A Review of Holiday's Great Orm Of Loch Ness

I am on holiday in Cornwall just now amongst such reputed cryptids as Morgawr, Owlman and the Beast of Bodmin Moor. If I catch a sight of any of them, I will be sure to let you know!

Meanwhile, I thought I would post an old e-clipping I found on a recent library visit. It is a review of Ted Holiday's book, The Great Orm of Loch Ness. The fascinating thing is that the review appeared in The Quarterly Review of Biology published by the University of Chicago Press (Vol.44, No.4 Dec 1969).

Amidst other reviews on books such as Cybernetics Simplified and Current Topics in Radiation Research we find a book on the Loch Ness Monster.  One wonders if such a thing would ever happen again in a scientific journal for a similar work? 

The reviewer was a Jane Oppenheimer, who I believe was a renowned embryologist who died in 1996. She reviewed more than 400 publications and looked for the following in a publication:

She respected others who were erudite and had little patience for those who lacked rigour in scholarship. Colleagues who were creative and imaginative as well as rigorous gained her admiration. Perhaps Holiday's lateral thinking struck a chord with here. 

She is careful not to admit to the existence of one or more large, unknown creatures in Loch Ness; but neither does she deny such a thing. However, Holiday's pursuit of the undeniable picture or film gets short shrift from the zoologist who says their community expects more than that. I would myself expect nothing less from them and smile when I see sceptical comments on this blog demanding better pictures. 

However, she ends on a positive note by agreeing that an open mind is required. If that is all that the scientific community showed, that would be enough for me.

 

A 1934 Book on The Loch Ness Monster

I just wanted to mention that Karl Shuker has updated his bibliography on books devoted to the Loch Ness Monster. By way of introduction, he mentions the first book on Nessie by W. H. Lane. For further information on this book and its author, you can view my previous articles here and here. (regular reader Steve Plambeck will warm to Colonel Lane and his giant salamander theory.).

Karl's list is a bit different to mine in that he includes non-fiction juvenile and non-english books. I don't, but I do include books which have sizable sections on Nessie while Karl is only interested in books devoted to the Loch Ness Monster. Between us, I think we have covered all the bases on what has been published. Well, that is not quite true, there are always general books out there which have a chapter on the Loch Ness Monster, these may well exceed what we have listed.

One title most of all caught my eye and that is Karl's up and coming book called "Here's Nessie!" which is a compilation of his writings on the famous beastie.  I look forward to this and Paul Harrison's forthcoming biography on Frank Searle in the months ahead!

While I am here, I promised in that first book article to look at the second ever book on the Loch Ness Monster. This was a 16 page booklet entitled "The Mysterious Monster of Loch Ness" published by the Fort Augustus Abbey Press and authored by a W.D.Hamilton and J.Hughes.

Unlike Lane's first ever book on the Loch Ness Monster, I have never seen the second book on public sale. I personally had to obtain a photocopy of an original held in Edinburgh. If it ever turns up on eBay, I expect it to go for hundreds of pounds. The authors are not mentioned in the book itself, but rather from the library catalogue. However, Michael Turnbull's book "Abbey Boys" which relates the history of the Fort Augustus Abbey schools, mentions them as teachers during the 1930s.

The book makes no mention of anything beyond May 1934, so I presume it was published around June 1934 putting it a few weeks ahead of Rupert Gould's better known book, "The Loch Ness Monster and Others". Proceeding in a chronological manner, the booklet goes through St.Columba, the Willie MacGruer land sighting around the First World War and the 1932 "crocodile" sighting in the River Ness.

A further note of interest states that the rumour of a released crocodile dates back to about 1913. I covered this persistent crocodile story in this article. Wetherell's infamous spoors are mentioned, but it is more interesting to note that this was contrasted with what was stated as the favoured theory of the locals which was of a "bearded eel".

The booklet goes a bit strange when it mentions strange toothmarks in sheep and deer carcasses but then states they were discovered to be those of a walrus! That in itself would be an unusual event as would be the tale of a famous deep-sea diver finding great honeycombed caverns in the gloom of the loch.

