Some Observations on the Arthur Grant Land Sighting

 

It is one of the most famous of all stories regarding the Loch Ness Monster, the tale of a man who almost ran his motorcycle into a large creature on a moonlit winter night. A newspaper account of the time summarized the events of that night (The Scotsman 6th January 1934).

ONE of the most remarkable developments in the Loch Ness mystery occurred early yesterday morning, when an animal presumed to be the monster was seen on land by Mr. Arthur Grant, a veterinary student in Edinburgh, son of Mr. James Grant, the proprietor of  Polmaily, Glenurquhart. He was motor cycling to his home in the glen at 1.30 yesterday morning, when he observed a huge object on the roadway near Abriachan. As he almost struck it, the creature leaped across the road and dashed into the loch.

... "It was," said Mr. Grant, "a bright moonlight night after rain had fallen. When almost forty yards away under the shadow of the hills, a short distance from the part of the reconstructed Glasgow-Inverness road near Abriachan, I observed what appeared to be a large black object on the opposite side of the road. I was almost on it when it turned what I thought was a small head on a long neck, and the creature, apparently taking fright, made two great bounds  across the road and plunged into the loch.

"I had a splendid view of the object; in fact, I almost struck it with my motor cycle. It had a long neck with an eel-like head and large oval-shaped eyes, just on the top of the small head. The body was very hefty, and I distinctly saw two front flippers. There were other two flippers, which seemed to be webbed behind, and there was a tail, which I estimate would be from five to six feet long. The curious thing about the tail was that it did not, so far as I could see, come to a point, but was rounded off. The total length of the animal would be from 15 to 20 feet.

"Knowing something about natural history, I can say that I have never seen anything in my life like the animal I saw. It looked like a hybrid. I jumped off my cycle," said Mr. Grant, "but the animal with great speed had rushed into the loch, splashing the surface violently and making away."

Mr. Grant's story created great interest along Loch Ness side, where there were many motorists moving about in the hope of seeing the monster.

When I was writing my book on land sightings, I looked into where the incident took place as it was normally stated as near the the village of Abriachan. It turned out it was bit further south near Brachla (sometimes written as Brackla) in the area now occupied by the Clansman Hotel. By coincidence, there is a statue of a large monster near there and a stream runs past it down to the beach below.

My speculation was that a stream could be a plausible spot for such a creature to come ashore, but of course, the habits of such creatures are not exactly well documented. At that time, a group of people from Edinburgh led by Mr. A. F. Hay, a fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland, were already there on a nine day investigation and made their way to examine the site of the encounter. Their investigation with Grant was subsequently reported in the same newspaper on the 22nd January, from which I quote:

We spent the next two days in his company, a part of the time in going over the ground and foreshore where he had seen it, measuring up spoor and hunting for clues as to the identity of the beast ...

We checked the tracks at the point where the creature had gone down the steep bank into the loch and confirmed the fact that there was no “body drag" though without doubt something large had gone down there. The marks of the feet or flippers – as they were scrapes or “skids” in the soft earth, there was no telling the nature of them – were roughly five feet apart ...

Some seventy yards further up the beach from this point (near Abriachan) what appeared to be a set of foot or flipper prints in the shingle measuring some 24 inches long from toe to heel, 38 inches cross from right toe to left, and 30 inches from heel to heel. Nearby was a large crushed down area in the bracken as if an over-sized cow had lain there, though no farm beast could have reached that spot.

When I was up at the loch a week or so ago to pick up some game cameras, I had time to drive over to the area of the Clansman Hotel and have a look from the road down to the loch. I parked the car and crossed what was a busy road to the layby opposite the Loch Ness Lodges where the earthen bank slopes quickly down. Once down at beach level I surveyed the scene. The photo below is looking northwards.

I looked back at the slope I had scrambled down and I could see the opportunity those men 90 years ago had to examine slide tracks in the softer earth. Quite how it looked in January 1934 is not certain though January implies a minimum of vegetation. Furthermore, the path from road to loch was not obstructed by any walls both then and now.

Looking at the beach, it was evident that beyond the embankment, the large shingle provided no opportunity to provide further tracks (photo below). This tallied with Mr. Hay saying nothing more about tracks immediately after the slide down the embankment. 

However, Hay mentioned some tracks being impressed in the shingle "some seventy yards further up the beach" towards Abriachan (i.e. northwards). I walked roughly that distance and came to a smaller area where the shingle was smaller and well capable of leaving a good impression from something like a large animal's forelimbs. I pressed my own considerably lighter feet into this smaller shingle and left a footprint with no problem.

The waters in the foreground of the first photograph below is a stream flowing down from the Clansman Hotel. So the testimony of the gentlemen from 1934 seemed to agree well with what I was observing today. It was stated at the time that a plaster cast of a track was made and sent off for examination. This spoor was not the four toed track of Marmaduke Wetherell, but a three toed one. No further mention is made of this item in any newspaper, magazine or book I have consulted. I do not even know if it could have survived to this day, which is all a great pity.

