The Story of Arthur Kopit's Land Sighting

I have been looking into some less familiar reports of the Loch Ness Monster on land and this led me to this blog for today which raises the profile of one such case involving an unexpected figure. I had been aware of the case of Arthur Kopit for some eight years, but a recent Internet search has given enough information to tell you more.

The source for the story was a letter Arthur wrote to the New York Times which was printed on the 1st August 1976. The newspaper had been running various features on the loch, the monster and its followers awaiting the result of Robert Rines' AAS expedition. On the heels of the success of the 1975 underwater pictures, the Times signed a contract with the Academy ensuring first refusal on all findings.

As it turned out, the AAS returned empty handed, presumably once they positioned their camera and sonar rigs properly. But that is another story. Meantime, the events of 1975 prompted people to come forward with their stories and so we come to Arthur Kopit and we reproduce the text of his letter which turned up on the Internet and is below.

Oh monster, poor monster

One night in August 1962, I was in the vicinity of Urquhart Castle, on the shore of Loch Ness. I had no idea at the time that this area was the site of the most frequent Loch Ness “monster” sightings. It was perhaps 11, and there was a full moon shining toward us across the loch.

When I parked my car outside the castle gate, at least 100 yards from the loch, I was able to hear a very loud sound. I did not have to strain to make the noise out; indeed, I, and the girl I was with, heard it as soon as we left our car. And as we approached the castle, it quickly became clear that the sound was emanating from a spot beyond the castle - that is to say, the water.

It was a halting sort of sound; uneven breath; a kind of gasping. It made me think of an asthmatic walrus (not that I have ever met one), or some such amphibious creature that could breathe on land but with effort only. A large creature, surely, to expel such a volume of air. The thing was obviously eating a lot. Munch munch munch. Snap snap snap. By the time we reached the castle we had no doubt about what was happening: A large amphibious creature of some sort was feeding on a bush or tree.

At the castle (as I recall) the ground rose so that one could walk from the grass or dirt directly onto the parapet. As we walked up said parapet we realized (she, apparently, to her delight; I to my consternation) that “the thing” was directly beyond the parapet on a small beach or spit of land.

It did not sound like a cow or sheep or dog; it sounded like an aquatic/land creature, Also, the loch is extremely cold; nothing sensible (like dogs or cows) would swim in it by choice. From where I stood, I could see there was no apparent way for a land creature to walk around the castle and get to this spot; it was guarded from land approach by the castle walls.

Well, all I had to do was poke my head over the ledge beside the parapet and I would have seen what it was. However, it occurred to me that whatever it was would also see what I was. Perhaps Nessie was a predator. “You go first,” I whispered to the girl I was with, and she pointed to me. Whereupon I devised a plan: to find a large rock, drop it over the side and (no, not knock it out) drive the creature toward the water, whereupon we would be able to glimpse the thing in retreat. Safely.

However, I made a bit more noise than necessary and the creature departed into the water. The girl I was with claimed she saw a long tubular creature slide into the water. That is her report. I did not see it. I believe I saw a V‐shaped wake in the water by the edge of the beach, but then I may have wanted to see the wake and will not swear I truly saw the wake, as I swear to everything else I report.

Subsequent to this event, it has seemed to me that I came upon, by accident, a favorite feeding spot of “the creature.” Possibly my information may help you in obtaining clear photographs and irrefutable evidence of the thing's existence.

I hope you will not take my slight jocular tone as a sign of a hoax. I really have better things to do than make up this tale. It is just that I have told the story so often to friends - like Jack and Carol Gelber - who have smiled very skeptically, that I suppose I have developed a kind of joking tone in the telling.

This is a grand adventure. Wish I were with you.

ARTHUR Kopit

Middletown, Conn.

Now this is not a story that made it into the classic literature, since Arthur only put it into print in 1976, but it appears again in a letter printed in the September 1999 issue of the Fortean Times. This letter was written by researcher, Ulrich Magin, in response to a previous Nessie article. However, in the letter, the name of Arthur Copit was the name associated in the literature with this event, which led to some fruitless online searching.

But the original letter names him as Arthur Kopit and a google search soon revealed this was the same famed American playwright. His picture below is taken from his Wikipedia page. In fact, the letter title "Oh monster, poor monster" is derived from one of his best known plays, "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad".