Having run off a few stories of other lake cryptids, the authors make no commitment as to what the creature may be and give a list of various candidates. The one thing that puzzles me from the list is what is a "megovia"?! The discourse ends with the two stories often given as the origins of the name of the loch.

PUBLIC NOTICE: Can "P.C." email me at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com about the painting they sent a comment to me about.

A Sighting Report from 2001

Reports of encounters with the Loch Ness Monster regularly appear on multimedia, even years after the event happened. Today, I highlight one for you which happened 13 years ago but was not made public until 2011 and now in 2014, hopefully it will go out to a wider audience.

Of course, the phrase "Encounter with the Loch Ness Monster" is a contentious series of words before one even gets into the details of the story. Not all reports that enter the public domain will be of the creature and, indeed, plenty of people will not hesitate to tell you that none of them involve a monster at all. Once again, I will offer my opinions, but let the readers judge.

I was at a recent meeting of the Edinburgh Fortean Society where Innes Smith gave a very good talk on the problems of believers, sceptics and the paranormal in the field of psychic research. That in itself was material enough for a few more articles, but it was what Innes said after that is relevant today.

Innes is Vice-President of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research and has been researching the paranormal since 1998. On the night of 1st May 2001, he found himself on the shores of Loch Ness as a result of a detour from a paranormal investigation at Loch Ashie. I encourage you to read his full and entertaining account here before I get into the nitty gritty.

In summary, Innes was staring out at the loch on a beach opposite Castle Urquhart, drinking coffee with his camera at the ready. To quote from his article:

It was then that I saw it. Her. It. Constantly in motion, something between the graceful rise of a swan’s neck out of water and a wiggly worm, an animated question mark (how apt) moving from  left to right. I estimated it to be about 6 feet out of water (1.8 metres to my metric chums) and it was framed brilliantly by the path of moonlight. My instant reaction was one of joy and I said out loud, ‘no way, no f*cking way‘, and then curiously my brain started to squeeze at least 20 seconds of thought into 0.2 of a second.

I reasoned that I was witnessing something that no-one would believe, and yet, here I was with a camera in my right hand (a cup of hot coffee was in my left). I also reasoned that even if I did take a photo, the chances of anything appearing on the film would be negligible (I had no telephoto lens and it was 1 a.m in the morning). However, the mere fact that I would not try, would, I reasoned, count against my credibility, so I decided to take some photos. I took five photographs. With a flash (it is an old automatic 35mm film camera). By the time my eyes had slightly readjusted to the darkness, I could see nothing.

The rough location of the sighting is circled above. I must admit to a bit of jealousy here. I have been out several times at night by Loch Ness with the infra-red equipment trained on the dark waters. So far I have had no success. But amidst the flow of millions of travellers past Loch Ness over the years, some people will statistically be in the right place at the right time.

But for eeriness levels, this report is a notch above the others. One o' clock in the morning; a cold, lonely beach; a path of moonlight leading an individual to see a monster's neck writhing on the surface.

If indeed it was a monster's neck. The zoom in below shows a bit more of what Innes saw, though he seems convinced it was a hallucination, but why and how he cannot say.  The word "illusion" is more often used than "hallucination" when attempts are made to explain away monster sightings. Though some of the strained explanations that I have read must have required the witnesses to have feasted on magic mushroom soup for their lunch before their alleged encounters.

But Innes' story is a bit more unique. The usual daytime explanations seem even less adequate in a nighttime environment where birds have gone back to their nests and otters to their holts (I have run various trap cameras over the years, I get birds landing near the camera in daytime, but to date nothing at night). Logs will continue to drift at night with vertical branches protruding, but they don't writhe and twist and disappear from view so quickly.

Did that shimmering path of moonlight have an effect on the mind? I must confess I do not know, but I don't think the burden of proof lies with me to demonstrate that. After all, it is just moonlight reflecting of a surface of water. It does not sound like a big deal but I have put a note in my mind to coincide my next visit to the loch with a full moon and hope for a clear night. I am not expecting to trip out into a hallucination. Innes said it was a half moon, NASA's moon phase calendar confirms ths moon was in a first quarter phase on April 30th.

