Australian cryptozoologist, Paul Cropper got in touch with me recently concerning an incident from the 1960s at Loch Ness which involved some well known names of that time. The context was our mutual friend Tony Healy who I had the pleasure to meet up with in Edinburgh back in 2012. Paul is working on Tony's unpublished work about his epic global tour visiting famous monster sites between 1976 and 1980 and which he wrote up into a manuscript a few years later.
The focus of this article is on Robert Rines who was at the loch multiple times during the 1970s and claimed his one and only sighting back on the 23rd June 1971. This account has been related in book and documentary form at various times, though some wrongly place it in 1972. Paul found this typical account from "The New Yorker" dated 27th November 2000:
The first and only time Bob Rines saw the Loch Ness monster was June 23, 1972. He was fifty years old, a patent lawyer from Boston, and had been a monster hunter for two years. He was sitting at tea with his second wife, Carol, and their friends Wing Commander Basil Cary and his wife, Winifred, at the Carys’ cottage on the shore of the loch. About five o’clock in the afternoon, Basil Cary walked out to the porch to fetch his pipe.
Shortly thereafter, the others heard him shout, “I say, that can’t be an upturned boat!” They leaped to their feet and rushed outside. Cary was running off the porch, telescope in hand. “Grab the binocs!” he called back as he ran. Rines snatched his Super-8 camera and hurried across the road in front of the house to a sloping field that looked directly onto the water. There, moving through the loch, was a large, darkish hump, covered, as he could see through the telescope, with rough, mottled skin, like the back of an elephant.
Using a fishing boat moored across the bay for comparison, Rines and his companions estimated the hump to be about twenty-five feet long, and four to six feet out of the water. The hump moved out on the loch against the wind current, turned around, headed back in their direction, and then suddenly, in front of them, submerged. “The hair went up on the back of my neck,” Rines says with a happy sigh, recalling that afternoon. “I’ll never forget it as long as I live. My God, at that moment I knew there was something in there. I knew it was an animal! And that’s what’s kept me going all these years.”
An interesting postscript to this was provided in Dennis Meredith's "Search at Loch Ness" (p.57) when Rines met local farmer Alex MacLeod a year later and it turned out they both had the same sighting when MacLeod had been out fishing! What became of the film sequence that Rines took is a minor mystery, Roy Mackal does not even mention it in his 1976 analysis of 22 items of film footage and all I could find was the still frame below taken from Nicholas Witchell's book. I can see what might be a hump to the left at the end of the white line of water which I presume is the wake of the object.
But going back to Tony, he naturally would have visited Loch Ness during his tour where he met up with that enigmatic figure, Winifred Cary. He had a conversation with her concerning her time at the loch as well as Robert Rines during which that 1971 sighting came up with some surprising details. I quote from Tony's manuscript with his permission:
For many years, she explained, she’d been aware of her ability to map-douse the location of lost pets, lost valuables and underground water. Her talent had become so well known that three firms had employed her on different occasions to find water beneath the town of Inverness. Eventually, on June 20, 1965, Ted Holiday, the most unconventional of monster hunters, asked Mrs Cary if she could possibly divine a favourable location for his surface watching. Intrigued by the idea, Mrs Cary held her dowsing pendulum over a map of the loch and eventually received the strong impression that a surfacing might soon occur near "Whitefield" cottage.
Sure enough, on the following day, Mr Holiday and a couple called Eaves saw a large, black hump surfaced very close to the shore at "Whitefield". As Ted aimed his movie camera and began to squeeze the trigger, the Eaves’ dog barked, causing the creature to suddenly submerge. "Was it because of your success with Ted that Dr Rines asked for your help on the night of the ‘flipper photographs?" I asked. "Well, partly, I suppose", she replied, "but it was mainly because of his own sighting in 1971 - that was a result of my dowsing too, you see".
Well now, this was strange: I’d read that Dr Rines and his wife had experienced a very good sighting in Urquhart Bay. I also knew they’d seen it from the Cary's cottage – but nowhere had I seen any reference to dowsing being involved.
The sighting occurred on the evening of June 23, 1971. Dr Rines and his wife, good friends of the Carys, had dropped by for a visit, and after dinner the subject turned to Mrs Cary’s psychic powers: "Just for fun, I got out the pendulum and map and tried it again, and as soon as I did so I became aware that something had just surfaced in Urquhart Bay."
"That’s right", agreed Wing Commander Cary, enthusiastically. She said: "Look out the window right now and you’ll see it!" And sure enough, there it was: a great big, 20-foot-long hump moving across the bay!
