Enigma Documentary: DNA, Giant Eels and an Unseen Film

A new documentary aired on Channel 5 some weeks ago looking into the enigma known as the Loch Ness Monster (link). This was one of the better programs on the subject as it focused on the search for the creature in the matter of the DNA samples taken from the loch in 2018 and the results released to the world in September 2019 which was covered at the time on this blog. A documentary was televised on the UK Discovery Channel devoted to the subject which I reviewed here.

The program opened with the well known faces of Willie Cameron and Steve Feltham and the story beginning all the way back in 565AD with Saint Columba and his water beast in what the original Latin text called the Lake of the River Ness. The tales of old flashed back to the modern day as drone technology was employed to take some excellent shots of the loch from on high. What would Columba have made of all this? Or would he yet have found the monster of the loch a more fabulous sight to behold?

But every story has a beginning which brought us to monster researcher Gary Campbell who took us through the early days of the 1930s, the first photograph of the creature taken by Hugh Gray, then the one taken by a certain Kenneth Wilson and a peek at what looked like an impressive collection of old newspaper clippings. This switched to various scenes such as water bailiff Alex Campbell being interviewed in the 1950s, the Loch Ness Investigation of the 1960s right up a young Steve Feltham arriving at the loch in 1992.

Eyewitness Richard White told us about his pole like neck sighting from 1996 (below) and Gary Campbell's own sighting which ensnared him around that time. Such seemed to be the summary of the last ninety years of the hunt. At this point I noted there was a near zero acknowledgement of evidence from the 1930s to the 1990s. No classic photos apart from the two above, no Dinsdale film or any of the like. Was this down to brevity of time or making it all seem more relevant to the modern viewer?

This moved us seamlessly on in a chronological manner to the environmental DNA quest of Professor Neil Gemmell four years ago. While his team were seen on their boat collecting water samples, the talk turned to what the mysterious animal could be, because the hunt was now on for a sample of its DNA. Familiar theories abounded such as deer, sturgeon, catfish, eels and the venerable plesiosaur. So just how would one recognise the DNA of a plesiosaur? The professor suggested something between bird and crocodile DNA. That sounded reasonable though the implication was that if you did have plesiosaur DNA, there was no way to verify that was the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

This brought us to the contrast between this new brand of "monster hunter" and the old brand which we were told is dying out. To be fair to Professor Gemmell, he was not presenting himself as any kind of monster hunter - that would be professional suicide. He was at Loch Ness to promote the science of environmental DNA, but if some unexpected strands turned up, they would then be firmly in the domain of science and some serious analysis could begin.

Adrian Shine chipped in and said nothing had been found in fifty years of searching. It was a failure which to him meant they were all either useless at looking or there was no monster. But there was those three sonar contacts he saw during Operation Deepscan in 1987. He again admitted that he did not know what they were although that did not mean to him that they were monsters.

I do not agree that the traditional monster hunter is dying out. Their numbers are certainly down on the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, but dying suggests a process that ends in death rather than a process which may have bottomed out. Who knows? We look to a newer generation to continue that particular form of the hunt. But the documentary then moved back to the theories.

Steve Feltham talked about the front runner theory which ticked the most boxes for him - the Wels Catfish. He suggested a dozen or so juveniles may have been released into the loch decades before the whole Nessie media circus exploded in the 1930s. It is entirely reasonable that those fish could have grown to large proportions in time for 1933 onwards but I am not convinced the Loch Ness environment was suitable for breeding and so they are all long gone. As others have said, this does not explain long neck sightings or land sightings. I suspect one solution there is to discount these other genres as explicable by known phenomena around the loch. In which case, why not just explain the remainder in the same manner?

Gary Campbell was more attracted to the giant eel theory and recounted a tale from fifteen years ago when an eyewitness saw something evidently large and eel-like swim past and under them and was longer than their fifteen foot boat. It was appropriate at this point that Gordon Holmes' 2007 video of something long and slender was displayed, though the man himself did not make an appearance.

All these large but known creatures were discussed by Adrian Shine and Neil Gemmell as they assembled some seriously long ropes to gather those important water samples from the lowest possible depths at about 200 metres down. As the program approached the point where the DNA results would be revealed, various points of view were expressed on topics such as what DNA may or may not be found, what if it wasn't recognised and the urgency in getting samples into a protected environment as they can degrade quickly.

It was then that we were treated to the Bobby Pollock film of August 2000. This is one of those films which tantalizes but getting a close look at it in terms of the whole film or a decent number of frames has proven elusive. We got about fifteen seconds of it in the documentary out of a total of three and a half minutes filmed by him. This is a film which would greatly benefit from some video stabilization due to the shakiness of the filming and perhaps after that some further image enhancement to clarify the object of interest.

The creature or whatever it may have been, was hundreds of yards away from Mr. Pollock, but there is something there to dig deeper into. For those unfamiliar with this film, the Glasgow Herald of 12th March 2002 gives the account:

The three-and-a-half minute video was filmed by Mr Pollock, 45, from Crookston, as he walked at Invermoriston Bay with his wife, Catherine, 41, and three-year-old son Robert. Mr Pollock claims he saw the creature rise around five feet out of the loch and that it was jet black in colour. The video has won him (pounds) 500 from bookmaker William Hill for the best recent Nessie ''sighting''. The Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club administers the annual award on behalf of the bookmaker.

Mr Pollock said: ''We stopped at a place called the stone seat overlooking Invermoriston Bay for our lunch and I saw an object floating on top of the water, and it started moving off towards Fort Augustus at quite a pace. You could say that it was a seal or a deer in the water, but I've seen things like that in the water and it definitely wasn't one of them. I've never seen anything like this in 12 years. It's very strange."

Mark Stewart, curator of marine mammals at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban, Argyll, studied the video 30 times. He said: ''Sometimes it looked like a seal, sometimes it did not look anything like a seal. It was moving quickly - it was pretty quick - I felt too quick for a seal.''. Mr. Stewart said he showed the video to experts and staff at the sanctuary, but no-one knew what it was.

Though Mr. Pollock captured the images in August 2000, he held off for more than a year before bringing them to the attention of Gary Campbell, president of Inverness-based Loch Ness Monster Fan Club. Mr. Campbell said Mr. Pollock did not release the video because he ''feared ridicule''. He added: ''But when I saw it, I realised that what he had was probably one of the best pieces of footage ever. We have spent a long time analysing this video. After careful analysis, we concluded that whatever was in the water was definitely animate.''

I include a still taken from the documentary, it's the dot in the centre. It doesn't look much from here, but it looked better as a film sequence, yet still in need of enhancement. Single frames from video do not translate as well as a still image taken with a camera and then there is the problem with recording images of objects in Loch Ness from the shore as one could already be hundreds of metres away from the object of interest. Even the claimed five feet of neck or whatever it was would be a challenge at such distances.