If it was the monster, I am sure Tony Shiels would approve of the "tentacle" reference and Ted Holiday would give a nod to the worm like metaphor. With reference to the previous plesiosaur article, I don't think any plesiosaur could contort its neck like that.

But what about the camera? It seems a bit of that "shock and awe" I have previously referred to kicked in to a degree. That doesn't always mean one is suddenly rooted to the spot, but it certainly initiates a mindset where one is not dotting ones "i"s and crossing ones "t"s in the usual methodical manner (and I say this knowing that Innes is a practised investigator of the unusual). As Innes says:

I legged it back up to the car. I told my colleague about what I’d seen. I know he didn’t believe me. I hardly believe myself*. And as a footnote: the photos?  A mysterious mist appeared on all the shots. How odd, there was no mist? Maybe I had captured something paranormal after all? …. and then I remembered what I had in my left hand. A cup of steaming hot coffee. I had succeeded in photographing steam from a cup of coffee – brilliantly.

I can sympathise with that, even a "seasoned" visitor like myself cannot be quite sure that I would be ready to seamlessly move into action with the video recorder or camera. Here are some more observations that Innes gave to me:

1. It had no head or head shape, it could have been a tentacle or a giant worm.
2. It was constantly moving, initially from the left to the right as if rising from the loch surface.
3. I would estimate it as being about 6 - 10 feet out of the water.
4. The colour was impossible to know due it being nighttime, but the shape was in the middle of the path of moonlight on the surface and looked black to me. 
5. How far out was it on the loch? Hard to judge. Maybe a bit closer (to me) than halfway across. 
6. The sighting lasted no longer than 5 - 10 seconds - at this point I started to take photographs and the flash ruined my night vision. By the time I stopped taking photos the image had gone - maybe 10 seconds after that...

Innes suggests about 500m to the object and when he described the motion of the object it reminded me of one of those fast time lapse films you see of plants growing where they rise up and flail about in various directions, but in a general vertical direction.

Did Innes spot our famous resident? He is not sure and I am, of course, open to the possibility that he did.  The briefness of the sighting and the relatively long distance brings one into the percentages of sighting validity. It is simplistic to just say deer, bird or branch as the credibility of a sighting is inversely proportional to distance and obscuration but directly proportional to time (see link for more detail).

I regard Innes as a trustworthy and skilled investigator and so it is down to what could possibly have fooled him ... or not. When I come back from my next trip, I will have a hopefully better idea of moonlight observations of the loch.

PUBLIC NOTICE: Could P.C. get back to me about the painting you told me about. My email is lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

The Plesiosaur Theory

A mini debate of sorts has arisen in a small corner of the Web concerning Plesiosaurs. To wit, is the Loch Ness Monster one of their ilk? A recent article by Nick Redfern dismisses the idea and that has led to a growing thread on the Zombie Plesiosaur Facebook page. I chipped in with a few comments but thought after nearly four years of blogging on Nessie, I really ought to say something about plesiosaurs.

In fact, it is well overdue since the Loch Ness Monster and plesiosaurs has been fixed in the public mind since the early days of the Nessie story. Indeed, the two have been almost synonymous in the media representation of the phenomenon for decades. The reason behind that is quite simple when the various theories are considered by the populist press.

Giant slug? Ugly.
Giant eel? Boring.
Paranormal manifestation? Wacky.
Surviving aquatic dinosaur? Now you're talking.

Nothing resonates more with the public imagination than a living dinosaur. Okay, I am not sure plesiosaurs are strictly dinosaurs, but the public doesn't care about that. The earliest reference I have seen on this theory in the Loch Ness story is from the Inverness Courier dated 24th October 1933. That article mentions a Philip Stalker who gave a radio talk on the monster citing this amongst other theories.