As the others observe the creature through a telescope, Dr Rines, with commendable presence of mind, grabbed his 8 mm movie camera and began filming. Unfortunately, the light was too poor for anything much to register on the film. So it was that incident that led to dowsing being tried again in 1972 – this time in conjunction with the boats, sonar and underwater strobe camera.
The Carys confirmed that a grid system had been worked out which covered the whole of Urquhart Bay. After the boats set out on their nocturnal mission, Mrs Cary concentrated on a map in her parlour. Whenever she sensed the location of one of the creatures she called out the window to her husband, who flashed his car’s headlights in a prearranged code to guide the boats to the relevant spot: "Of course," Mr Cary added with some understatement, "we were all very pleased with the result."
Winifred Cary has been referred to at various times in this blog's history. A compendium of her own claimed sightings was written back in 2020 here which includes a map locating her sightings courtesy again of Tony Healy. That article also mentions the story of Cary being used to dowse for camera rig locations in Urquhart Bay. But going back to our main story, two things stand out for me.
The obvious one is the use of dowsing again to locate the Monster by Winifred. Doubtless, readers will have varying opinions on the subject of dowsing. Some will swear by it and others will think it is a lot of hokum. I myself need more convincing but Rines seemed to have been convinced by its power. But I do accept that Rines had a genuine sighting and that case was strengthened by it being a multiple witness sighting, especially the independent corroboration of Alex MacLeod.
Now it does make sense that the dowsing side of the story has some truth to it. Why would the Academy turn up at the loch the following year with all that apparatus and then go off and employ the use of a controversial psychic to map out likely locations? The implication is that perhaps Rines had been impressed by Cary on a previous meeting, namely on the 23rd June 1971. I don't doubt there was a pendulum being swung over a map when the Monster put in an appearance, but let each decide if that was significant or a coincidence.
Nevertheless, there seems to have been a bit of censorship going on across the decades to exclude this awkward story in order to maintain the technological reputation of the Academy of Applied Science and its founder Robert Rines. How much of that editing policy was down to Rines, the particular author or publisher is a matter of debate.
When Tony conversed with Winifred Cary, her conclusion that "we were all very pleased with the result" would have been a statement acceptable to many, but time has not been kind to the 1972 "Flipper" photograph when the unvarnished original was later compared to the contemporary "enhanced" version. There is still something odd there that requires an explanation, but in the maelstrom of peat particles, even sceptics see their "Elvis" in this slice of "toast". Either way, one could no longer say they were "very pleased" with the outcome and hence the efficacy of the dowsing side of the story drops in proportion.
Sure enough, on the following day, Mr Holiday and a couple called Eaves saw a large, black hump surfaced very close to the shore at "Whitefield". As Ted aimed his movie camera and began to squeeze the trigger, the Eaves’ dog barked, causing the creature to suddenly submerge.
Holiday recounts this incident with the Eaves family in his book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness" with the context being the 1965 Summer expedition organised by the "Bureau" - the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau. After a couple of weeks conducting various searches along the shores of Loch Ness, we take up Ted's account a few days before the sighting which includes some relevant musings about Monster hunting techniques:
I lived and slept on the shore, moving from point to point for the slightest of reasons or for no reason at all, shifting ground from instinct rather than from logic. We had tried to photograph the Orm using military planning and, so far, had failed. I was now trying the oldest technique known of encountering an animal — an absorbed concentration on the end in view, leaving the details to look after themselves. This method works surprisingly often.
On the 17th and 18th, I stayed on the Whitefield shore at the spot where Fraser and Cameron had been fishing. On the 19th I went to watch Tor Point and then, on a hunch, doubled back and spent the evening watching Foyers Bay from the north-west shore. The weather had again turned chilly and rough and nothing unusual was seen. If Nesa was really protecting her beasts from our cameras, she must have found me a very unpredictable observer and a grave threat to Orm security, since the 17-inch Newman was shifting about the loch almost at random. The camera was now as erratic as the monster. Quite suddenly, this system paid off.
On the 21st I returned to Whitefield and the day, which began cold and rough, took a turn for the better and the evening was lovely. As usual, I parked in a woodland glade beside a burn and only thirty yards from the pebbly beach. A couple called Mr and Mrs Eaves were near the beach having a picnic. After ex-changing pleasantries, I went down to catch trout. It was a calm evening with plenty of midges about.
Mr Eaves had a new sort of tape-recorder in his car and, on my way back from fishing, he invited me to examine it. Mrs Eaves was seated in a deck-chair on the beach, contemplating the loch. Suddenly, she let out a yell, which sounded like: 'The monster! It's here! The monster!'