After some wrap up comments on the monster legend, including the assertion that people who want to believe in monsters will see monsters and how King Kong may have influenced people, it was on to the DNA results. Professor Gemmell had spent a year analysing the sequences with the help of various labs and it was time for the news conference at the Loch Ness Centre to tell the world what the 250 samples had revealed.

First off, nearly 3000 species had been found and most of those would be of the microscopic variety. No reptile DNA was detected nor anything that was catfish, sturgeon or seal. To that could be added the absence of cormorants, mergansers, ducks and otters. I could quite understand why seal DNA was not found as they are not indigenous to the loch and are rare visitors. The other reason for absence of DNA was the low density of it in the water. I can see that as the land based creatures are not always in or on the water. 

However, the emphasis of the results was on the eels of Loch Ness. Large amounts of eel DNA were found in almost every sample taken from the loch which led the professor to speculate about the possibility of giant eels. The DNA samples did not prove the eels were gigantic, but neither did it disprove their presence in the loch. All this assumed giant eel DNA does not differ significantly from normal eel DNA. The other result that people took note of was that about 20% of the DNA remained unidentified due to errors in sequencing, samples being too short or temporal. I was not sure what temporal meant.

Various people then gave their opinions on these results. Steve Feltham said lots of eel DNA was a given, so what was there to say? Willie Cameron suggested the small amount of water sampled compared to the loch size plus the admitted absence of DNA for otters and so on left the mystery open. Gary Campbell focused on the amount of DNA samples which gave inconclusive results as another possible avenue.

As the programme closed, Professor Gemmell hailed the survey a success as it provided a platform to popularize science and I do not doubt that this was achieved. Despite the absence of what people had desired to be found, disproving a negative was not what he had set out to achieve. Environmental DNA surveys can only talk about what was found and not about what was not found. The absence of otter DNA did not imply that otters had disappeared from Loch Ness prior to 2018. Or then again maybe it did, but people were not accepting that implication.

So the documentary ended and watching it cover those events of 2019 again gave me an opportunity to revise what my own thoughts were on the eDNA survey now compared to back then. The first point was that there were no catfish or sturgeon in Loch Ness for the same reason there were no seals in the loch. That is, there were zero catfish, sturgeon and seals in the loch and in the months prior to when sampling began.

That was the position I took, but on reflection one should not discount the other reason and that was due to an inadequate supply of their DNA floating in the water. If there was a solitary seal in the loch in the weeks up to the sampling survey, would it have been detected? My guess it it was more unlikely than likely unless the boat luckily sampled in the area it was most active over about 26 square miles. That is all a theoretical possibility, though I regard it as the second choice explanation.

Which brought me to the second point regarding DNA samples from animals which are indigenous but for which samples were not found. I refer to the otters, cormorants and ducks, etc. In that case, one can be pretty sure their DNA was in the water but it never meaningfully got into the sample bottles. That suggested to me that DNA shed by an animal does not travel very far from its point of origin. There are exceptions, such as if the animal in question was located at the mouth of a river, then the flow into the loch may spread its genetic code further.

But otherwise it seemed to me that if an animal or small group were fairly localized in their activity over a certain time period, their DNA would be harder to find. Does that mean the Loch Ness Monster(s) exhibit this behaviour? Well, as said above, one can only really talk about what was found rather than what was not found. As an aside, I read that no salmon DNA was detected from the fish farms near Dores. I found that a bit hard to believe and it was not stated in the documentary, but I would like to see a confirmation of that from another source. If that were true, then DNA really does not travel far and maybe tends to go down than across - probably because it is held within faeces.

The third point was on that 20% of DNA that was unclassifiable. Was Nessie hidden in that pool of data, once again hidden from our eyes? That was an argument that I never found convincing. If 20% of some  hypothetical Nessie DNA was too degraded to identify then I could accept that statistic but for 100% of an entire class of DNA to disappear down this black hole looked improbable. One animal's DNA was surely no more prone to degradation than any other animal?

Well, I still take that view but I thought it over and the only reason for a whole class of DNA being corrupted would be due to the animal in question moving in an environment that accelerated DNA loss. Nothing came to my mind that would allow this. What about the abyssal deep near the bottom of the loch? Was there a difference in acidity, water pressure, oxygen levels, silt density, temperature or light levels that could affect DNA? I was not persuaded either way and am no expert on DNA stability to take it further. But I will keep an open mind on that question.

Which brings us to those eels. Okay, so eel DNA was found in Loch Ness. No surprise there you might say as people have said there are millions of them in the loch. But Professor Gemmell expressed surprise that so much of their DNA was found almost everywhere. Now thinking again about it, he has a point. The eel in question is the European Eel or Anguilla anguilla and according to Wikipedia:

The European eel is a critically endangered species. Since the 1970s, the numbers of eels reaching Europe is thought to have declined by around 90% (possibly even 98%). Contributing factors include overfishing, parasites such as Anguillicola crassus, barriers to migration such as hydroelectric dams, and natural changes in the North Atlantic oscillation, Gulf Stream, and North Atlantic drift.

This would seem to be the reason for his surprise, was Professor Gemmell expecting samples consistent with a critically endangered species? If the number of migratory eels into Loch Ness has been dropping for decades, is there an unaccounted for surplus of non-migratory eel biomass in Loch Ness? Maybe, but the question is difficult to answer. I made an enquiry as to whether the amount of eel DNA collected gave an indication of the total eel biomass, but I was told it could not, which was a disappointment.

Moreover, I am not aware of any attempts to estimate that value from any survey in past decades. All I have found is statements that there are or were millions of eels in Loch Ness. Based on that 90%-98% drop, does that means there are now hundreds or only tens of thousands there now? There is nothing quantitative apart from past small samplings with nets and the latest eDNA results. There may indeed be a surprising amount of eel in Loch Ness and the excess could be found in the proverbial two tonne creature or two thousand equivalent normal eels.

I read that the eel population in Europe is now recovering after various conservation measures, but still well short of historical norms. That is good news for large animals eating the various fish of Loch Ness and if they are gigantic eels, there is still no way of telling if that DNA collected a few years back belongs to them or the kind pulled up by a rod,

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

Fortean Times on Nessie at 90

 

It continues to be "Nessie at 90" and I knew the magazine Fortean Times would be doing a piece on the monster. What form that would take was up in the air for me, but that became clear when I got a view of it today. The article is authored by Ulrich Magin whom I already knew as a sceptic and I immediately concluded this was going to be a piece that would attempt to explain away the whole phenomenon in very mundane terms.

 

This is not a review (yet) but rather a warning that if you're expecting at best an argument for a large creature in the loch or at worst a balanced article then you can forget it, don't bother buying it. Ulrich cannot even get basic facts right such as when he states that there is no evidence that seals have ever entered Loch Ness. Really?

Fortean Times has slipped a long way from the days when I bought it as a school kid in the 1970s. It resembles more the sceptical magazines of those days. I would encourage the editor to publish a counter-article in the interests of balance rather give its readers this skewed view of the subject.