This was only just over five months after the first reports began to be published. Rupert T. Gould also mentions a letter to the Morning Post newspaper which promotes the theory on the 14th October 1933. I have not seen that particular newspaper, but it is fairly clear to me that the long neck from the August 1933 Spicers story was the catalyst for this line of thought.

That being said, Rupert Gould was not favourably inclined to the theory in his 1934 book. His reasoning being that the air breathing creature should have been seen more frequently, some bones should have been found and the creature was extinct anyway. He did not discount the idea that some evolved descendant of the original plesiosaur swam the oceans of the world, but he could not see such a beast residing in Loch Ness.

However, the idea that Loch Ness contained an evolved form of the species gained traction in the decades ahead. Loch Ness Monster expert, Maurice Burton, promoted the idea towards the end of the 1950s and his student, Tim Dinsdale, fell in favour with the idea when he published his popular book "Loch Ness Monster" in 1961.

Tim attempted to counter Gould's objections by suggesting ideas such as the monster covertly taking in air via nostrils on the top of the head or even using the reports of "horns" as suggestive of extended nostrils. Meanwhile, Tim could always call upon the trusty ceolacanth to counter arguments about extinction. As a bonus, it would be proposed that a modified plesiosaur could have taken upon itself other quirky abilities, such as the monster's flexible hump configuration (others would also suggest a hypothetical rhomboidal tail misinterpreted as a second "hump").

It seemed to work as the theory gained ground into the 1960s and 1970s. The painting at the top of the article was executed by William Owen and I believe formed part of the Great Glen Exhibition at that time. How many of the monster believers held to the idea of a modified plesiosaur is not clear to me, but it seemed to be ahead of the other candidates such as eels, worms and tulpas.

However, Roy Mackal, in his 1976 "The Monsters of Loch Ness", downgraded the plesiosaur to third place in a list of candidate animals, well behind the giant eel and amphibian. It would seem these days that the giant eel has triumphed over the plesiosaur as a hopeful monster.

By the time Tim Dinsdale published the fourth edition of his book in 1982, he still listed the candidates but he was now non-committal on any of them. He still believed there was an unknown animal there, what it was eluded him (though one might wonder if his less publicised paranormal views had a say).

I myself have not subscribed to the traditional plesiosaur theory in a long time. The problems are too many to me. The idea that a number of air breathing plesiosaurs could be swimming in the upper echelons of the open water column was dealt a blow when sonar failed to register that scenario. Yes, anomalous sonar contacts have been recorded over the decades, but nothing consistent with open water air breathers. The large lungs would have easily shown up on sonar.

The problem with required multiple surfacings to breath was also evident. Dinsdale speculated about the use of extended horns to take in air but this was not a solution to the rarity of monster surfacings. The problem is not inhalation, it is exhalation. Have you ever seen a whale come up for air? The noise and spray that accompanies the exhalation leaves no one in doubt that there is a large animal around.

If the Loch Ness Plesiosaur comes up for air, even just below the surface, we should hear it before we see it. I would also add that even if the creature was regularly just swimming inches below the surface, the head and part of the neck would be visible from cruise boats. The conclusion is simple, the Loch Ness Monster cannot be an air breather, even by surreptitious means.

Apart from the fact that the plesiosaur is extinct in the fossil record, there is the problem of those shape shifting humps, that very flexible neck and a head that is so small it is often described as a continuation of the neck. We even have reports of the head-neck extending in length and retracting into the main body! These are more suggestive of a neck-like appendage that is boneless rather than the neck vertebrae of the traditional plesiosaurus. Furthermore, could the plesiosaur move on land like our beast has been reported doing?

When all you have is 70 million year old bones, there is plenty of room for speculation. This all points to the conclusion that the plesiosaur as known from the fossil record is an unlikely candidate for the Loch Ness Monster. However, this did not deter those such as Tim Dinsdale who initially suggested a modified plesiosaur that had developed various Nessie-like attributes over geological time.