Readers will also notice in the background of the photograph some gorse bushes. Mr. Hay had further stated that "nearby was a large crushed down area in the bracken" commensurate with a large animal laying down there. Note "bracken" is more usually applicable to fern leaves, but those would have died back to the ground by January and so the plentiful gorse around the loch was more likely in mind.

To the right of the gorse bushes you can see a pile of large, broken rocks. I wondered if these were blast fragments associated with the road building that had been going on nearby over the 1930s. Perhaps they were, though just beyond them was the expanded pier that had been built for the Jacobite Cruises some years back. I am not certain how much rock debris that produced and so cannot exclude that explanation.

Mr. Hay did not give an indication of which direction those tracks were pointing. Did they indicate the creature was going to or coming from the loch? That is not certain and so one possible scenario is that the creature on that moonlit night came ashore on that lighter shingle where I stood and clambered up the stream and then onto the road. As it proceeded to do whatever Nessies do on land, eventually it moved about seventy yards further south before Arthur Grant approached on his motorcycle.

At the moment of closest encounter it crossed back towards the safety of the loch down the embankment and across the rougher shingle into the loch. An ordnance survey map from 1904 shows this to be a quieter place in those days. The likely spot was near Stevenson Cottage, one of the small number of houses represented by black rectangles on the OS map. It is not clear which of those buildings survive to this day as part of the Loch Ness Lodge or Clansman Hotel complex.

The stream previously mentioned is named as "Allt Coire Shalachaidh" which has an uncertain translation from the Gaelic but one suggestion is that it means "Stream of the corrie of (the) willow place". Now having said all this, there is uncertainty due to the fact that Grant's estimate of the location is expressed in miles and an error of say plus or minus 5% puts us out by 80 metres either side. So, we can hold these observations lightly pending any further information coming to light.

Of course, one can dismiss the entire episode out of hand by accusing Grant of fabrication for whatever motives. I covered such objections in my land sightings book, but I quote what Constance Whyte said about Grant in her book "More than a Legend":

Memory of the event is still vivid in Mr. Grant's mind, though for many years he has preferred to say nothing about it on account of the treatment, amounting to persecution, to which he was subject at the time.

I might be going out on a limb here, but I would say that hoaxers prefer not to suffer for their sins and much rather confess them, do their penance and move on in life. Well, unless you're a glutton for punishment.

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

MONSTER - The Mystery of Loch Ness

 

I watched the latest Loch Ness Monster documentary which recently televised on the 22nd September. I believe this had previously shown on the new Paramount+ UK subscription channel a while back. That was originally shown as a three part series, but Channel 5 broadcast it as a single show lasting just over two hours, including adverts. I am not aware if anything was cut out from the originals. It was produced and directed by Stephen Finnigan for Two Rivers Media Limited.

I don't always review every documentary that is broadcast and looking back, I note I did not do the History's Greatest Mysteries episode from Sky History last June or the Zachary Quinto double header from January 2020. The last documentary I reviewed was also shown on Channel 5 back in March, so I wondered how this one differed from that as one does like to see a bit of variety in what is presented, although the basic facts of the mystery must needs be laid out for new viewers.

As I have said before, these documentaries are not made for the likes of long term watchers such as myself, they are aimed at the general public but there are some variations on a theme as producers try to put a different spin on the usual boilerplate formats lest increasingly informed audiences lose interest. So we have seen documentaries focused on Frank Searle, the recent eDNA project, Robert Rines, the major hoaxes or specific species candidates. In this case, there was an emphasis on the twelve year period from Tim Dinsdale's film to the Rines Flipper picture.

The players in this documentary known to me were Adrian Shine, Gary Campbell, Dick Raynor, Simon Dinsdale, Darren Naish, Willie Cameron, Malcolm Robinson, Tony Harmsworth and David Martin. As the documentary proceeded upon a timeline narration from 1933 onwards, various people would chip in with appropriate sound bytes as the documentary flipped between general narrator (Dougray Scott) and a given expert, depending on what was being discussed in that slot.

Not so familiar to me was a Stuart McHardy (Scottish Historian), Jenny Johnstone (Scottish Historian), Elsa Panciroli (Paleontologist) and Mara Menzies (Folklorist). These were not Loch Ness Monster experts but I suppose people looking from the outside in with some skill in related areas. Well, maybe, and others will be mentioned later. 

Once upon a time in a far away land, there was a loch and in that loch was a monster. Or so some people supposed but others laughed and thought it foolish.

I think that fairytale like beginning sums up any documentary. It is natural to start a story at the beginning and for most that is the year 1933. So the various participants took us through the proverbial first sighting in water, first reporter, first sighting on land and first photograph. Now through all these narratives, the odd mistake will be made. I make them myself when I appear in such productions if one mis-speaks during an interview. One normally does not ask for a re-take if it is a minor sin of commission or omission.