Arthur is now aged 82 and so I began a search to make contact with him. This was finally achieved with the help of his daughter who was glad to make my acquaintance and told me how her Dad's Nessie story was a "classic" within the family and "it really sounds like he did encounter her". Evidently, like so many eyewitnesses, Arthur still stands by his story.

She gave me his phone number but I was told that he was in relatively poor health but would be willing to talk. But given that and the current circumstances worldwide, I was more inclined to take a rain check on that and contact Arthur later to get his story and also ask about his female friend who actually saw the creature. But let us move on with what we have.

Now what can we say about the story itself, these fifty eight years on? In August at that latitude, the sun would have set by then, but we are told there was a full moon which places the event around the 14th August which places sunset more precisely at 9pm. But it is a full moon which provides a reasonable degree of illumination. But unlike the well lit castle at the top of the article, I doubt there were any spotlights around and the modern visitor centre was nowhere to be seen.

Having said that, Arthur did not see the creature as the idea of popping your head over the wall did not come across as a great idea to him. I can wholly sympathize with that view. If you heard loud animal noises beyond a wall and it began to dawn on you that the stories of 40 foot creatures may be true, would you stick your head above the proverbial parapet? 

The tactic to disturb the beast and then catch a view of it retreating sounds eminently reasonable, but the monster's classic aversion to noise was not known to Arthur and it was off before its appointed time. However, his female friend is stated as seeing "a long tubular creature slide into the water". That could be interpreted in two ways. She may have seen the long neck of the creature swimming away or it could have been a more extended view of the body. There is no way of knowing more as things stand.

STRANGE SOUNDS

But what Arthur lost in the visual was made up for in the auricular. What are we to make of sounds like asthmatic walruses and munching and snapping noises? Reports of noises associated with the Loch Ness Monster are rare indeed, so we should pay some attention to them when they do come along. The first thing to be said is that the sound was associated with something large. It was heard from 100 yards away and that was with the castle between them acting as a sound buffer.

Naturally seals or some other larger pinniped may be suggested by those more sceptical of a monster and the description of it being akin to a walrus noise may lend credence to that idea. If you want to know what a walrus sounds like, there is a link here. I guess Arthur had looked into some aquatic calls as part of his own attempt to understand what he had encountered and this composite idea of a walrus halting or struggling for breath was the best he came to.

But it is not clear whether this halting breath was due to it being out of water or indulging in these crunching and munching noises. It seems unlikely that the monster would draw much if any nutrition from bushes and trees so one wonders if it was just gnawing at them for some dental purpose? A look at the foliage below the castle in a more recent photograph suggests that even if Arthur looked over the wall, he may not have seen anything for dense foliage until the creature was further out in the water.

But this does make me think that monster hunters on their forages around the loch should pay more attention to trees on the shoreline which have suffered damage - especially higher up. It's a bit of a long shot, but who knows? Any such find should involve a search for any material that is not part of the tree and I wish Arthur had gone back the next day in sunlight to check out what had been left behind!

This episode also bring into focus the competing theories of indigenous water breather and itinerant air breather. Could such a noise be made by something that draws its oxygen from gills or similar organs? The answer seems to be "no" unless there is something other than lungs involved here. The only answer there is the strange ability of the creature to rise and sink vertically using some highly efficient buoyancy mechanism which may involve gas intake and discharge. We have some reports where this sinking and rising involves a foaming action around the waterline of the object. Could this be gas discharge as the object descends? How would that discharge sound out of the water?

I know, just a piece of idle speculation, but as I have said before, a lung breathing animal will not be long unseen and unheard in the loch. The only explanation for that scenario is the horned air tubes that have been postulated for our favourite beastie and as perhaps demonstrated in our previous article which brought you Harry Finlay's horned monstrosity.

I am not so convinced by that, but I know others are. But if it was an air breather, why did it sound as if it was struggling to breath? It sounded like this was a creature that was not accustomed to being out of the water on a regular basis like seals and the extra weight on its lungs due to being wholly or partially on land was actually a burden on its oxygen intake process.