So is it as simple as adding in skin/gills which have replaced lungs to extract oxygen from water? How simple is it to add in those multiple humps? If the lungs change into a buoyancy mechanism, how does it still evade sonar? It should be clear that the more features that are added in, the more improbable our converted plesiosaur becomes.

The idea is not impossible, it is just unlikely that an extinct plesiosaur has turned up at Loch Ness with all these add ons. Like Tim Dinsdale, I regard the Loch Ness Monster as something else - an unknown creature yet to be identified. That may seem a retrograde step when one can at least come up with something known to science from the past. I agree, but in my opinion the sightings database says "No" to plesiosaurs.

Gould's Five Photos

I found this clipping on a recent search of online archives. It is from the Aberdeen Journal dated 31st March 1937 concerning Commander Rupert T. Gould. We remember Gould as the first person to write the first serious book on the Loch Ness Monster in 1934 and thereafter held sway as the "go to" person on the subject until his death in 1948. 

It seems he was in demand as a guest on radio and public lectures on the subject and the item below advertises an upcoming radio talk. Gould mentions in a letter that he has five photographs of the Loch Ness Monster. The question for me and you is what were these five photographs? Feel free to add your comments!

The Mysterious "Footprints" of Loch Ness

While I was researching a previous article on the search for the elusive Nessie carcass, I came across this sonar image of the underwater contours of the loch. The author of the article bearing the image was the well known Robert Rines and he had been discussing his own quest for Loch Ness Monster bones in 2005. In the course of that article he said this: 

In addition to ROV-optically inspecting further sonar targets of this expedition, it remains for us to explore this year the further mystery of the lines of similar-dimension and uniformly spaced 10-meter diameter sonar targets - "circles," ("footprints") at 700 foot depth. These were first detected and published by our Klein team of 1976, and have strikingly been re-imaged on the '05 side-scan map at spaced intervals along both sides of the loch - northerly and southerly.

The anomalies he refers to can be clearly seen forming a line of vertical dots on the left hand side of the image. The black strip in the middle is the blind spot below the side scan sonar device. My estimates suggest this sonar image was produced around the area marked in the map below, a few miles south of Foyers.

Robert Rines refers to a series of sonar images discovered by the Klein team back in the mid 1970s during the famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) Academy of Applied Science expeditions of yore. These were described as stone circles and that particular story can be found in Meredith's 1977 book, "Search at Loch Ness". 

Marty Klein speculated that these could be submerged megalithic constructs and they were even dubbed "Kleinhedge I" and "Kleinhedge II" referring to structures found at depths of 30 and 70 feet respectively. These are depicted below from 1976 images.

It has since been speculated that these are in fact more recent artifacts created by dredging operations. How that was deduced and how that would form circles I would like to know but Klein tells us that divers went down and identified them as stones formed in a circle.

However, that does not mean they are megalithic in origin (which Klein admitted) and one wonders if operations during the creation of the Caledonian Canal 200 years ago or the widening of the A82 road in the 1930s are more relevant?

Be that as it may, Robert Rines in our 2005 sonar image links the two. I am not sure if that is the only conclusion to be drawn. The line of anomalies we see is south of Foyers but Klein's objects were over 10 miles away to the north at Lochend.

Moreover, Rines places them at a depth of 700 feet. That in itself would be extraordinary but I doubt that is true and think this is a typographical error based on the fact that the maximum depth in that area is nearer 600 feet. The sonar plot that came with the image suggests something less than 600 feet but still very deep.

So what could be responsible for this line of "footprints"?  When one comes across a mystery at Loch Ness, then one may be inclined to implicate our famous denizen of the Ness deeps. But at this point, I cannot think of a reason why the Loch Ness Monster(s) would indulge themselves in the habit of digging out a line of depressions (or mounds) for miles. Readers are welcome to come up with a theory.

By coincidence, and just before I read the Rines article, I was at Loch Ness speaking to one of the operators of the Loch Ness Project cruise boats. I asked what was current in their research and he raised this very topic. He mentioned that it may be underwater operations linked to the Foyers Power Station.