I have often seen people become excited on seeing what they think is the Orm. Usually, they are mistaken or the alleged sighting is so inconclusive as to be worthless. At the same moment, however, Mr Eaves gripped my arm and pointed.
Close inshore, against the beach, the water had taken on a flat appearance as if something large, moving beneath the surface, had altered the set of the ripples. On seeing this, I made a dash, seized the Newman, and planted it firmly on the sawn-off stump of a tree. Eaves joined me and we crouched like runners waiting for the starting-pistol. Mrs Eaves was standing up, peering at the loch, and so, unfortunately, was their dog, which was tied to the deck-chair.
About 20 yards to the left of the flattened water, and directly opposite the mouth of the burn, I saw an object starting to emerge. There was no doubt that it was a hump. Silhouetted against the water, it looked jet black. It was rising vertically in a peculiar manner, as if the mass, below water, was shortening and thickening and this thickening was building itself above the surface.
On seeing the hump, Mr Eaves half-shoved the lens of the Newman towards it in his eagerness. His wife was excitedly shouting something and their dog started to bark, determined not to be left out of the act. By then, I had the hump square in the frame of the wire viewfinder and my finger had actually found the button-release for filming when the hump collapsed. It collapsed in a sort of muscular spasm, far quicker, indeed, than it had emerged. There was a distinct roiling of water as the Orm moved out of the shallows at the mouth of the burn. Some small waves came ashore and then it was gone.
I felt exhausted at this further incredible disappointment and sat down, no longer interested in looking at the loch. Mrs Eaves then came over to tell her side of the story. While she was admiring the view through binoculars, a hump rose right into her field of vision. It was black and seemed to have a serrated ridge. She estimated it to be as long as their family saloon-car less the boot.
Holiday adds that he went round to Strone by the Castle the following day, checked that the main rig was functional and had lunch with the Carys, but nowhere in the book does he mention consulting Winifred on the matter of dowsing for the Monster. In fact, reading his account above, he seems to put his luck in being in the right place at the right time down to his own instinctive approach to picking locations on a hunch and on that day the "system paid off".
One could conclude that Holiday was taking the same approach as Rines in suppressing this contentious item to maintain an air of science in his Orm book. After all, at this stage Holiday was still invested in his biological invertebrate theory of the Monster with none of the paranormal connotations of his later views. Maybe, but if Winifred had indeed directed him to Whitefield, why offend her as a friend by taking the credit himself?
As Holiday became more open in his paranormal views from 1970 onwards, there must have been no fear in now crediting the psychic powers of Winifred Cary in his new psychic world of monsters? However, his later books, "The Dragon and the Disc" and "The Goblin Universe" make no such admissions. The closest we get is in the latter book where he says:
Mrs. Cary is a forthright old lady whose opinions sometimes border on the brutal. After a colorful and amazing life in British India, she returned to England shortly before war broke out to become a major in Special Operations Executive. But running parallel with this military pragmatism is a strong psychic disposition which Dr. Omand detected instantly.
One of her favourite afternoon diversions is to watch television horse-racing and to pick the winners. Although she knows nothing of form, the quality of her precognition can be judged by the fact that she picked the first, second and fourth runners in that year’s (1973) Derby. But she never bets or allows her predictions to be used for betting, holding that to do so would be to destroy the gift.
Paul Cropper and myself wondered why Holiday didn't acknowledge Cary across those years of writing? I did not think Cary requested anonymity as the whole thing about directing underwater camera locations in 1972 did not seem to be hidden from the teams involved. Since Holiday's "Goblin" book was published after his death, maybe his friend, Colin Wilson, had edited it out of the final manuscript?
But thinking about it further, Holiday stated he was already in the Whitefield area in the days leading up to the 21st June. If he was already attracted to that area based on his aforementioned "instinct" then perhaps he viewed Winifred's advice as not so much new information but corroboration for the "hunch" he already had concerning the Whitefield area? In other words, two people are telling the same story but from their own perspective and possibly own bias. That seemed a more harmonious explanation and that is probably as far as I can go with that.
In conclusion, does Winifred's tales of dowsing for Nessie lend itself to the idea that the Monster is some kind of paranormal phenomenon acting like a psychic beacon for psychics to locate? I would say not going by the opening lines of Tony's conversation with her when she states that her abilities were used to find lost pets. So just replace "I can't find Tiddles, can you help me?" with "I can't find Nessie, can you help me?". Unless of course you regard moggies as some kind of weird paranormal creature!
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
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