I will come to the big sin of omission further down. But Aldie Mackay's sight of something black and glistening was presented as was the famous Spicer land sighting. Here we were pleasantly surprised to meet Mark Spicer, a grandson of George Spicer. I even got my first look at Mrs. Spicer in a photograph - though I still do not know her first name. Mark told us that his grandmother would tell them the tale of the monster and she wouldn't have told them if she didn't believe it to be true. 

Alongside these was included the multiple eyewitness account from the Halfway House by the Alltsigh river on the 22nd September 1933. I initially wondered why this was included and then remembered my own write up on this account here and the statement that this was another first - the first sighting of a long neck. Well, I don't think it was, they were beaten by about 20 days, but it is actually a fascinating account as two others claimed to have seen a long neck at other parts of the loch the same day.

It was onto the first photograph taken by Hugh Gray and here was the big sin of omission. With all those experts to advise the production team, how on earth did they end up showing this terrible version of the photograph?

When they could have used this one instead? 

The first version is poor quality, over-contrasted and retouched as was the fashion of newspaper editors in those days. The second is the superior version and has been available for use since the 1980s. I was going to send off a communication to the program's senior researcher asking that question, but why bother? However, in doing this, they missed a trick as it later transpired.

All this combined, as the program said, to light the blue touch paper. One speaker said people like to place their monster in dark places, such as peat-stained waters. That didn't quite explain the Loch Morar Monster which resides in clear waters. Nevertheless, in preparation for the later expose of the Surgeon's Photograph, we followed the adventures of Marmaduke Wetherell, who was described as the first person to come up and conduct a search and investigation of the loch.

I would normally agree with that but then concluded that the first person of note to do that was actually sea serpent expert, Lt. Cdr. Rupert T. Gould, who was up at the loch by November of that year. Wetherell arrived in mid-December. Be that as it may, the story of the fake hippo tracks ensued and we are told Wetherell was sacked from the Daily Mail investigation and left under a cloud with the apparent intent to give the Mail their monster photograph.

Once again, I am not sure Wetherell was actually sacked. He had conducted this investigation for a full month and then claimed he had seen a huge seal in the loch to close it all off with the explanation that this was what all the fuss was about. Actually, Wetherell's seal would clock in at nearly thirty feet and it was a sighting as convenient for the end of the expedition as the discovery of tracks was at the beginning. Like Alastair Boyd, co-author of the Surgeon's Photograph expose book, I think Wetherell cooked up this sighting. There was no seal in the loch at that time, certainly not one of those proportions.

That led to the Surgeon's Photograph of April 1934 and the oft-mentioned story of the investigation into how Wetherell and his associates had seemingly duped the Daily Mail. The other author of the expose book alongside Alastair Boyd was David Martin and he was interviewed about the Wilson picture. Not once was Alastair mentioned in the documentary. You would think he had nothing to do with the book, so I was a bit puzzled as to why he was not even credited with his part in this story.

Various other events from 1933 to 1934 were mentioned such as the Edward Mountain expedition and of note was what appeared to be a glimpse of the leader, Captain Fraser's, log book. Or was it? I wonder what dark corner that book is being held in. Then the documentary took a big leap of 24 years from 1934 to 1958. Had the Loch Ness Monster vacated the premises and gone off on holiday somewhere? No, the media generally lost interest to focus on the troubles in Europe and all that came from that. 

The story resumes with the Peter MacNab photograph published in 1958, though it was taken in 1955. Some comments were made about the photograph suggesting they did not accept it but no expose story like the Surgeon's Photograph was forthcoming, because there are none. However, all seemed to be going well at this point as there was no concerted sceptical attack upon the stories or images as a whole. I began to think that the second half of the documentary was going to metamorphose into an attempted demolition job as various opinions on why these were all non-monsters would unfurl one by one.

But that didn't really happen.

So, the documentary entered the busy period of 1960 to 1972 as the Dinsdale film was taken and appeared on the BBC Panorama program rekindling interest in the monster and a series of expeditions throughout that decade. At this point, Simon Dinsdale entered the story as did some people from the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau. These were Dick Raynor, Alison Skelton and Peter Davies, who volunteered for service over those years. I do not recall seeing the latter two in television before, so that proved to be of additional interest as these people recounted their tales of monster hunting and also the human side of the story.

Alison was the wife of Clem Skelton, one of the important members of the LNIB whose camera skills helped set up the various camera watches. He had altogether been a Spitfire fighter pilot, high altitude reconnaissance photographer, actor, novelist and monster hunter. He is pictured below applying his skills to an LNIB camera.

I was interested to hear her give an account of an encounter that Clem may have had with the creature back in those days. She said he was rowing across the loch about the time of dusk when something came up beside him, making bubbling sounds and was larger than his boat. He did not investigate and rowed as fast as he could to shore. I guess I would have done the same thing rather than think of the photo-op of the century.

Then Dick Raynor told us about his time there and the film he shot in 1967 of an object making its way on the loch leaving a wake behind it. The LNIB regarded this as an important piece of evidence and submitted it to JARIC for photographic analysis, concluding the object was perhaps seven feet long and travelling at 5mph. The story of Dan Taylor and his yellow submarine were told before moving onto the arrival of Robert Rines and the Academy of Applied Science from America.