THE EXACT SPOT

Now some are trying to figure out where Arthur was standing when he was at the "parapet". I called upon my extensive collection of postcards and include this one which is a better view of the castle grounds. People can refer to this and others in considering the literal lie of the land. Arthur mentioned

"At the castle (as I recall) the ground rose so that one could walk from the grass or dirt directly onto the parapet. As we walked up said parapet ..."

In the postcard image, there is a small hill rise in the foreground to the castle and a wall along it to the left. It may have been this wall he clambered onto as a first guess. Another possibility are the walls on the far right concerning which I add a second image to show their relatively lower height on the centre right.

So thus ends Arthur Kopit's fascinating account and it may raise more questions than it answers, but isn't that the way with a lot of Nessie stories?


The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Harry Finlay recounts his 1952 Monster Sighting

The picture a couple of paragraphs below is enough to let Nessie fans know that this post is about the 1952 close encounter between the Loch Ness Monster and two individuals - Greta Finlay and her son Harry. As recounted last year, I tracked down Harry to his home in Perth, Scotland and phoned him up for a chat on that day on the 20th August 1952.

However, some people said I should get Harry in front of a camera and record the account straight from the man himself. That task was done yesterday, having arranged a date and time with Harry, we met up at his house for the first time. Though I guess Harry would be somewhere near 80 years old, he looked a fit and sprightly eighty to me.

Of course, we chatted about the event amongst other things and Harry is one of that small band of people I call a "knower" rather than a "believer". When you see the Loch Ness Monster from a range of twenty to thirty feet, it is no longer a case of believing but knowing what you saw. Having said that, you can see the creature close up but still have no idea what you are looking at.

Mammal, reptile, amphibian, fish or something else? Harry couldn't give a definitive answer to that one and, apart from those who tell us more than they actually know, I would be in the same camp. Does it exist? Yes. What is it? I still don't know.

It was also good to finally get to see a picture of his mother, Greta, who passed away back in the 1990s. The picture below shows here with her husband, who took the initiative and reported the story to the local newspapers. I snapped this with my mobile phone, so the result doesn't quite do them justice.

I asked Harry to roughly sketch what he saw that day for me which is shown below, though one would not really expect the drawing to diverge that much given such a monstrosity is going to brand itself onto one's memory to some degree. It is more a composite picture as the creature was first seen approaching Harry from the right, then glided past them, finally submerging with its rearward parts closest to them.

Harry's estimates of particular dimensions were added by him and if we add in the two water gaps between neck and humps we get near the 15 feet estimate of his mother given to Constance Whyte. Add in the presumed present but obscured tail and we get a creature in excess of 20 feet.

Having sketched the beast, I showed him the original from my copy of Constance Whyte's "More Than a Legend" with which I snapped a picture of him at the top of this article. But what you will hear from Harry was how he was a split second away from taking one of the best pictures of the monster ever but his Mum grabbed the camera from him, thinking he was fumbling! The Loch Ness Hoodoo strike again!

Enjoy this clip on a classic monster sighting from the very eyewitness himself.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

New book on Sea Serpents

Malcolm Smith has emailed me to tell me he has just published his book entitled "Australian Sea Serpents". I haven't seen the book yet but the promotion on Amazon runs thus:

Sea serpents! So you thought they were mythical beasts, figments of the imagination of medieval cartographers to fill in the corners of their maps! Think again. Sea serpents have been reliably reported all over the world right up to the present day. And some of the most remarkable have been those which have visited Australian shores.

A government diver was brought quickly to the surface when he encountered a fierce eel-like monster nine metres long.

Multiple witnesses on shore at Newcastle watched a battle between a sea serpent and a whale.

Swimmers at Cronulla were amazed when the long neck of a sea serpent rose out of the water just outside the sea wall.

In one year alone, eleven sea serpents appeared off the east coast

Now Malcolm Smith, a qualified zoologist, and author of "Bunyips and Bigfoots", has thoroughly searched the archives, and provided a definitive study of this mystery. More than half the cases are new, having never been discovered by earlier researchers. After a careful analysis, removing those reasonably suspected of being hoaxes, as well as those representing known species, several score of unexplained sightings remain. At the end of this book, all but the most sceptical of reader will be convinced that our coasts are being visited by large marine species still unknown to science.