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

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

The latest Photo from Loch Ness

The Mirror newspaper ran this story today on a series of pictures taken by a John Payne from Newport, Wales, up on holiday at Loch Ness. The original story is at this link. Here is the account taken from the paper.

Loch Ness Monster 'captured in new pic' after tourist spots 'long neck' in water

A tourist claims to have captured proof of the Loch Ness Monster on camera, with photos showing 'a long neck'. John Payne, 55, was admiring the scenery from a window when he noticed strange movement on the nearby water. The dad-of-three grabbed his camera and managed to grab several pictures which seem to show a shape on the surface. John, a retail worker from Newport, Wales, said:

“I was looking out at the scenery from the window and this huge thing just appeared out of nowhere. I tried to get a picture but it was gone and then it popped up again further down the loch. I took another picture and then zoomed in on my camera and waited to see if it would appear again and it did. It must have been something very large because we were about a mile away from the loch and I could see it clearly. You wouldn’t have been able to see a bird or anything from that far away – it had to be something large. It was like a huge neck."

He went down to the loch later the same day but said the creature was nowhere to be seen. John added:

“I showed some people at the hotel and they were all really shocked. It all happened so quickly, it was only there for maybe two minutes. I looked at other Nessie pictures and these do look similar to it. At first I thought it was a giant fin, but I know there are no dolphins or porpoises in the loch so I was thinking what the hell is this thing. It wasn’t like it was tied to anything, like a buoy, because it kept moving further away.”

John was at guest house Foyers Roost on April 9th when he spotted movement on the lake.

The article has three photographs which were taken at different times, going by the relation between the object and the foreground trees which are shown below to see some more detail. The object is definitely moving if we compare its position to the trees in the foreground across the three images. I would say it has moved at least 100 metres in the time between snapshots. Mr. Payne said it disappeared twice and I would say that coincides with two of the treetops in the images which would obscure the object as it moved from left to right.

But by what means is it moving? Now the initial impression of what we are looking at does give the impression of a long neck and what looks like a back behind it. I zoomed in as far as I could on the three pictures for a further comparison below which is in chronological order from left to right. The appearance of the object does slightly change in each image, though it was hard to say if this was due to seeing a different aspect of it or something else.

Certainly one thing that stood out was the apparent "backwards looking" appearance of the presumed neck. Animals do not tend to swim forwards whilst continually looking backwards at the same time. However, the central image above does look a bit more upright which made me wonder about rotation. In fact, what looks like a kink in the first image began to make me think this was a log being blown up the loch by the prevailing south westerlies.

There was a log doing the rounds in Urquhart Bay a few years back which fooled or rather incentivized a few people with distant dubious photos. I took a picture of it at the time when I visited the area in 2017. However, the object here is on the other side of the loch, but I wouldn't discount this being another piece of tree debris.

Another theory I have now seen on the Internet is that this was a kayaker with a sail attached to the front and the person sitting down to the left. That is also probable and better than the log theory. Either way, the characteristics of the object point away from what the witness claimed it looked like.

In fact, when Mr. Payne said it was a mile away, but he could see it clearly, that came across as a contradictory statement. Not much is clear at a mile away I would suggest. But I do not doubt him when he said it had to be larger than a bird and looked like a neck. More could be gleaned if I had the original larger images, so in their absence I will leave it at that.

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

Bus Trip to Loch Ness

It was off to Loch Ness again for a quick one day trip to pick up the trap cameras and carry out any other investigations that were appropriate. This time things were done differently in that I took the bus up to Loch Ness rather than jump in the car as is my usual plan. The reasons for that were a bit experimental being a matter of time and money. Perhaps this was a "cost of living crisis" experiment as people come to terms with prices which exceed any increase in their wages or any other income.

The advantage of the car is that you get there quicker and can go any time you wish and go anywhere within reason. The disadvantage is the cost, depending on where you are starting your journey. In my case, I calculate the cost for the 330 mile round trip at over £100. There is also the fact that when driving, you have less options to do other things. On a bus, you can do more things and it is cheaper. In fact, in my case it cost nothing. The downside is you are bound to their timetables and it takes longer to get there. In my case it took an hour and a half longer to get there than by car.

So with those things in mind, the trip to Inverfarigaig on the south side of the loch on Saturday involved getting the 8:00am M80 Citylink bus from Edinburgh to Inverness and then the 302 bus at 12:30pm from Inverness to Inverfarigaig. On the way back, it was the 14D bus at 6:17pm from Dores and the 7:25pm M90 bus back to Edinburgh, getting home about midnight. The thing here was that miss any of these buses and you were either not getting to Inverfarigaig or may be stranded in Inverness. There were no alternatives bus times that made the trip viable.

The other thing was that once you were at Inverfarigaig at 1pm, you had to walk from there to Dores to get the bus back and that was a nine mile walk. The local bus service was far too infrequent to allow anything else. However, that was the itinerary, walk back to the top of the loch, doing what had been planned beforehand. I had five hours to cover that distance which was more than achievable.

The bus trip from Edinburgh to Inverness was comfortable enough. The bus left the city half full but was near enough full by the time extra people had been picked up in Dunfermline and Perth. But I had two seats to myself to stretch out for about 90% of the trip. The facilities on the Citylink bus at both ends was something less than desirable. The toilet was out of order on one trip, neither of the USB power ports worked on both trips and the facility to put your cup of coffee somewhere stable required some lateral thinking.

Well, at zero pence a trip, who was I to complain? The one big unknown was what the weather was going to be like as a nine mile walk in the rain would be a miserable experience. Fortunately, it was a dry day and the sun popped out towards the end of the hike. So onto the Nessie specifics as cameras were collected as the walk progressed across that nine mile stretch and I can confidently say this was the worst year for cameras stolen over the ten years of doing this. Quite simply, some were not there when I got to their particular spot and it was not down to them falling off. They had been knicked.

Such risks go with the territory, they are relatively cheap to replace but it is the missing potential pictures that may have been snapped that irritates more. Moreover, those who stole them and try to profit from any publishable pictures would fail as I could prove they came from my cameras. Why this year was the worst left me speculating. Perhaps that cost of living crisis brought more people to the loch as staycations came back into fashion again or perhaps this "crisis" makes people think they are more entitled to other people's property?

Anyway, if these people want to right their wrong, drop them off at the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit please. As for the images on the cameras I retrieved, I haven't looked at them yet but will post anything of interest later. The other matter as I walked along the shoreline was the George Spicer land sighting of 1933. A discussion had appeared on Facebook about where it could have occurred and the matter of deer tracks.

On the first point of location, the issue was raised in a sceptical manner as if to imply there was little opportunity for such a point of entry to the loch and therefore is dubious. Now I have been up and down the road between Dores and Foyers countless times and seen various locations but on this day when I was hiking from Inverfarigaig to Dores, there was an opportunity to scrutinize various points more carefully.