Dick commented that this felt like NASA was getting involved in the hunt and it wouldn't be long before they got results. On and after the night of August 8th 1972, i would have certainly felt that way. Dick Raynor and Peter Davies recounted their experiences on the night the famous "flipper" photograph was taken. What came out of that leads us into the section of the documentary on Robert Rines.

This took us into 1975 and those controversial head and body photos, the article in the prestigious Nature magazine naming the Loch Ness Monster, the postponed meeting with scientists and the press conference at the House of Commons. A leap of 12 years then takes us to Operation Deepscan and its inconclusive results.

So the program switched to two investigators, Rikki Razdan and Alan Kielar, who discovered the 1972 flipper photograph was a claimed enhanced image which bore little resemblance to what the Jet Propulsion Laboratories produced and they were right. It had been retouched by parties unknown who to this day have not confessed to the deed. They also visited Winifred Cary to find that Robert Rines had used her so called psychic dowsing skills to pinpoint where to place their underwater cameras. To this day, it is not clear to me what Rines' reply to this was?

One thing seems certain, as a lawyer Rines never sued them over these claims. We then switched to a fuller exposition of the Surgeon's Photograph hoax, but there was no new information added to that particular story. After some more psychological words about people wanting the monster to exist, we ended up with the recent eDNA survey results and no reptiles but lots of eels. 

That eel reference left some speculating that some of what had been previously spoken about could support a giant eel theory. They picked the so-called eel-like nature of what the women at the Halfway House in 1933 saw and the "snake-like" characteristics of what Hugh Gray photographed. Well, at least they admitted these people saw a large unknown creature but there is nothing eel-like in what was reported by those women or anything snake like in Gray's photograph. But, as stated earlier, if they had used the superior Gray image and dug around a bit more, they would have had an eel-like head to bolster their case.

After some more lightweight psychology about the monster being ingrained in the culture, a mystery we cannot let go and the more we want to believe, the more it stays in our mind, the documentary ended. After all that, I wondered if a change in direction for this genre of documentary was required? How about a documentary that focusses on land sightings, or one on events before 1933 or one that tracks a team of monster hunters (like the bigfoot programs) and so on? Well, the last one may be in the offing, but I suspect even the general viewing public may be getting tired with the same old format.

Maybe that is more down to the lack of imagination of the broadcasting organisations to whom these documentaries are sold to. Either way, the vast majority of stories on the monster remain untouched by these people while they play it safe with a tight subset of the genre which is rarely updated. 

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The author can also be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

A Visit to the new Loch Ness Centre Exhibition

 

A week or so ago, I made it up to Drumnadrochit to visit the new exhibition which is now under the management of Continuum Attractions and has undergone extensive changes over the first half of this year. It was time to see how the Loch Ness Monster story has been re-created by them over forty years since the first incarnation of this opened under the guidance of Tony Harmsworth. That first one was very much along the lines of the plesiosaur theory and everything was just about evidence while the subsequent exhibition was more along the lines of "no monster here" and everything was no longer evidence.

The exhibition moved from one extreme to another and so the question now was where the new one lay between these other two. Now I have to say here that I would not consider myself a suitable reviewer of exhibitions such as this. That is not because I am being paid to hype it or because I am related to anyone in the company. Rather, having imbibed a lot of the monster story over the decades, one can get a bit pernickety about things others would consider minor matters.

Moreover, the exhibition was not specially designed for me or any other monster believer or indeed for any sceptic. It is an exhibition designed for the average person, who, though not stupid, has little knowledge of the subject and may want to know more. Therefore, the job of any such exhibition is to present the subject in such a way that does not deceive or try and lead a person down one path to a fixed conclusion. In that light, I offer my thoughts and observations.

I turned up on the Friday and found that there had been a power cut and so had to wait for perhaps ten minutes while this was sorted out and everything was brought back up to speed. I went in and at this point I will confess I got in on a free ticket from Continuum Attractions. That was no big deal as I had helped them out on a few minor things and that was a fair exchange. I would say there was about five of us going into the exhibition. This was a week before the schools in Scotland closed for the Summer holidays and so I wanted to be there before the tourists began to arrive en masse over the next few months.

The first room we entered was a kind of ante-room before the main event. There were various famous and purported photographs of the Loch Ness Monster hanging on the wall along with sketches and a picture of the most famous man of all, Tim Dinsdale. On the wall beside these pictures was a quote from myself taken from one of my books. Don't worry, that was the first and last time you would hear about me in the exhibition! A nice touch above the pictures were four numbers hanging on hooks - implying they were subject to change. They were the numbers 1, 4, 4 and 5. Or to be more precise, one thousand, four hundred and forty five sightings and counting ... 

That would be the number taken from Gary Campbell's Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register. So all a good start I thought. Throughout the ensuing exhibits, the "classic" photographs, though not explicitly presented as evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, were neither subject to some of the unfalsifiable and withering arguments you get from sceptics. Well, one or two were but I move on.