The book can be purchased here and is also available in Kindle format.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Three Books of Interest

Three books, two new and one old came into my hands in recent months. I have a look at them here beginning with "Mysteries of the Loch Ness Monster" which we are told are "from the secret files of the National Enquirer". Now, when those last two words are mentioned, American readers may feel justified in letting out a groan as that magazine has put out some rather tongue in cheek articles on the Loch Ness Monster in years past.

This item came out some time early in 2019 for the American market, so I obtained a copy from eBay. Consisting of ninety three pages, it begins with general sea monster myths and stories such as krakens, mermaids and sea serpents as it circles inwards to some other lake cryptids before the mystery of the monster itself. It is all standard stuff with diversions into cultural elements such as films and attractions around the loch.

However, something occurred in this publication that I have only ever seen once before and did not expect to see again. Yes, you guessed it, they printed the Hugh Gray photograph upside down! This last occurred in 1972 in Elwood Baumann's bog standard work, "The Loch Ness Monster". Now how on earth can anyone get that wrong in this information rich age? You only have to google for "hugh gray loch ness monster" and any link will take you to the correct orientation of the picture. Methinks someone is having a laugh.

Meantime, there is no mention of Tim Dinsdale's 1960 film of the creature which is very remiss, considering its pivotal role in Loch Ness Monster history and they get a few other things wrong such as the 1934 Lee picture being ascribed to F.C.Adams. Oh well, no book is perfect, but it is now part of the Loch Ness Monster book history and so I include it here.

The next book has a bit more clout and is entitled "Creatures from Elsewhere" published in 1992. I saw in listed during an online search and bought it for a few quid. When I opened it, I realised I had seen the material from somewhere years before.

In fact, it was a series of reprints of articles from the Orbis "The Unexplained" magazines published between 1980 and 1983. In the book's 84 pages we had various cryptid articles ranging from Bigfoot to Werewolves to mermaids. But a good two thirds of the book is dedicated to lake and sea cryptids. So, we have Peter Costello on American lake monsters, Janet and Colin Bord on sea monsters and Irish lake monsters and Adrian Shine on the Loch Ness Monster. Nessie gets 13 pages in the form of the three articles originally penned by Adrian.

Looking at those articles, it is clear with hindsight that Adrian was in some kind of transition phase. There is no mention of sturgeons as a leading theory and he is still open to a few classic photos and films. The 1972 underwater flipper photo taken by the AAS is still looked upon with some favour. His words on sonar lead him to see this as an important tool though he admits the interpretation of the "data" is open to the opinion of experts.

Interestingly, he suggests only two possible explanations for Dick Raynor's 1967 film. It is either an otter or an unknown animal, no mention of the birds interpretation that is touted today and which could easily have been suggested back then. All in all, an interesting book and it is worth extracting these articles from the multi-volume magazines.

As a piece of nostalgia, I remember as a teenager in Glasgow going to my local newsagent every week to buy the latest issue of "The Unexplained" and expectantly building up the collection for the next binder volume. I still have them all, though the picture below is taken from eBay where you can occasionally pick up an entire set.

Moving onto the final publication, we have "The Loch Ness Monster" by Charles Fowkes which was published by Pitkin Publishing in 2019. Charles is a journalist and publisher and the book is one of those entry level tourism booklets that are aimed at lightly stocked bookshelves at various retail centres around and about Loch Ness. 

At 32 pages in length, it has a lot to pack into a small space and overall does this well. Starting in general with folklore and the world of monsters as well as the fear and intrigue they induce in mankind, Fowkes throws a statement out there which in my view is psychobabble:

Of course the Loch Ness Monster exists: it exists in our Collective Unconscious.

This quote is ascribed to an "anonymous Jungian analyst" who seems to not want to be identified. Readers who may recall our last article on Jon Erik Beckjord are reminded that Jungian archetypes and tulpoidal thought forms go hand in hand.

The way is prepared with further mentions of other lake monsters and the Loch Ness Monster is introduced by way of the ancient kelpie tradition. Though, as has happened in other books, kelpies and water horses are often confused as the same thing. Aleister Crowley gets a mention and it is mused whether he left his effect on the loch. I think the answer to that is "No" (as explained in my own book on the Loch Ness Water Horse).

