New Witness Corroborates 2011 Sighting

I was going to post another item this weekend but I felt this partly finished article ought to go out now. The reason is because of the William Hill award for the best Nessie sighting of 2011 and there are four contenders including the sighting in this title. The winner will be decided at the end of January and I thought it best to complete the story on this sighting so that whoever judges will have a fuller picture.

Note, I have no interest in who the eventual winner is and I do not stand to gain financially from it! The award candidates do not even know I am writing this. In fact I have been looking into this case since July and was awaiting further information, but so be it.

Back in July I was at Loch Ness and stopped at the shop of the Hargreaves at Foyers to buy some provisions (I documented that in an older posting). So I talked about their sighting with them and before I left the lady said that an Ala MacGruer had seen something too. I noted the name and headed south back to Edinburgh.

When I eventually found and got round to talking to Mr. MacGruer, he did indeed confirm that he too had seen a strange creature around the same time that day but closer to the shore. He was driving along a local road further downhill when his attention was taken by an elongated object in the water. He stopped the car to have a look and described an "eel-like head" with a neck about two feet out of the water.

He described it as going at quite a fast speed towards Sand Point. In other words, the creature was heading in the general direction of the loch where the Hargreaves saw their head and neck. Eventually it disappeared past Sand Point. Mr. MacGruer estimates it was up to 300 yards away from him and so substantially closer than it was to the Hargreaves.

I hope that is as accurate as I can state it as it was conducted over the phone and then by letter and with my lack of knowledge of local small roads in Foyers. Ala sent a drawing of what he saw.

Ala MacGruer is a pensioner and has spent his life living by Loch Ness. He is an experienced angler and has spent many, many hours fishing on Loch Ness and beyond. His knowledge of the loch and what can fool a person is therefore above the average witness standard. I asked if he had seen anything like this in his life before but he said he had not. He recalled how one could be fooled by birds observed in mist and hence giving a wrong impression of size, but that day such conditions did not prevail. Those who may suggest that he merely saw a seal ought to give him some leeway given his lochside experience.

Clearly, Mr. MacGruer's account adds weight to what the Hargreaves saw and diminishes the chances that something was misidentified - especially with a good witness at a shorter range. Reports of the Loch Ness Monster seen by multiple witnesses are good. It is even better when they view the creature independently and unaware of each other's situation.

As an aside, readers familiar with the history of the Loch Ness mystery may recognise the surname MacGruer. Indeed, without me prompting him, Ala declared that his uncle William MacGruer had seen the creature on land as a young lad. I told him that this was no surprise to me as that case from almost 100 years ago is part of the Loch Ness Monster lore.

That particular case was reported in the Inverness Courier on the 3rd October 1933 and describes how a group of children playing on a bay near Fort Augustus were surprised and terrified to see a large creature with a long neck and a camel like head lurching out of the bushes and entering into the loch. It seems that his uncle stuck to that story to his dying day.

So I give you Mr. MacGruer's account and hope it adds to the credibility of what happened on that day on the 15th June 2011.



RECENT BLOG POSTS:
More on the Hugh Gray Photograph
Parthenogenesis and Nessie

More on the Hugh Gray Photograph

I have still a few things to say about this classic photograph of Nessie redeemed from the jaws of the Labrador dog. We pointed out the real possibility of a head being visible to the right which had been hidden for decades by over-contrasted reproductions, but there is more to come as we wrap up this important piece of evidence.

These concern the place taken, the time taken and the reaction to the picture by the media. In this post we consider the last point and an interesting newspaper item from page 15 of the Courier Herald dated the 8th December 1933.

The photograph had made international headlines and naturally people speculated as to what it may be showing. Curiously, no one mentioned Labrador dogs with sticks in their mouth and we put that down to having a superior reproduction of the photograph to hand. The article is shown below.


An animal with the body like a whale, a head like a seal and an elongated tail. Did someone say a head like a seal? Where did they get that from? I would suggest they spotted the head which we highlighted on this blog last year. It's nice to get some corroboration and from a source mere days after the picture was taken.

The only difference is that he takes it to be seal-like rather than our eel-like speculation. The truth is that we are not sure what head it represents, but it is there as far as I am concerned. It is no surprise, meanwhile, that the self-appointed experts of that day utterly failed to see any thing other than "wreckage" in the photo.

P.S.

I toned down my berating of those who think this picture is a Labrador Dog. However, a cursory look at various sceptical forums/websites will leave you in no doubt that no one is perfect in the matter of courteous debate (albeit with an allowable modicum of mild sarcasm).