Adrian Shine, the curator of the previous exhibition, would feature more than anyone else in the presentations. So he was there in the ante-room in a kind of "live" framed picture. I wasn't sure whether that implied an imbalance in views. On the one hand, he was there as an expert on the hydrology, limnology and history of the loch. On the other hand, he was also there as a sceptic regarding there being any large exotic creature in Loch Ness. Where one began and the other ended was not always clear to me.

Alongside Adrian's animated portrait were two interesting items from the lore of the great story - a copy of the Drumbuie Stone and Marmaduke Wetherell's hippo ashtray. One of them was accompanied by a text asking if this could be linked to the monster - a recurring theme as I ventured on into the first video room. There were eight rooms in all, taking me fifty minutes to go through. The first was an introductory video of the natural history of the loch from ancient geological times. 

I studiously stood and watched this, though a man and his two kids just took a glance at it and hastily moved on. Why pay good money but then rush through? Maybe the power cut delay had messed up his itinerary or something. The video was an entertaining walk through volcanic times using video graphics up to a present day clip and set the scene for the mystery.

I next walked into the Myths and Legends room and was greeted by the voice of David Tennant, famous for his portrayal of Doctor Who and apparently a Nessie fan. He provided the voice over and it was natural that this room was the next subject to greet us. It had that kind of ethereal feel to it which captured well the nether-world of kelpies and water horses.

By this time, I was wondering if the room dimensions were exactly the same as the prior exhibition. It looked like it, but the refurbishment was more important than whether rooms had been combined or split up. It was next onto the room of Nessie's origins as a multi-screen display took us through the early 1930s and the beginnings of the modern monster. This was in a dramatised form using actors representing such people as Aldie Mackay and Alex Campbell in the setting of an old style pub.

Alongside that was a screen displaying people, photos and sketches linked to the mystery as shown below. Here the old classic photos were again on display and in general they were neither praised nor pilloried, which I guess was the best I could hope for. One or two were questioned and I do not recall seeing the O'Connor, Shiels or Cockrell photos.

It was interesting to see actors who were non-white depicting eyewitnesses. I guess this was to fulfill diversity quotas but it made me think whether there had been any such eyewitness over the last ninety years. I could not think of a single one and although back in the 1930s that would have been no surprise, nobody over the last few decades came to mind. Of course, most of the time the ethnicity of the person involved is never stated. They are there out there somewhere, but who was the most famous one? I am sure someone will let me know.

The next room was a high vaulted space bathed in green light which conveyed the depths of the loch and the exploration of it. Well, it is actually more tea-like but green is perhaps more calming. The effects made one think they were standing at the bottom of the loch looking up as a large screen took us through the various underwater searches over the years. The effects were good with the odd mysterious shadow flitting past but I did not agree with the sceptical assessment of the 1975 "body" picture taken by the AAS. Well, I did say this exhibition wasn't crafted with a small cadre of Nessie hunters in mind!

The next room was what I would describe as the previous exhibition compressed into one room. This was the domain of Adrian Shine as he appeared on a large video screen in front of the John Murray boat giving us his perspective on the decades of the hunt, what animals may or may not be Nessie, the other usual suspects which fool observers and where do we go from here? Now I do not mean that Nessie scepticism was confined to this room only, it was not, but this was the room to go to for that genre of opinion. As I said, this was going to be an exhibition that would attempt to balance these two opposing poles. Did it achieve that? I will give my take on that at the end.

Nevertheless, it was a well presented video, and yes, people are fooled by everyday phenomenon, and so that had to be said, it just depends how you say it. As the tour drew to a close, it was into the penultimate room which was a kind of reprise of what had gone before as final arguments were made. There was a display of items highlighting curious explanations of monsters but the main focus was the video wall and at this point we finally got to meet some Nessie believers in the form of Steve Feltham and Alan McKenna who were stating their case to me. No worries, chaps, I am all in.

With all that done and dusted it was time to place your vote. What did I think? Plesiosaur? Big fish? Hoax? Boats? Logs or what? Make your choice and press one or more of those nine buttons. That was quite fun and my vote was added to produce a video wall display of all cumulative results. And the winner was ... well, you just got to love the voting public.

I took snapshots of the running totals and may come back at the end of the Summer to see how the voting has progressed. The final room may or may not have been a room, perhaps more of an exit hall. But it had preserved something that was for me a favourite part of the previous exhibition and that was the video testimonies of some well known sightings, straight from the witnesses themselves. 

This is something any enquiring mind should listen to and so I was glad to see it still there and a bit more modern looking. However, it was hard to hear the audio as there was some music playing over it in the same area. In the last exhibition, there was a set of headphones one could plug in to the display and hear it clearly. But it appeared there was no headphone facility, perhaps this was some health and safety rule about sharing a headphone. Anyway, I told the staff nearby about the issue and hopefully it will be sorted soon.