The history of the loch and the various theories for the monster are examined, though I doubt one of them can be considered and that is methane gas eruptions. Loch Ness is too oligotrophic for such a scenario. Charles then gives us a timeline of Nessie hunting and reports from which one can often get a sense of the author's degree of scepticism in these sequences.

In this, he generally sticks to stating what the eyewitnesses said in a neutral manner. One divergence is where he states Maurice Burton's theory that the Hugh Gray photograph was an otter. Not even the most ardent sceptic takes that theory seriously now.

But if you are thinking this booklet looks familiar, you would be correct. This is in fact a revision of the same 1993 book published by Pitkin (below). However, the text of that book was done by a Lynn Picknett who is a paranormal researcher with very little to do with the Loch Ness Monster. Interestingly, I note that Lynn wrote the text, but the copyright of it lay with Charles Fowkes Limited. Lynn is better known for her books on some dubious conspiracy theories which, in comparison to Nessie, makes our favourite monster look as real as next door's dog.

I went over this older booklet to see how things had changed since then and noticed she had adapted some text from Adrian Shine's aforementioned articles on the Loch Ness Monster for The Unexplained magazine. The text concerned Dick Raynor's 1967 film, but it was clear that this was the source. It was not quite word for word, but it was getting there. I did not check how far The Unexplained, if at all, was a further source for the booklet. 

Plagiarism? Not quite. I checked Lynn's Wikipedia profile, it revealed that she had been the Deputy Editor of The Unexplained series back in the 1980s, so that explains her familiarity with Adrian's articles and it turns out that Adrian was acknowledged as a consultant for the booklet anyway.

Perhaps it was his influence that was evident when every classic Nessie photograph is rejected as evidence. But one curious thing to end with was that though Lynn closely followed Adrian on the 1967 Raynor film, all was not as it seemed. Adrian's original quote from the 1980s was:

Raynor is quite ready to entertain the possibility that the animal was an otter (the object was definitely animate); this is the only real possibility apart from an unknown animal.

In 1993 it became:

Although the object was certainly animate, Raynor was willing to concede that it may have been waterbirds or an otter.

Apparently now Dick Raynor plumps for waterbirds. Do make up your minds!

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Inverness Courier adds Nessie section

The venerable Inverness Courier has started its own Loch Ness Monster section. I noticed the click through icon above a few days ago and it takes you to their latest articles on the monster (such as the recent eDNA experiments) and it goes back further. It would be nice if they could add even older articles for a good historical line on the monster and its varied crew of followers.

It would seem that interest in the monster is creating enough clicks to merit its own section on their website. It's good to see that Nessie continues to generate a following despite the attempts of critics to bury her forever. Well, some do. Others don't for reasons that have nothing to do with cryptozoology.

Regulars fans of the monster will know that the Courier led the way in reporting on the monster when it first surfaced anew in the 1930s beginning with that famous "Strange spectacle on Loch Ness" from May 2nd 1933 penned by then anonymous correspondent, Alex Campbell. It was a pity they weren't so upfront in earlier decades going back to the 19th century, but the world was looking for a good monster story during the Depression years and there was a creature in a remote Highland loch that just fitted the bill.

The Courier published a 200th anniversary book recently by Jim Miller which I have. The Nessie part is brief, but it is interesting to have a history of the area going back to 1817. I don't know where you can buy this - a brief search of some online book stores had none in stock.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

1990 Article by Jon Erik Beckjord

I was alerted to this article by Scott Mardis, who runs the Zombie Plesiosaur Society Facebook group. He had uploaded the Fate magazine for May 1990 which has an article by Jon Erik Beckjord, famous for his Bigfoot and Nessie research back in those days, but who died in 2008. I think I would be right in referring to Jon as a paracryptozoologist who did not hold to zoological cryptids, but another category called zooforms or entities which look like animals but are not flesh and blood. 

It is not a view I subscribe to, it may solve a lot of so called issues such as food stocks, lack of sonar and photographic hits, but for me it is a sledgehammer solution to a cryptid nut. Nevertheless, it was a view I held to in my youth and we do like to give a platform to other pro-cryptid views here. So, I scanned the text into this article from the pdf file to spare you the multitude of Fate adverts about fortune telling, magic crystals and how to be the next Merlin. That text follows below.