The two factors here are distance from road to loch and height from road down to loch. The distance is of some importance as the time from when the Spicers saw the beast to the time they reached the location where the creature entered the undergrowth has to allow sufficient time for the creature to cover that distance and disappear under the waters. That required distance from road to loch is unknown as we do not know how long it took for the Spicers to reach the location or how fast the creature was moving.

Educated guesses can be made, but a definitive conclusion cannot be reached. However, when I performed a range of calculations for various scenarios in my main article on the Spicer sighting, it was eminently possible for the creature to reach the loch and submerge. It depends on your tolerance of value ranges and that tolerance may depend not on science, but your own personal tolerance for accepting land sightings.

George Spicer had told a young Ted Holiday that the shoreline was "only twenty foot down on the right". One presumes this does not mean a twenty foot drop, but a distance of twenty feet with an unknown gradient descending towards it. A survey of various points of the shoreline ensued as I walked along the nine mile stretch. I was pretty confident there was no such point further south between Foyers and Inverfarigaig. The road is a long distance from the shore along that stretch.

A lot of the road was clearly unsuitable, the drop was too precipitous for the kind of creature I had in mind and indeed even for nimbler creatures such as deer. The photograph above is close to the shore, but there is a sharp drop of perhaps seven feet before it. On other parts of the road, such as below, there was quite a long distance between road and loch which also presented a bit of an obstacle course for large, lumbering creatures. Undergrowth is one thing, but thick solid trees are another proposition altogether.

The two prime spots for me was the stretch of road about half a mile north of Inverfarigaig which runs very close to the loch but begins to rise thereafter. Perhaps more of a candidate is further up in the area near Whitefield which is where the Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951 was taken. The road ran close to the loch at these points and the gradient did not look difficult at various points such as in the picture below.

But picking the actual spot would not be possible. Indeed, we are talking about an event that happened nearly ninety years ago and the road and vegetation alongside it today are not the same as they were back then. However, one would expect the rising and falling contours of the loch side to be roughly the same. All that being said, Rupert Gould reckoned the event happened halfway between Dores and Foyers, which puts us in the Whitefield area.

Moving on, but related to this account is the matter of deer and their habits. It has been suggested that the gap in the undergrowth witnessed by the Spicers and later by one of the locals, was nothing more than a well worn deer trail and therefore what he saw was no more than a group of deer crossing the road. With that theory in mind, I continued walking and looking for anything that looked like a trail not made by humans. A couple of photos of what may be trails are below.

Having said this and looking at photographs of deer trails from across the world, I saw very little at the loch as pronounced as others where the vegetation underfoot is almost stamped away. Perhaps the middle picture was the best one. The bottom picture actually stops just before the tree ahead of it and it was interesting to note that the loch side part of the road was dotted with various of these little depressions. I was wondering if they were the remnants of rain overflow which comes down from the hillside finding paths of least resistance or were some man made? 

I think the point though from what I observed is that there is no need for deer to waste energy by continuously pushing out and maintaining gaps in bushes and trees. Though the middle picture above was taken in April and not in late summer when growth will be at its greatest, it did not look like it was going to get much denser and such a more sparse trail would make more sense to deer. I may well be back in late summer to do the same hike again and see how things have changed.

Of course, throughout all of this walking trip, an eye was kept on the loch over to my left just in case the Monster of Loch Ness put in an appearance for yours truly. That did not happen, but as I reached the beach just south of Dores (above), I met one of the many anglers who frequent the loch and got into a conversation with him. I asked him how it was going and he had caught some brown trout. Inevitably, I asked him if he had seen anything a lot bigger than the trout in the water. 

He confessed he had not, but he did say that when he was a youngster years back, he was watching a flat calm surface of the loch as his family drove over on the other side of the loch. It was the kind of surface where the hills were perfectly mirrored on the water. Suddenly, he saw a large V-wake appear out of nowhere and progress up the loch. Nothing was visible and to this day he wondered if it was something like a seal or even bigger? 

I didn't offer an explanation for what he saw, but I do like to engage anglers in these conversations when possible. As you can see from the above picture, the sun was now setting on another day at the loch and it was time to catch the bus back to Inverness. At the bus station for the bus to Edinburgh, I had a pleasant chat with the lady behind the cafe counter, recklessly fed a flying rat some of my chips and met a farmer who regularly arrives from Aviemore sober as a judge in the morning and arrives back there at night legless.

You meet all types on a bus trip to Loch Ness. I hope to do it again some time.

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

The Land Sighting of Alistair Dallas

Alleged land sightings of the Loch Ness Monster comes in varying degrees of credibility, some say they have no credibility at all - and I am including people who earnestly believe in the beast! One account which has lurked in the shadows of more famous accounts comes against the background of a mystery in its own right. I am referring to the Alastair Dallas account from 1936 and the sketch which he did and is shown above. Now the background mystery to this was the legendary MacRae film, an alleged film of the Loch Ness Monster taken in the early 1930s which is said to be indisputable evidence of a close up  creature.

You can read a fuller account of that controversy in one of my earlier articles. Today we mainly focus on Dallas' own alleged account. The first mention of this account is in F.W. Holiday's book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness" published in 1968 and it refers to his meeting with Dallas in 1965. The prime reason for that meeting was to find out if Dallas really was one of the trustees of the film, but at the end of that story Holiday says:

Mr Dallas said that he had seen the Orm for himself, many years ago, during one of his painting trips to the Great Glen. However, due to the almost pathological scepticism the subject engendered, it was a topic he rarely discussed.

And that is all that was intimated as the account took a distant backseat to the MacRae film. Nothing more was said until monster researcher, Alan Wilkins, contacted Dallas in the early 1970s through an intermediary named Tom Skinner. Dallas told Wilkins that the alleged MacRae film of Nessie was actually his own sighting in the same decade. Years later, researcher Mike Dash contacted Wilkins to get more details and he was told that Dallas supplied to Wilkins a quick basic sketch and then a more detailed sketch said to have been done at the time in 1936. Both are shown below.

One would have to admit this is one of the best executed eyewitness sketches produced over the years and apparently done "live" right at the scene of the encounter. Alan Wilkins supplied Mike Dash with the text of Dallas' reply via Skinner back in October 1974:

Only one fly in the ointment. It is my personal knowledge that his [Holiday's] reporting of his conversation with me is almost diametrically opposed to the facts. I was there so I do know about that. There was no suggestion on my part of a second film. The first I heard of that was your information…

The second film he (Holiday) writes of is, I consider, my exposition about my sighting of the Beastie. Holiday was so worked up on the subject of film that he did not find it possible to drag his mind away from this aspect. On reading his book it became clear to me that he had not heard one word of what I had to say about the actual impression made on me by that sighting.