Overall, it was a big improvement on the previous exhibition in terms of presentation, entertainment and seeking a balance between belief and scepticism. However, what was actually presented as potential evidence for the Loch Ness Monster was small, the sonar hit of October 2020 taken from a Cruise Loch Ness boat got some attention at the end. As stated earlier, it was good to see some classic images presented uncritically, but no more than that. I wondered where some other classic images were, such as the Dinsdale film? Or more modern ones from the last twenty years.

Perhaps there was copyright and licensing issues tied to some of those? You can't just put on display images owned by others when you are charging a fee to see them. Such is the commercial world of the Loch Ness Monster. On the other hand, sceptical images of logs and wakes are pretty much free. So how did I rate the exhibition for balance between scepticism and belief in the creature?

I assigned a mark to each of the eight rooms out of 100, so 60:40 would be 60% pro-Nessie and 40% anti-Nessie for want of better phrases and each room was given equal weight. I added them up and got a balance of 55:45 in favour of Nessie. So I could say that the exhibition had achieved a balance with a tilt towards Scotland's most famous creature. Others of course, may come up with different numbers, but go yourself and form your own opinion as to how the mystery of the loch has been newly presented to us in Drumnadrochit.

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1933 - King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster

This year marks the 90th anniversary of two famous monsters. The first was King Kong when that great ape appeared in his first film, released in America to critical acclaim on March 2nd 1933 in New York. Two months later, the first media report of many concerning a strange creature in a Highland loch was published by the Inverness Courier on May 2nd under the title of "Strange Spectacle at Loch Ness". After those debut days, the two monsters followed parallel paths into 1933 as more reports to intrigue the public came in from the loch about the newly named Loch Ness Monster, while anticipation of the King Kong film coming to Britain fueled excitement about monsters real or imagined.

King Kong would have its premiere at the Coliseum Cinema in London on Easter Monday, April 17th as seen in the contemporary advert below, which was around the time that Aldie Mackay, the eyewitness to the "strange spectacle" in Loch Ness, had her encounter. In scenes unfamiliar to modern cinema goers, a report from the Daily Herald the next day said that thousands gathered at Charing Cross trying to get in to see the film with police being called in to control the crowd. Those who were successful had to stand in queues hundreds of yards long wrapping round the block. By the end of the day, 15,000 were the first to see this literal blockbuster.

Such was the impression that the film had on the general public that a question has been raised in the ninety years since as to whether these two monsters did follow parallel paths or did their paths cross and influence each other in some way? To that end, it has been speculated in recent times that the prehistoric monsters depicted in the King Kong film had a subliminal effect on the eyewitness accounts that came out of Loch Ness in the months after the release of the film in the United Kingdom.

While the film was preparing to go on general UK release in the Autumn of 1933, the Loch Ness Monster story ramped up with a sensational story from the Inverness Courier of August 4th concerning the monster out of the loch on dry land crossing a road in front of two witnesses in their car. The couple were the Spicers from London and their account became one of the lead stories of the coming worldwide media interest. This interest was to be sparked by one national newspaper, The Scotsman, sending a team up to investigate local claims and publishing it to a wider audience in September.

King Kong and Nessie now had everyone's attention. And this is where King Kong first enters the Nessie domain. Lt. Cdr. Rupert T. Gould interviewed the Spicers for his book, "The Loch Ness Monster and Others" published later in June 1934. During his meeting with George Spicer, the film came up in the conversation:

While discussing his experience, I happened to refer to the diplodocus-like dinosaur in King Kong: a film which, I discovered, we had both seen. He told me that the creature he saw much resembled this, except that in his case no legs were visible, while the neck was much longer and more flexible.

It is not clear when George Spicer saw the film. Was it before or after his experience at Loch Ness in July 1933? The film had been screening in London for three months before the Spicers' encounter at Loch Ness which sounds like plenty of time to see it. But then again, maybe monster films were not his thing until he saw something monstrous up north? Nobody knows for sure, but after this no author made any mention of King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster that I could find for fifty years.

That came in 1983 with Ronald Binns' sceptical work, "The Loch Ness Mystery Solved". In his concluding argument that people need monsters and will therefore see them, he refers to the exchange between Spicer and Gould and conjectures that:

It is probably no coincidence that the Loch Ness Monster was discovered at the very moment that King Kong, the masterpiece of the genre, was released across Scotland in 1933.

This "pioneering argument" (as Binns self-describes it) was not developed further and speculation about any connection between the two monsters disappears again for another thirty years. That came with the publication of another sceptical book entitled "Abominable Science" by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero in 2013. This book was a general diatribe against cryptozoology with a large chapter on the Loch Ness Monster. I reviewed it at the time here.

Binns' initial thoughts were taken and developed by the authors who suggest that the scene in King Kong with the diplodocus-like dinosaur mentioned by Gould was transposed by George Spicer onto his story. It was not clear what was meant by this, did George Spicer take that scene and totally fabricate a similar incident at Loch Ness or did what he saw at Loch Ness go through some kind of mental diplodocus filter? So questions were left unanswered, as well as the involvement of Spicer's wife, the co-witness and as mentioned above whether one or both of them had even seen the film by that time?