NESSIE,CHESSIE, TESSIE, MOKELE M'BEMBE, OGOPOGO, CHAMP: ARE THEY THE SAME?

By Jon Erik Beckjord

The names run off the tongue, with similarities between some of them. Could it be that the creatures also are similar? I would suggest that the answer is yes, and for many reasons. I am fortunate to have a huge number of photos, drawings and descriptions of these creatures. Since not everyone knows these names, let me explain that Nessie inhabits Loch Ness and is the best-known lake monster. Chessie hails from the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, and Tessie is found in Lake Tahoe, on the California/Nevada line. Mokele M'bembe guards small (three miles long) Lac Telle in the Republic of the Congo, (a place that will eat up an investigator's money), Ogopogo wiggles around Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, and Champ is the queen of Lake Champlain, which crosses NY, Vermont and Canada. All are alleged lake monsters, all have differences, and all have some similarity. For a detailed background of each, see the bibliography in the book by Henry Bauer, The Enigma of Loch Ness. 

DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES

What then, are these differences and similarities? Nessie has been sighted and filmed in many shapes, but most often in two basic forms: a plesiosaur shape and a snake shape. Chessie seems to be mostly a serpentine shape, according to Mike Frizzell, of the Enigma Project in Reisterstown, MD. Tessie is rarely seen, and was filmed just once in a roll of film that the local chamber of commerce, who owns the film, will not allow to be viewed, lest it scare away tourists. In the film and descriptions by witnesses, it is also a long object that never shows a head, flipper or fin. Ogopogo has been described mostly as a serpentine shape, recently with a fluked tail by one witness; with no tail flukes by most others.

Occasionally a humped back is reported. Champ is mostly seen as a serpentine object, like a telephone pole that moves, except with undulations. Two visual aids, however, show something else. The Mansi photo shows a humped back with a long neck and a head, and the Hall video shows a hump with a neck as well. Yet, a number of photos taken by Ms. Kelly Williams shows another serpentine telephone pole. Mokele M'bembe is special and will be discussed below. Although some of the descriptions and photos of the same (or different) creatures are similar or identical, some are wildly different. A researcher must ask, "How can we reconcile all these differences?" 

A SOLUTION IN A NEW THEORY

If we stick to the old idea that these creatures are animals, we are caught in a dead end, for no animal, or animals, could account for all these variations that seem at times incompatible. It is simply too much to expect that a basilosaurus (an ancient whale), a plesiosaur, a giant snake and a monster worm could all exist side by side in these different lakes. Michael Meurger has written a book called Monsters of Canadian Lakes, and in it he points out that different lakes have different-looking lake monsters, and other lakes have several different kinds of lake monsters.

It is hard enough to accept one basic monster without having to accept the idea of several different kinds, all co-existing in different lakes. As a solution, I offer a new version of an older idea about Nessie and those of like ilk. Ted Holiday (see his book The Goblin Universe) and others in the past have suggested that Nessie may have come from, and gone back to, some other dimension, and may not be a normal animal at all. This concept is very difficult to prove and is beyond our current scientific ability to test. Most researchers feel that Holiday's ideas are too far out.

However, if we rephrase these ideas into a more testable hypothesis, the results may explain both the similarities of Nessie, Chessie, etc., as well as the differences. At the same time, it may bring about a re-focus on the lake phenomenon problem. The zoological path has proven to be a dead end. Let us look at Nessie, Chessie, etc., as an energy phenomena that can change to solid matter for short periods of time - perhaps even energy phenomena that has either guidance or intelligence, or an ability to react to the expectations and/or knowledge of their observers. An energy form might take the shape of a moving energized streak in the water. If it is able to feed off the expectations of its observers, it could take a more definite form as it moves along.

Perhaps in lakes where there are no viewers the phenomenon might not take any form at all. A good example is Lake Tahoe and Tessie. Few people expect a lake monster to appear in high and remote Lake Tahoe. Few lake monster experts visit there. Thus, the phenomenon asserts itself as a long, narrow body with no head and no tail. Perhaps if researchers were to live there, future sightings might feature a head, hump and tail. Miss Alexandria David-Ned, a French scholar and traveler, has written in her book, Magic and Mystery of Tibet, of the idea of forming "tulpoids" or creatures made from mental constructs, "mind creatures." If it is true that the mind can form physical or semi-physical beings, then maybe the lake monsters are given much of their form from the thoughts, conscious or otherwise, of the observers. 