As to the actual sighting by Dallas, Wilkins had back then received some verbal details on the creature seen which he also passed onto Mike Dash:

• Midday sighting - lasted long enough for Dallas to go and fetch his sketchbook
• Extremely close quarters - 100 feet
• Monster approx 32 feet in length, hauled out of the water, apparently sucking weed from stones
• Round golf ball eyes, ears, distinct neck, distinctive narrow flipper seen
• Three dorsal fins, like sharks’; thick, fleshy, flabby
• Tail in water
• Mangy appearance - tufts of hair or fibre
• Sketched animal from above in 3/4 side view

The original sketch supplied also had the annotation "Drumnadrochit 1936 Sept." at the top. Finally, some time after Dallas' death in 1983, researcher Dick Raynor contacted the family regarding the film, but also on the land sighting which is detailed at his website. It is likely he was speaking to Alastair Dallas' son, who is also called Alastair. The background to how Dallas came to be at Loch Ness is mentioned:

Mr Dallas was a widely travelled landscape artist with a wide circle of friends. After the "new" road along the north-west shore of Loch Ness had been completed he contacted the main contractors, Carmichaels, with a view to a commission to record the works. Unfortunately, the commission had already been awarded, but due to the original artists preference for sweeping curves over straight lines, Mr Dallas was later invited to the contractors offices and given the commission by the proud builder of the straight roads. It was during this commissioned work that the sketch is believed to have been made. 

Dick displays the 1936 sketch of the beast by Dallas and discusses what he thinks Dallas may or may not have seen. It is not clear to me who first posted the sketch on the Internet, whether it was Mike Dash or Dick Raynor, but I guess it was first posted around the turn of the millennium. Mike Dash adds another detail from Dallas' son, Alastair, whom he spoke to in 1998:

My father was a great teller of tales, not that he was a deliberate liar… he very much liked attention. I never saw any film, nor did my father ever discuss it, which I feel he would have done if [Holiday’s account] was correct… I have no reason to cover up information… So far as I am aware my father never had any friends known as Dr MacRae.

... I honestly think you should end your search here and now. I have already said that my father was a great teller of tales. Need I say more?

Such a statement casts doubt upon his father's account, though the focus here seems to be more on the MacRae film rather than his 1936 sighting, so how do we assess all this? Well, I got an email recently from Thomas, who occasionally sends me items he has found on the Internet. In this case it was a recent interview with Alastair Dallas' son conducted by Hilary Alcock and Flora McDowall for the Regional Ethnology of Scotland Project in July 2018. The original link also has a picture of Alastair Dallas Jr. shown below.

The focus of the interview was recollections of Kirkcudbright artists of whom Alastair Dallas Snr. was one. One part of the summary is interesting to Loch Ness researchers:

Alastair’s father was a keen photographer and took a photo, in 1936 while working for McAlpine, of the Loch Ness monster which proved very popular.

A photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, or even a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster on land? Surely not, as we would have heard of such a thing a long time ago? Fortunately, the website provides a transcript of the interview and we extract and reproduce the Nessie portion of it here. The "HA" and "FM" are the interviewers and "AD" is Alastair Dallas:

HA: And did he go and paint outside or did he - ?

AD: He was a great one for the camera but it was the early days of colour and black and white, there's one he did I've got I've yet to find the plate, but I know I've got it, of the Loch Ness Monster.

HA: Really!

AD: It was on Border Television I think about the year before he died, they paid twenty-five pounds for a print. I printed them off took me half an hour to do two hundred! [Laughter]

FM: Nice work if you can get it!

AD: I literally turned the handle.

FM: And what was his story about the Loch Ness Monster?

AD: It was 1936 he was doing a commission for McAlpine who were doing the new road along the north side of Loch Ness and the previous artist they'd commissioned simply would not paint what was there, he liked swirling curves on a road McAlpine has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds making dead straight! [Laughter]

AD: So McAlpine wanted a picture of what he had done, where these pictures ended up I have no idea, but the old man had a hut assigned to him by McAlpine where he stayed for weeks at a time - this was before he got married of course, this was before the war and the one of the Loch Ness Monster was in his sketchbook, he hadn't painted it or anything like that, and he found it one day and he got it made into a plate and he had me print it off for him 'cause he was too busy doing something else. As I say, Border bought a copy and they did a wee interview with him for twenty-five quid but that was quite a lot o' money in those days.

FM: And he was really convinced he saw the Loch Ness Monster?

AD: This drawing I don't think looks as if it was drawn invented, eh it's too detailed.

FM: It's amazing isn't it?

HA: Yes.

AD: And there was a guy up in Loch - beside - Loch Ness he used to take people around an' ah sent him a copy by email and he did a thing on his website about it, but this loch Ness Monster I think he genuinely saw what it was and he simply didn't take a photograph because he didn't have his camera with him, he'd gone down to the loch-side for somewhere quiet to have a cup o' tea an' a bun!

FM: Well lucky he could draw!

AD: Lucky he could draw. I have some of these prints still - they're not in really good condition because the last few they were running off the ink was beginning to catch where it shouldn't and when I said, will I clean it, an' he said, no two hundred that's enough.

There are two observations to make about this interview. The interview begins with Dallas talking as if it was a photograph that was taken by his father in 1936, but it is clear at the end of the interview that no camera was involved in the sighting and only the sketch was a by-product of this alleged encounter. It seems more likely perhaps that the original sketch was photographed years later for the Border Television interview as requests for copies of the sketch came in. The TV interview is said to have taken place a year before his father death, which would place it in 1982.

The clip may be held in the ITV archives or elsewhere such as here, but that is beyond the scope of this article. The usual issue with these old items is that they may lie in a film canister only to be digitised for a fee and with long lead times. But the second point concerns Alastair Dallas' assessment of his father's account when he says that he thought his father genuinely saw the monster. 

But we were told previously that he thought his father was a teller of tall tales. Is there a contradiction here? Did Dallas Jnr. say his father's story was a fabrication just to get rid of people or did he change his mind about it over the years? The second contradiction is where Holiday states that in 1965 Dallas rarely talked about his own sighting "due to the almost pathological scepticism the subject engendered" but his son related how in 1982 his father willingly talked to the TV station about it and printed off lots of copies of his sketches for public consumption. Some things do not add up here.

But let us at this point take it as a genuine statement that he thought his father's encounter was believable, what can we make of it? It is said to have happened about noon on a day in September 1936. The location is not stated, though his drawing is signed "Drumnadrochit 1936 Sept." which is a slight conundrum as Drumnadrochit is hundreds of metres away from the loch. 

It may suggest the location was a point on the shoreline near the town but that could extend from Temple Pier to the woodlands shore facing Urquhart Bay or closer south to the castle. I do not think it was the woodlands by the bay as he is stated as looking down on the creature and that area is pretty flat which points to the other areas, but there is not enough information to take that further.

My own initial impression of the account was sceptical purely based on the sketch. Quite simply, it does not line up well with the descriptions given in the general corpus of eyewitness reports. The two areas of contention are the triple dorsal fins and the two hanging lobes by the sides of the head. Looking through the sightings database, only two reports mention multiple dorsal fins but both put them apart at such a distance as to suggest more than one creature. 