A couple of years later, researcher Charles Paxton had an article published in the January 2015 edition of Fortean Times entitled "Nessie, Daughter of Kong?" in which he took a different view to the King Kong and Nessie connection. He argued that King Kong being a major influence on the Loch Ness Monster was too simplistic and failed to address various factors at play, such as a strange creature in the loch being reported at least as far back as 1930 and the issue of the film not reaching Inverness until October of 1933. However, he did not dismiss the idea of some degree of cultural influence.

This article led to a couple of letters being published in the March 2015 edition from an Ulrich Magin and a Martyn Jackson. The first focused more on the account from 1930 but also mentioned the potential influence of water horse and sea serpent necks beyond the dinosaurs of King Kong. The letter from Mr. Jackson changes tack and goes back to 1925 and the release of the silent movie, "The Lost World" which was another dinosaur movie featuring stop motion technology and was seen as the forerunner of the King Kong film. In particular he refers to another diplodocus-type creature which runs amok in London. Did this film released eight years before King Kong have any influence in the matter?

The debate then comes full circle in 2023 as the Fortean Times published another article by the aforementioned Ulrich Magin to mark the 90th anniversary of Nessie. This was a sceptical article and the focus was again on the Spicer land sighting with the statement that he may have been influenced by the movie. That more or less sums up the debate on the connection between the King Kong movie and early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster in 1933.

With all that history behind us, now seemed a good time to review all this with a fresh look. That required new information and so I turned to the British Newspaper Archive to harvest data on what the media were reporting on the two monsters back in 1933 and 1934. It has over 67 million pages of British newspapers digitised and online since the 1700s and is the most complete archive available. It will not have every newspaper for every year, but the amount of pages available should give us a representative view of what journalists were writing on certain subjects back then.

Firstly, all references to the phrase "King Kong", "Loch Ness Monster" and "Loch Ness" were collected for the years 1933 to 1939. The phrase "Loch Ness" was chosen as not all references to the monster used the phrase "Loch Ness Monster". When plotted on a chart, the two phrases had pretty much the same shape and so I will stick to matches for "Loch Ness Monster" although references to "Loch Ness" were almost 50% greater. The chart of newspaper hits for "King Kong" and "Loch Ness Monster" is shown below. The Loch Ness Monster line is the darker one.

Looking at King Kong first, the line rises into May 1933 as the film finally arrives in London and the reviews and chatter begins. There is then a dip awaiting the later nationwide release and then by the end of September, we have a peak in King Kong interest as most parts of the country would have seen the film (though Inverness did not see it until October). Another peak happens in November as the sequel film "Son of Kong" came out at the end of the year to stir further interest. That film was a flop and depicted a lot smaller ape. After that King Kong fever effectively ends and it drops rapidly into a flatter pattern.

For the Loch Ness Monster, things started quietly as news of a monster stayed with the local newspapers in early 1933. It was when The Scotsman took up the story in September that it began to acquire UK interest and launched like a rocket to peak in January 1934 with various key events being reported such as the Wetherell expedition, the first photograph from Hugh Gray and the Arthur Grant land account. Then the reporting likewise dropped off with a small peak in the summer of 1934.

What can be gleaned about any potential relationship here? The King Kong phenomenon had peaked in September with its peak in cinema goers, but the Loch Ness Monster peaked four months later and for its own different reasons. King Kong had peaked just as the Loch Ness Monster was taking off. Both had gathered a similar number of hits up to their respective peaks, but the Nessie one was more of a spike hitting a peak twice as high as anything for King Kong.

As to actual content, most of the King Kong matches would be cinema adverts, reviews and local talk about the film. There would be an overspill into the mainstream where columnists would use the phrase in different ways and the beast would "appear" at local events such as carnivals. The Loch Ness Monster was different as it focused on eyewitness accounts, theories as to what it was, what the experts thought about it and what people were going to do about it. To that can be added the humorous articles, letters and the use of the phrase in a more generic way as well as how it fed into the local cultures in a similar way to King Kong.

How correlated are the two data sets as in how closely do they relate to each other? By using the Excel correlation function, a numerical value can be assigned to this question. This is a number which lies between -1 and +1 and the closer it is to +1, the more positively correlated they are. A value closer to zero indicates there is no correlation between the two and a value tending to -1 indicates they are oppositely correlated (i.e. one rises as the other falls and vice versa). For the two years of 1933 and 1934, taking in the significant highs and lows of the two beasts, the correlation came out at +0.19 which would be regarded as a weak correlation. 

That does not mean that the two phenomena went their own ways throughout those years, it is more suggestive of a degree of influence but not a strong one. The next set may give us a better indication of how one may have influenced the other and that is the number of times both phenomena were mentioned in the same article  Since the accuracy of the newspaper archive search facility gave matches for both on the same page but not necessarily the same article, each hit had to be examined and judged accordingly. 