A RECENT EXAMPLE

I was at Loch Ness in 1983, the 50th anniversary of Loch Ness research, trying to use robot video to catch the image of Nessie. Our results were marginal with this technique. One day while waiting for a TV program to air about our efforts, I observed a series of rings being formed in the water about mile away. Fish do this, but these rings caught my attention because they were being formed in a straight line, one ring after another, some ten feet apart. I watched with ten power binoculars, and saw, I thought, two small, straw-shaped objects, less than two inches long, surfacing to form each ring, then submerging. I waited, tried to film them with a telephoto lens, and watched some more. At one point I thought I saw a pink body, perhaps six feet long, almost surface, and then submerge. It had neither fins, head nor tail that I could see. The body slightly reminded me of a Florida manatee. The film did not turn out, and I resolved to watch for this again the next time the water was calm. Later, on one of the last days spent at the Loch, we had gotten up early from a caravan at Achnahannet, some miles away from the Clansman Hotel where the first ring-sightings had occurred.

At 8 A.M., I noticed the same sort of rings forming, this time going toward Fort Augustus to our right. I pulled out a movie camera and proceeded to shoot the rings as they formed, perhaps at three mph, going down the Loch in the calm water. As I filmed with three people watching, I wondered if it would surface. I had to stop twice to wind the film, and as the film ran out, the rings subsided and petered out. I thought nothing much would come of the film, and paid little attention to it until I returned to the U.S. However, after a number of viewings, it gradually became apparent that more than a series of rings had been filmed. What appeared at first to be a mere water disturbance became a progression of form on the water rather than in it.

The white rings expanded to form a long streak. The streak undulated, like a pair of linked inchworms, and these in turn became a comet-like form, taking on a shape similar to a Concorde jet, on the calm, blue water. To my surprise, enlargements showed a gray rounded face, sometimes with two horns mounted above, looking at the four of us around the camera. To do this, the thing had to crank its head over at a 90 degree angle, looking sideways and up, while still moving forward. Dr. Maccabee agrees that there is a triangular nose, and other views see a set of eyes, and a mouth with some heavy duty teeth - like a set of short walrus tusks - mounted aiming downward. The face image has little contrast, which is typical of energy phenomena of a less controversial type, such as moving mist, or windstorm. Overall, it seems a cross between a cat, an otter and a walrus.

It was found to measure ten feet, so otters are out, cats are out, and there are no ten-foot white walruses in Loch Ness. Los Angeles zoologists agree that it is nothing known to them. Each frame of the film shows a changed form and a changed face. Further in the film the object changes again to a linear water disturbance, a frothy line on the surface. After I had wound the camera, the object changed again and continued to change. The last head to appear is the most bizarre, and the hardest to accept. In six frames, up comes a white blob, unformed, and in under one second the head took on definite features. It looks like a man's head, bald, with two tufts of hair, somewhat rectangular, rounded in shape, with wide open eyes, a nose and mouth. In two more seconds, it has gone down under the water, and at that point the film stops, needing to be wound again. The last sequence shows just an occasional ring in the water, then nothing. The water is calm, as if nothing had happened.

Dr. Maccabee agrees that the object moves, and is probably animate, and that it looked at us. Zoologists at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History agree that the film shows no known animal or fish. Other zoologists discount even a school of small fish. Operation Deepscan, a sonar effort at Loch Ness in October 1987, discovered that schools of bait fish do exist, but at least 50 feet down and not on the surface. Thus, the object seems to be the Loch Ness phenomenon, or Nessie. My point in this analysis is to show that it may be possible that our own thoughts affected the image that the pheomenon radiated to our camera. As it progressed to our right, it may have grown in substance due to input from our collective thoughts about what Nessie should be like. As it got beyond range, it subsided to nothing. It starts as almost nothing, grows to a ten-foot object, becomes a series of appearing and disappearing heads, then subsides to nothing—something like a bell curve in intensity.

