or harbour seals of the surrounding seas? The sketch does not look like a seal to me with that raised back and spherical looking head. Neither is the long neck of tradition visible which leaves one pondering what was seen that night? The strange cries heard above and the guttural noises recorded below also require an explanation as opinions are sought of others who may know these subjects better.
Another LNE trip was undertaken before Christmas but without any glimpse of anything unusual, but the hunt will continue into 2026 with expectations high for further adventures.
I wish readers a Happy and Prosperous 2026.
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