Foyers Power Station was first constructed as part of the aluminium works built in 1896 and survived its closure in 1971 to be upgraded and form part of Scotland's hydro-electric scheme. How that could be linked to surface anomalies deep down is not clear to me. If they are 600 feet down, then they will be difficult to examine and Robert Rines' ROV operations do not mention them in detail.

I wonder if they have their origins in World War II operations at the loch? What that could be and how it would survive decades of silting is not clear to me. It is a mystery at Loch Ness and we await further information and developments.

(Public Announcement: Can P.C. get back to me about the "painting" at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com)

Loch Ness Monster Sighting from 1889

I was in the library going over some old newspapers from the 1940s and followed up a reference to a sighting made over 120 years ago. The reference was made in The Encyclopaedia of the Loch Ness Monster by Paul Harrison who in turn refers to the Inverness Courier for the 16th January 1948.

It concerns a letter mentioned in the Courier from a man called H. J. Craig who was then living in  Western Australia. At the time of writing, Mr. Craig was probably around 70 years of age and recounted a tale when he was a boy fishing with his brother in a rowing boat near Urquhart Castle. The original clipping is reproduced below for your reading (click on each image to enlarge).

The original letter was published in the West Australian of 27th September 1947 and had been prompted by a recent sighting of the creature by two separate motoring parties, the Forbes and Macivers (published in the Inverness Courier on the 1st August 1947). A thumbnail of that Australian article is shown below with a picture of Urquhart Castle and a model of the ubiquitous plesiosaur.

What prompted Mr. Craig to write was how the witnesses had described seeing this dark object with multiple humps and a head cutting through the water at great speed in a manner similar to that day in 1889. Donald Maciver had described how "amazed they were at the amount of spray which rose off the water" as they kept pace with it in their car near Foyers. The whole affair lasted about ten minutes and the idea of a motor boat was dismissed due to the lack of noise and the certainty that no boat could attain that speed (presumably they were thinking of one of the normal boats and not a John Cobb type affair). Needless to say, there were no motor boats racing down Loch Ness in 1889.

Meanwhile, the Forbes were sitting by the shore east of Inverfarigaig when  they heard a splash and saw the creature heading south at speed. In similar words to the Macivers, Mr. Forbes saw "the water shearing off them (the humps) and sparkling in the sunlight". I am quite certain the two parties were witness to the same event on the loch.

At this point, I will intercept one sceptical comment that they merely saw a string of merganser birds or similar flapping hastily along the surface. However, to demonstrate the power of what they had seen, the "wash could be seen lapping the edge of the loch".  Moreover, the witnesses compared the object against the buses on the far side of the loch and concluded it was of a similar size. Those birds sure grow to some hefty sizes on Loch Ness.

But fifty eight years before a similar display of unsettling power sent a couple of Victorian boys speedily rowing for shore. Amazing what a hold simple birds had over local folk even before Nessie became a mania. I hope you being to see the inadequacy of such an avian explanation. Others may not, but they have no choice if they do not believe any large animal inhabits Loch Ness.

Well, that is not quite true, they could always default to calling all these people just mentioned liars. But any explanation which "sucks less" than the monster one is not necessarily an explanation either. Better to say nothing at all in those circumstances.

Finally, and in a manner similar to the Dinsdale hump, our monster seems to take pleasure in swimming in a most inefficient way by ploughing through the water. By what manner of propulsion this is achieved is a bit of a mystery since we have no monster to examine.

Such raw displays of dissipative power are rare and they have to be else the Loch Ness Monster would exhaust itself in short measure. For sure, no laws of physics are being broken in such an act  for submarines do this all the time when they travel at speed on the surface with a sizable portion of their bulk above water. But one wonders what motivates the monster to undertake this more difficult movement? Is it a defensive tactic against another Nessie? A courtship display to prove one's fitness to reproduce or just chasing fish?

For sure, animals will expend energy in often seemingly useless ways. I am still undecided whether this motion was flipper based or something akin to a squid's propulsion technique. Who knows, but between 1889 and 1947, it seems our favourite creature had not lost any of its natural force.