Of note might be that the John Cobb Memorial was one mile away, and Cobb, a racer, died in a jet boat in 1952 at that spot. Cobb was bald, and had thin hair on the sides of his face. Perhaps Nessie, Tessie, Chessie and the others have been affected by the preconceptions, or lack of same, of lakeside viewers. The very strongest images with the most detail - heads, humps, tails, tails with spikes and backs with triangular stegosaurus-type projections - are found in Loch Ness, which draws a very literate and educated group of visitors. Nobody expects a Tessie, nor a Chessie, so their images are less complex. Champ has almost as much press as Nessie, and thus its image is often complex. Ogopogo is felt by many people to be so far from Loch Ness that any similarity is remote, so its image, fed from the minds of visitors, is more Chessie-like, i.e., telephone-pole style. 

THE MYSTERY OF MOKELE M'BEMBE

Mokele M'bembe is the dollar drainer of the African continent. Herman Regusters, who saw the creature in 1981, has made a hump-and-neck type drawing that brings to mind Nessie. Zoo director Marcellin Agagna has done the same. Colonel E. Mossedzedi of the Congo army has drawn a very worm-like rendering of M.M., based on his own sighting of the creature. It looks more like a large worm or snake than like any brontosaurus, or even plesiosaur. In the '70s, explorer James Powell asked natives about the creature and showed them photos of animals like hippos and elephants, with other photos of re-creations of prehistoric animals mixed in. Invariably, the natives picked either the brontosaurus or the plesiosaur. These images may have reinforced a tulpoid Mokele M'bembe's shape. Where the earliest pygmies and other local natives got their mental images from, we do not know.

In any case, there are more reports of MM being of the plesiosaur form than the snake form, and thus it tends to be different from the northern hemisphere lake monsters. The mechanics of its mental-energy feeding process, however, appear to be the same, with the same result. Mokele M'bembe seems to be more in the lake monster mold than the dinosaur mold, and it is most often encountered in the water, over its head - not the usual habitat for a brontosaurus. There do exist stories of sea serpents in the southern hemisphere, and while these are not lake monsters, I will throw in a brief account of a sea serpent seen by a hotel manager from Mamatanai, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, while I was there in 1983, debunking stories of natives eating mermaids. It seems that twice in the '70s this manager, an Englishman, had encountered a 50 foot serpent, lying underwater on the sea bottom in a lagoon near Ramat Bay. He described it as looking like Chessie: a large, snake-like thing, and he avoided disturbing it lest it decide to eat him for lunch. Ramat Bay was where many of the alleged mermaids were seen, which later were proven to be dugongs, a relative of the manatee. 

INTELLIGENT ENERGY?

Perhaps the same energy phenomenon is in all the lakes of the world, and it reflects to viewers what their background, racial memories, education, and expectations send to the phenomenon. The more sophisticated the viewers, the more likely the image received is equally sophisticated. However, this may not be completely true in all instances. The images seen are too varied to be of mere animals, and a better theory, which physics can someday test, is a theory of intelligent energy, reflecting our own thoughts and images to us. I propose that Nessie, Chessie, Tessie, Ogopogo and Champ are all the same phenomenon. So too is Mokele M'bembe, but with some regional and perhaps foreigner-influenced input that results in it seeming to be of the hump and neck type. If the alleged lake monsters are viewed as being unknown energy phenomena, all the apparent contradictions fall away and the path is cleared for physics to make sense of something where zoology could not. 

THE END

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Dragons West of Loch Ness

I have just published my first Kindle booklet and it is a monograph entitled "Dragons West of Loch Ness" and subtitled "Tales of dragons roaming the hills and forests near Scotland's infamous loch". The motivation for this short work was a tale that has always grabbed my curiosity being the story of Fraser of Glenvackie, who reputedly slew the last dragon in Scotland. His name is mentioned obliquely in Loch Ness Monster folklore and pointed me to further tales of strange dragon like creatures roaming the hills and forests near Loch Ness but which evidently were not the famous inhabitant of Scotland's largest loch.

It is longer than the usual blog article but shorter than a book size and I consider it an appendix to my first folklore work, "The Water Horses of Loch Ness", but it is new material. American fans of Celtic Dragons can buy it here and British fans here. So for the price of a cup of coffee, buy it, read it and enjoy it!

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com