Vote for the best Nessie sighting of 2011

The Inverness Courier has some voting buttons on its website for readers to choose from the three best sightings of 2011. These are Jon Rowe, William Jobes and the Hargreaves. We have covered these sightings on our own list plus the Diane Blackmore sighting of August and the Atkinson sonar trace of September. There will undoubtedly be other sightings of Nessie in 2011 which did not make it into the local and national media (in fact, we'll bring one soon on this blog).

I guess it has been a good year for Nessie sightings, especially considering the Jobes and Rowe sightings included pretty good photographs. However, the report log is a far cry from the record year of 1934 and people began to wonder whether the Loch Ness Monster had gone off on some holiday somewhere or worse. Anyway, let us hope 2012 is a more successful year for evidence of the strange resident of Loch Ness.

Parthenogenesis and Nessie

The latest news on the BBC about a "virgin birth" shark reminds me again on how a Nessie population is sustained in the relatively small volume of water that is Loch Ness.

To recap, in the absence of a male shark, this female shark in a Dubai aquarium, has produced offspring for the fourth year in a row. It seems the descendants are doing well. and are not exact clones having some minor DNA differences There is nothing new in this scenario as various fish, reptiles and amphibians are known to reproduce asexually. However, the process has not been observed naturally in mammals.

This form of reproduction can be "turned" on and off depending on various factors such as a lack of males, seasonal factors, conditions that favour rapid population growth and so on. It has its advantages and disadvantages compared to normal reproduction. There is the reduction of the gene pool diversity and concomitant susceptibility to new mutations and diseases but on the plus side, there is no need divert scarce resources to develop males which cannot reproduce offspring themselves.

But does this have any relevance to the Loch Ness Monster? Curiously, the Nessie portrayed in the 2007 film "The Water Horse" (below) was asexual with a population of exactly one creature whose progeny were propagated by a single egg it laid. No problem with food stocks there then!



They say that "life always finds a way" but when it comes to one or more large creatures in a 24 mile long loch, scepticism adds "but not in this case". The question frequently levelled at Nessie "believers" is that there is not enough food to sustain a viable population of large creatures. Firstly, I don't accept this and shy away from the two dimensional thinking that goes on in this matter. However, assume that there is a prey-predator ratio issue for the moment.

Asexual reproduction would reduce (perhaps significantly) the number of creatures in the Loch. Certainly and statistically, half of them (the males) can go (well, some are needed if the females switch out of asexuality).

It would also eliminate inbreeding brought on by generations of the same pool of creatures inter-breeding. However, what the minimum viable population may be for such a group of asexual Nessies is pretty unclear. But there is an opening there for lower creature numbers. But what about lack of genetic diversity? Well, how often do Nessies reproduce? Once a year? Once a decade? The longer the generations, the less the impact of genetic diversity. There is also the matter of how stable Loch Ness is to changes that expose lack of genetic diversity. So what has happened at Loch Ness in the last 10,000 years that may endanger a small gene pool of monsters?

But it is all speculation when it comes to this decidedly odd beast.

So, was it the case 10,000 years ago as the glaciers retreated in Scotland that one or a few female Nessies became trapped in Loch Ness as the land rose from the burden of immense amounts of ice? Did asexuality kick in to preserve the continuation of the species? Did the creatures switch between asexual and sexual across the millenia depending on various environmental factors?

Who can tell? But as I said, such a scenario is not mandatory to explain how the Loch Ness Monster has survived to this day. The creature was moving between the seas, land and other lochs long before man ever became inquiring enough to ask such questions.

Loch Ness "world's biggest spirit level"

The BBC have posted a piece on how scientists have used Loch Ness to measure the minute effects of tidal forces on the loch's water levels. The sun and moon's combined gravitational force raises and drops the water level by as much as 1.5mm in a day. The other interesting note is that the Foyers power station alone does the same thing by 4cm a day.

I would add my own note that when using a trap camera before and after heavy rain, the difference in loch levels was even more noticeable.

Iconic Nessie Painting upcoming sale

As mentioned in a previous blog, the famous "courtship" painting of the Loch Ness Monster by Sir Peter Scott is going under the hammer on the 22nd January. The auction item is now listed online by the auctioneers Christies and can be viewed here.

The estimated price is £1500-£2500.

Happy bidding!

Nessie and the Fort Augustus Abbey boys

A Happy New Year to all readers, both believers and sceptics alike!

We'll kick off 2012 with an experience from 51 years ago. I was in communication with a former pupil of the school at Fort Augustus Abbey named Sean O' Donovan who lived as a boy at Easter Balnaban which is outside Drumnadrochit and up the hillside.