The Dallas sketch shows two dorsal fins and not three as verbally described, but I assume that the third dorsal fin mentioned is the fin like structure at the end of the tail. However that would be called a caudal fin and not a dorsal fin, but I would put that down to mis-naming anatomical parts rather than mis-numbering.

The hanging side lobes appear nowhere else in the database and that with the triple dorsal fins is an important argument against this account. Now I could be wrong on this, after all most sightings occur at such a distance that such features may be undiscernible. The claimed distance for this was about 100 feet which affords a lot of detail and puts a genuine witness in an important position. However, other close encounters do not mention these unusual features and we have about three dozen claimed sightings within a distance of 50 metres. Some of those should have confirmed what was being described here.

Alternatively, one could say that Dallas misidentified a deer or seal as Dick Raynor suggests in his analysis. At a range of 100 feet that would seem a distant possibility, especially as he claimed to have watched if for quite a long time. One could only begin to consider this if the creature was heavily obscured by vegetation, but there is no suggestion of that situation in the account.

One may even suggest the passage of years had not been kind to his powers of recall, but he asserted that the sketch was done as things unfolded before him. And then there are those two "breasts" hanging down in front of the creature. What is this? The first evidence of a female Nessie? If so, they are in completely the wrong place for the likes of a pinniped or just about anything else. 

So I am putting this account down as dubious which consequently removes another conundrum as it would be unlikely in the extreme that a man who had a land sighting would also be a trustee to an even rarer film. The chances of that exceeds even the word "improbable" because on average there is one claimed land sighting about every three years and if the MacRae film did exist, the odds of crossing the paths of the owner of that film is also very small.

In other words, both cannot be true, but how does the position that this land sighting account is fake reframe the debate about the mysterious MacRae films? In other words, was there anything about the reality of these films that influenced Dallas to introduce a false story? Did Dallas' tale originate in 1965 when he met Holiday rather than 1936 or something else? 

This is where the road ahead forks at various possible junctions. The simple conclusion is that if he lied about that story, he likely lied about everything else - case closed. But wait, Dallas said that Holiday had fabricated what he told him about the films. Was that made up as well? Most would assume that anything that promoted the idea of a monster could only be taken as a lie. This is what we call confirmation bias.

But if that statement concerning Holiday was true, was his immediate statement that the Loch Duich film existed true as well? One thing I do not believe is that Ted Holiday mangled his account that badly. But then again, even if Holiday faithfully reproduced the account, he may have unwittingly reproduced a series of falsehoods. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, but was not Holiday alerted to the films by an independent source at Loch Ness? Do we have to add needless complexity by introducing another liar?

One reason I think Dallas told Holiday pretty much the same tale as he told Wilkins ten years later is because Holiday did not describe to readers what he told him. Why would he do that? Quite simply because Holiday was promoting the idea of a giant invertebrate in the same book and the conical head with eyes, the backbone supported dorsal fins, the tufted hair and dare we say the breasts would have been too much for Ted. I suspect he may not have believed him either.

Here is what I think happened. Back in September 1936, Dallas drew a sketch of the Loch Ness Monster. The reason it is annotated "Drumnadrochit" is because that is where it was drawn and not at the loch side hundreds of yards away. He was up there to draw scenes from Loch Ness, so why not sketch its most famous inhabitant while he was there? In the best tradition of that phrase, "An artist's impression ..." he allowed his artistic imagination to let rip, perhaps encouraged by others over a pint in the pub.

Who knows what the minor details may have been, but when Holiday knocked at his door in Kirkcudbrightshire twenty nine years later, he perhaps saw an opportunity to get some of his old artwork given a public airing. Unfortunately, he should have asked Holiday what his opinion of the Tullimonstrum Gregarium was before he took that step. Holiday did not take the bait, but Dallas got his chance with Border TV another seventeen years on.

But what about the MacRae films? What Holiday tells us of what Dallas described is quite detailed and one doubts that Dallas' artistic imagination could have produced that story from scratch for the visit of this unknown Holiday chap who just turned up at the doorstep. The only way out here is that Holiday fed him a lot of conversational monster information first or somehow the book has telescoped the account and is actually a compression of events such as follow up letters. 

One thing seems clear to me, if there really was a MacRae film and Dallas was a trustee, his joking about with Holiday and his imaginary sketch would surely disqualify him as one of these serious minded trustees. As for the anonymous person who tipped off Holiday at Loch Ness, is it possible that that person had met a young artist in 1936 in Drumnadrochit who boasted about seeing the monster close up and had even taken some photos or even film of it? When investigators began to swarm around the loch in the 1960s, the story came back to him and the rest is a ripping yarn.

But for me, the door on the mysterious MacRae films has closed a little bit more. The door is still slightly ajar regarding this other film taken at Loch Duich. It was always a stretch that one man could have bagged two sensational monster films at two separate lochs in the space of a few years, but perhaps one film can be accommodated, despite its whereabouts being as much a mystery as the creature it claims to have filmed.

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

Some Feedback on a recent Hugh Gray Photograph Article

Referring back to an article that was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in September 2022, I had written on the 1933 Hugh Gray photograph and went further into my own views on this significant picture . The details of that article are here. Since then Bruce Champagne sent a letter to the journal in reply to my article which I was invited to further reply to. Bruce is known in cryptozoological circles for his work on sea serpents as well as relict hominids and so I read his reply with interest and then composed what I hope was an appropriate response.

Bruce Champagne's letter can be found here and my reply was published in the same issue here. The two main issues revolve around the inevitable interpretation of how such photographs. We are sometimes told that eyewitness reports are subjective while recorded images are objective. Well, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the multiplicity of "objective" views when it comes to Loch Ness Monster photographs. The other issue concerns eyewitness versus recorded image when they both refer to the same event.

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

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

The 1880s Diver Incident - Evolution of a Story

What diver Duncan MacDonald saw under the waters of Loch Ness has fascinated researchers for decades since the story came to light in the Nessie "era" (i.e. 1933 to the present day). I have mentioned it before, mainly in the context of some other divers stories and would like to give it a fuller treatment here. Certainly, I would say that alongside land sightings, this genre of sighting is the most intriguing class of eyewitness reports and the rarest of all. I think most fans of the mystery would have been introduced to the story via the pages of Nicholas Witchell's book, "The Loch Ness Story" which related it thusly:

An experience by another MacDonald in 1880 was of an altogether different nature and terrifying in the extreme. As a diver, Duncan MacDonald was sent down to investigate a ship that had sunk in the Caledonian Canal entrance at Fort Augustus. Not long after, he sent urgent signals on his line to be immediately brought back to the surface. 

Shaking and ashen faced, he refused to say what he had seen for several days. When he had sufficiently composed himself, he told the tale of how he had seen a “very odd looking beastie ... like a huge frog” lying on the rock ledge where the wreck was lodged as he examined its hull. He refused to ever dive in the loch again though it would appear this encounter was where Loch Ness ends and the canal begins.