The search was run from January 1933 to October 1935, which by then both were out of the "mania" phase. The total number of hits for articles mentioning both the King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster was a mere forty three. The total number of newspaper occurrences of King Kong or the Loch Ness Monster on their own or together was 8999 in the same period. That means the media linked the two, for whatever reasons, about 0.5% of the time. In terms of hits for the two just being on the same page, the best total was 73 or 0.8% of the total. The chart below shows the hits for both as a dotted line. Since the number is so small compared to the overall total, it is numbered on the right hand side.

However, the dotted line hits a maximum of just over 1% of the total in January 1934 as Nessie media articles hit a peak. So, the dual mention phenomenon is more linked to coverage of the Loch Ness Monster than coverage of the King Kong movie, which would make sense. But it looks like a very small number compared to what it is covering, so that does not look like an indicator of the King Kong movie influencing the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon. This is further seen in what these dual hits actually talk about, which is tabulated into general categories below.

1. The idea of unclassified or extinct animals surviving - 3
2. Loch Ness Monster compared to diplodocus in King Kong film - 2
3. Humorous references to both (metaphors, poems, story) - 9
4. Appearances in public events (fancy dress, pantomime, carnivals) - 10
5. Nessie themed films compared to King Kong film (Movietone, Secret of the Loch, Irvine film) - 8
6. King Kong a better story than Loch Ness Monster - 2
7. Publicity for King Kong film mentioning Loch Ness Monster - 4

Most of the references are of a trivial nature and do not address the question of how dinosaurs in the King Kong film could have influenced eyewitnesses to objects in Loch Ness. In fact, there was no reference in any of the above to an eyewitness describing what they saw as looking like something from the King Kong movie. The most important references are the two which state that the Loch Ness Monster resembles the diplodocus in the Kong movie. One is explicit and the other is implicit when it only says you can see Nessie in the film, but there is only one scene that fits that statement.

That is two quotes from nearly nine thousand newspaper pieces over two years, not exactly a ringing endorsement of what is called a "pioneering argument". That argument is rather indirectly inferred from the coincidental appearances of the two monsters in 1933 and not anything that could be called direct evidence. This is further demonstrated when the newspaper pieces which mention both the Loch Ness Monster and King Kong are charted against the actual eyewitness reports from 1933 to 1934 as shown below (Nessie reports are the orange line).

The Loch Ness Monster reports just kept coming in long after any media stories linking the two was finished and peaked in July 1934. The correlation for these two data sets is 0.31 which is borderline weak to moderate, or in other words, not strong or compelling in any way. One can only go so far with these statistics, but they present a more quantitative approach to the subject than psychological theories which are notorious for being untestable.

But going back to the history of this King Kong debate, there was one quantitative analysis offered in defense of the theory and that was proposed in "Abominable Science". The claim was that the object described by the Spicers bears a more than passing resemblance to our not so friendly brontosaurus/diplodocus/ataposaur/etc from King Kong. I reproduce below two pictures relevant to that theory.

Now "Abominable Science" claims four similarities between George Spicer's sketch and their snapshot from the brontosaurus scene:

1. Both had a long neck.
2. Both had no feet visible.
3. Both had tail curved round side of body.
4. Both had victim in mouth.

Now if you watch the complete scene from the film (YouTube), that scenario is not so convincing. Depending on what frame you pick, you could only have two of the list true - long neck and something in mouth. What was claimed as a lamb or some other small animal in the mouth of the Loch Ness Monster by George Spicer equates to our unfortunate crew member in the Kong film. I don't think I have seen a meaner man munching brontosaurus. So much for giant cows with long necks.

So perhaps not the most unbiased choice of the "Abominable Science" authors. If they can do that, well, I choose a still which bears only a slight resemblance to the Spicer sketch. So, the case has not been made and I see no evidence that seeing dinosaurs like the one below from the King Kong movie can make people looking at floating logs or birds in Loch Ness turn them into prehistoric creatures. 

That there may have been cultural influences between the two monsters cannot be denied, people did make connections, but it is a big leap to conceive how this alters peoples' perceptions looking across a loch. Indeed, no serious scientific paper to this day has been published on the subject with convincing experimentation and reasoning.

Finally, I move onto "The Lost World" references. Actually, I watched this silent movie for the first time when I was researching this article. It was available to rent on Amazon Prime and I took some photos. It was a good watch considering its age, although obviously dated in more ways than one. Professor Challenger's captured brontosaurus also features in that movie and does some serious damage to London as the designers of Tower Bridge failed to take into account the weight of a brontosaurus on it and it drops into the Thames. The scene ends with a very Loch Ness Monster like scene but again, the links between this and the later Loch Ness Monster are even more tenuous.

After all that, what can one say but here's to another ninety years of Nessie.

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The author can also be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

sss

Now ninety years on we might say the special effects are primitive compared to today while we look over the latest Nessie photograph with no idea what that old critter is. Ninety years from now, I wonder what they will think of our CGI King Kongs? I don't know, but the latest Nessie pictures will be something we can't quite conceive and they still won't know what that old critter is.