He places the sighting at perhaps August 1962 and in his own words:

"I certainly saw a 'something', although I was too far away (about 500 ft up a mountainside and perhaps half a mile as the crow flies) for any minute detail, moving out from beneath Urquhart Castle across the Loch. Whatever it was appeared to be the size of a decent sized rowing boat and left a wake. It vanished mid-way across the Loch. The monster?"

I put together a rough map of where this object perhaps first appeared and disappeared (but it may have moved further into Urquhart Bay than centre loch).

Having looked out that window many a time, we are sure than Mr. Donovan was familiar with the normal items that made their way across the centre of Loch Ness. I asked for more details:

"I happened to be gazing out across the loch when I saw a 'shape' (no more definition than that and no different in colour from the water) move out from the bank at perhaps 6 knots? It left a clear wake, as would a small boat and my first assumption was that it was indeed a boat in shadow but when it reached the midway point of the loch it vanished."

Do boats normally vanish as they ply their voyage? Obviously not, but then again perhaps a boat did indeed sink but we doubt that. A decent sized rowing boat can be up to fifteen feet in length and four feet across. Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster in its single hump aspect are often compared to the dimensions of a rowing boat.

Sean also has a theory about the Loch Ness Monster promoted by another Abbey boy called George Campbell in his book "The First and Lost Iona":

"I have since read an explanation for my 'sighting' and others. Basically it has to do with the structure of the Loch and the existence in it of two distinct layers of water. Around 600AD ( I think) there was a ship-burial of a Norse chieftain and the waterlogged keel of the ship would still exist as there is little oxygen in the depths to rot it.

Currents in the loch still bring this keel to the surface temporarily and the dragon's head with which such boats were often decorated would account for those who have seen a 'head' with the length of the keel accounting for those that see a 'hump'. Make of that what you will but it fits with what I saw."

George Campbell himself expands upon this theory in his book (from link):

The King’s Drakar re-surfaces

Looking out from the shore, the interested spectator will have seen an animal head with a long neck emerge from the water and travel through the waves for a few yards before sinking from sight again leaving, in many cases, an impression of a long curved back or hump before disappearing completely from view. Remind you of anything?

This is the only explanation for a Loch Ness Monster which fits the vast majority of sightings (the dinosaur-like creature crossing the main road at dead of night with a sheep in its mouth being a notable exception). There is unlikely to be more than one Drakar keel down there so whether one sees on the surface a long curved back or a shorter more pronounced hump will depend on whether the keel has any forward motion when it inverts.

He also think St. Columba encountered a bear rather than a water monster:

On Columba and the Loch Ness Monster

The Ness has always been a great river for salmon but man is not alone among their predators. It shares a similar latitude, a couple of degrees below the 60th parallel, with Kodiak Island in Alaska, a place that gave its name to a member of the best known species of salmon fishing animal in the world, the brown bear. In Columba’s time the bear had been extinct in Ireland for centuries so it is not an animal with which he and his fellow Irishmen would have been in any way familiar.

But although it would not vanish from Scotland for a few generations yet, it was by this time, in the latter part of the sixth century, a rarity. With so much impenetrable woodland for cover, it would have been perfectly at home on the banks of the Ness and, like its North American cousins, would seek its favourite food where the water is shallow, the flow narrow and the passing salmon most easily caught. Rising in the water from all fours onto its two hind legs, it would certainly give the appearance of a beast rising from beneath the waves, all the more so if viewed indistinctly through a screen of greenery.

More than capable of killing a man if surprised, or interrupted whilst feeding, a brown bear would generally seek to avoid contact with humans, thus its readiness to flee at the sound of Columba’s voice. Taken with Adomnan’s reference to the dead man having been mauled and the beast’s emitting of a roar, all the evidence points in only one direction and that is not towards a loch-dwelling monster. This was not the first recorded sighting in Scotland of a monster but the last recorded sighting of a bear.

I would presume a boat of these proportions would have been found with sonar by now. But then again, perhaps Loch Ness has more than one secret in those dark depths. But I am also afraid I disagree with Mr. Campbell's assessment of Nessie sightings and St. Columba's memorable encounter!

Another story but less serious from that period came from one of the old school boys and relates as follows:

"I always thought that the incident of Fr. John Baptist taking his boat 'The Goose' out on a fishing trip supposedly returning by 4pm, not returning until the next morning with a large hole in the bow. He claimed that his boat was damaged by a 'sea creature', in the middle of the night, This was in '54 just before tourist season when the fund raising was in progress for the church. When I asked him why he did not come back at 4pm when he was due he said I was too smart and not to mention that to anyone. After all a priest seeing the 'Sea Creature' would never be questioned."