The account has been mentioned in other books, though the rather un-plesiosaurian description of the strange beast perhaps restrained its use in other publications of the time. Furthermore, I see no mention of it in the earlier works of Gould and Whyte, though it is very likely that they knew about it. The story is still repeated in our time such as Paul Harrison's entry for MacDonald in his "Encyclopedia of the Loch Ness Monster" which recounts:

Curious tale of a diving incident said to have taken place in 1880. MacDonald was a diver sent to examine a sunken ship off the Fort Augustus entrance to the Caledonian Canal. He entered the water and was lowered into the murky depths where the wreck lay, but within a few minutes he signalled to his team on the surface to pull him clear. When he reached the surface MacDonald was pulled from the water a ‘gibbering wreck’, his face as white as chalk. His service crew could make no sense of his ramblings, but he eventually told how he had been examining the keel of the ship when he suddenly noticed a large animal lying on the shelf of rock where the ship was lodged. He claimed it was ‘an odd looking beastie’, almost like a huge frog. It is said that MacDonald never dived in Loch Ness again.

Likewise, it has been covered in Malcolm Robinson's "The Monsters of Loch Ness" (2016) and my own book, "The Water Horses of Loch Ness" (2011). But what prompted this article was another recounting of this tale some years before in the letter column to the Fishing Gazette in early 1955. This was written under the pseudonym of "Vera Cruz", which apparently was the name of a popular Burt Lancaster Western film at the time. The relevant section says:

Many years ago I was intrigued by a story that a diver employed by the Caledonian Canal authorities used to tell. He was sent down in Loch Ness to examine the hull of a herring drifter (a wooden boat) that had run on some sunken reefs at a place called "Johnnie's Point," well known to salmon anglers from all over Britain. He came up in double quick time, and when the face-plate of his helmet was removed he was asked what went wrong.

"Wrong?" he said, "I got the fright of my life down there, and won't go back for love or money." Pressed to state exactly what had frightened him he replied: "Well, down there on a ledge just aside where the keel is resting, I saw the most horrible looking beast I ever set eyes on. It glared at me with two wicked-looking eyes, and was yellowish in colour and not unlike a big frog. If you don't believe me," he added, "go down and see for yourself." There were no takers, and that ship lay there for years and rotted away. 

I thought for a time I had found the earliest recounting of this tale, but Karl Shuker's article on this matter in his ShukerNature blog shows that this was not the case. Going back to Witchell, Peter Costello had coincidentally published his book, "In Search of Lake Monsters", about the same time in 1974 and gives an even briefer account of this incident:

An item in the Northern Chronicle on January 31, 1934, claimed that 45 to 50 years before, a diver investigating a small ship which had sunk off Johnnies Point, while down about 30 feet, saw on a ledge “a queer looking beast, which he described as something in the nature of a huge frog”. It was as big as a goat or a wedder, and just stared at him with neither fear nor ferocity. (This story came from the divers grand-nephew, Donald Frazer, lock-keeper at Fort Augustus.)

The oldest account is in that 1934 edition of the Northern Chronicle and cryptozoologist Richard Muirhead had managed to track it down for Karl and publish it online for the first time. This is the primary source and hence the most important document in this analysis. The relevant text is reproduced below.

Some forty-five to fifty years ago a small sailing vessel carrying a cargo of guano, when making the passage through Loch Ness, struck a submerged reef known as "Johnnie's Point," and sank, fortunately without loss of life. The mishap occurred during the night, and when dawn broke it was seen that the tops of the masts were still above water. Realising that the vessel might be raised, a squad of men was quickly on the scene, and chains were passed underneath the hulk.

But ere the job was completed the action of the water suddenly dislodged the craft, and she vanished into the depths. Still hoping to salve the wreck, the owner secured the services of Mr Duncan Macdonald, a noted diving expert, who was at the time employed at the Crinan Canal. Mr Macdonald duly arrived, and it was from the Caledonian Canal Company's diving-barge that he carried out operations.

After having made a descent of thirty feet, Mr Macdonald signalled that he wished to come up, and, on being questioned as to whether there was any sign of the ship, he said there was none. From this it was obvious that further attempts would be useless, so he was undressed, and the party prepared to make for Fort-Augustus, their headquarters. Now one man in the party, having heard stories of a strange creature which was said to live in the loch, began to question the diver. The latter, however, was at first rather diffident about taking any part in the conversation.

Yet, since the others knew that anything he might tell them would be perfectly true, they persisted, and finally the diver said that he saw a strange creature that day. It lay, he said, on a ledge of rock, on the self-same ledge, apparently, on which the keel of the wrecked vessel had rested, about thirty feet down. There, he continued, lay a queer-looking beast, which he described as something in the nature of a huge frog.

It stared at him, but, as it showed neither ferocity nor fear, he did not disturb it. In his own words he "saw that the beast made no effort to interfere with me, and I did not interfere with it." As to size, the diver said the creature was "as big as a goat, or a good wedder [Scots dialect word for a castrated male sheep]." The story, exactly as given, was told by Mr Donald Fraser, lock-keeper, Fort Augustus, who often heard the diver (his own grand-uncle) tell it many years ago.

There is a lot more in this than any other of the subsequent retakes which leads us to the first observation regarding a canard of the sceptical variety. It is often said by those seeking to discredit such reports that writers on the Loch Ness phenomenon, be they journalists, book authors or article writers, had jazzed things up a bit. Indeed, exaggerating things up to the point of grievous bodily harm. 

Now there is truth in that, but not to the degree that is claimed which makes it a half truth. Quite often a half truth can be more damaging that an outright fabrication, if you know half of what is said is true, then why not the rest? But the argument is more nuanced than that and certainly not all writers should be dragged down to the same level, as is the case when all eyewitnesses are also dismissed as ineffective observers.

In fact, the group of writers here can be assembled and analysed to look for what may be called the "evolution" of the story, though it may be more of a devolution. I first attempted this form of "textual criticism" in my booklet on the 1973 Richard Jenkyns story. Basically, you take a set of documents related to a common subject and attempt to create a relational tree with the original event at the top, branching out to the most recent versions.

Now as those familiar with this historical discipline in reconstructing far more older texts will know, changes can be introduced as time goes on and copies are made and copies of the copies are made. At the top lies the so called autograph which is the original account. For our purposes, that would be the retelling of the account by Duncan MacDonald to his grand-nephew, Donald Fraser. That may have been written down near the time of the incident or just orally transmitted, which going by the 1934 newspaper article occurred no earlier than 1884 to 1889.

When did Donald Fraser get to hear about it? One can only make an educated guess, but if he was a grand-nephew, there could be sixty years between their births and if diving required a fit man in his 30s to 40s, then Duncan MacDonald was likely born in the 1850s and so Donald Fraser was born just after the turn of the century and could have begun hearing from his grand-uncle in the 1910s or a thirty year gap.

Then we have a further gap to the Northern Chronicle piece in 1934 when written records begin. Tracking the differences between texts can give us a clearer picture of how the events in different accounts can vary by the deletion, addition or alteration of words and phrases. Similarities between accounts can also indicate from what preceding accounts a newer account may have been most influenced by. Cross comparing accounts led me to create this relational chart.

Compiling a table of similarities and dissimilarites between accounts leads to some deductions. The Northern Chronicle account is the best account as it is said to be "exactly as given" by Donald Fraser. It is still more than likely that some minor errors occurred as the journalist cleaned up the original transcript for publication. Some unintentional misspellings may have slipped in and some items were omitted for the sake of brevity. 

In fact, we see this in Peter Costello's rendering of the account where, even though he must have had the original Northern Chronicle account in front of him, manages to change "Fraser" to "Frazer". I suspect that was an unintentional cultural slip as Frazer is a more common rendition of the name outside Scotland. Otherwise, the only things of note are the inevitable omissions as Costello edits it down to a smaller account. What remains is consistent with the original.

Karl Shuker derives his text direct from the Northern Chronicle and presumably reproduces the entire account verbatim without error as I have not seen the original clipping. However, most of the action is on the other side of the graph beginning with "Vera Cruz". He or she says that that they were intrigued by a story a diver used to tell without saying who told them. Their account differs mainly in the dramatic effect that has been added. The diver now comes up rapidly in a frightened state who won't go back into the loch for love nor money.

Three details are added or changed to the description of the "big frog". One is anthropomorphic as the human attribute of wickedness is used to describe the gaze of the creature. The creature goes from queer looking to most horrible. The more important addition is found nowhere else in which the creature is described as "yellowish". What more can be deduced? How about the fact that the identity of "Vera Cruz"  is none other than the well known monster man and water bailiff, Alex Campbell. This is clear when the anonymous letter says:

I was the person responsible for bringing this strange creature (through the medium of the Press) to light, as it were, away back in May 1933.

This tells us a few things (apart from Alex liking cowboy films). Firstly, that as a resident of Fort Augustus, Campbell would have been well acquainted with Fraser as the local lock keeper and it is a reasonable conclusion that Fraser told the story directly to Campbell. I would guess they would be men of a similar age as well, though one cannot discount entirely that Campbell may have talked to Duncan MacDonald himself, but that depends on when MacDonald passed away.

In that light, it is also a safe assumption that Campbell was the source for Witchell's account. I say that because of the way Witchell diverges from the Northern Chronicle and converges to Campbell. For example, Witchell places the incident in 1880, when the Northern Chronicle places it at least four years later. Witchell also repeats the terrified response of Campbell's account while the Chronicle does not. He also repeats the vow of MacDonald never to go back as does Campbell, while the Chronicle does not. Likewise, the Vera Cruz line of accounts all state he was examining the boat while the Northern Chronicle states the boat was no longer there.

However, Witchell omits the yellowish colour of the Vera Cruz letter. Either Campbell or Witchell could have omitted that detail.  Witchell also contradicts Vera Cruz in saying MacDonald recounted the experience after several days while Vera Cruz says it was immediate. Also, Witchell gets the location completely wrong, it was not at the loch entrance to the canal, it was at Johnnie's Point which is about half a mile up the north shore from Cherry Island and over a mile and a half away from the canal entrance as the crow flies (see map further down).

However, since there was nearly twenty years between the Vera Cruz and Witchell accounts, it is not clear whether Campbell had changed anything or Witchell when they talked. It is likely to be a combination of the two. My own speculation is that if Witchell had said "Johnnie's Point" in the account to a general readership, they would have had no idea where that was. When Witchell asked Campbell where it was and he said near the canal entrance, I suspect a misunderstanding over how far or close "near" was came about.

Whatever happened, Witchell's account became the de facto account for years. As mentioned, future writers such as myself, Malcolm Robinson and Paul Harrison used it. Did that new layer of transmission lead to any further alterations? The answer is yes. Harrison increases the drama of the event by describing MacDonald as a "gibbering wreck" and "his face as white as chalk" and his colleagues "could not make sense of his ramblings". All of this is embellishment for dramatic effect and unlike the more quiet and diffident figure of the Northern Chronicle account.

Malcolm Robinson is truer to the Witchell text and only makes one change when the "several days" of Witchell becomes "seven days". This looks more like a typo than an attempt to pin down the actual number of days. I just looked at the text I transmitted in my own book and it is a basically a requote of Witchell's text.

Where does this leave us? The fact that texts can alter as they are re-expressed in later documents is a given fact of general history and certainly in this story as well. The most noticeable change concerns not the creature but the man himself where there is an increasing dramatisation of his reaction from a near silence to a gibbering wreck. The difference in location is also apparent and there are variations in when he told all. The only real variation in the beast itself is the addition by Campbell of its yellowish colour. It is impossible to tell whether this was told to Campbell by Fraser or was a later embellishment. 

In the light of claims that monster stories get distorted out of all proportion, this would not apply to this account (as was discovered with the Jenkyns account). The real essence of the story across all the documents is pretty much preserved. Namely, that some time in the 1880s, a ship sailing through Loch Ness struck underwater reefs and sank somewhere near Fort Augustus. A diver by the name of Duncan MacDonald was sent down to inspect the vessel. He signaled in a short time that he wished to be brought back up where he then told of seeing a strange looking beast sitting on the ledge beside the vessel. He described it as looking like a huge frog.

That is it and with that in mind, one can begin to look at the account with a greater degree of confidence. The only question that could be raised is the matter of forty five to fifty years. Duncan MacDonald may have passed on his story to his grand-nephew perhaps twenty or so years after the incident. What effect would this time gap have on his powers of recall? Likewise, a similar time may have passed between Fraser receiving the story and passing it on to the Northern Courier. The same question of memory recall can be applied to him.

In regard to Duncan MacDonald, if he did see such a creature underwater, there can be no doubt it would leave a powerful impression upon him, the kind of impact that lays deep tracks in the memory of a man and are not easily forgotten. Think back yourselves to major incidents in your own lives decades ago and how these things linger long in the memory as opposed to mundane events such as what you had for breakfast twenty years ago. In that light, I would expect MacDonald to recall and recount the incident in all its major points, right up to the end of his life or when his faculties began to seriously diminish with age.

But what about Donald Fraser? He would not have been as impacted by the story as he was not down there looking at the beast with all the fears and concerns that such a thing would arouse. Nevertheless, the retelling a such a spooky story to a young person would leave an impression and when it was reinforced with the retelling over the years. In that regard, one would see the link from Donald Fraser to his listeners in the 1930s as the weakest link. The problem is we do not know how weak it may be and it is really down to the reader to form their own opinion on that.

So looking at the account itself, we would mainly focus on the Northern Courier report. The likely location is within the area marked with an ellipse on the map of south Loch Ness. The circle to the left is the area wrongly implied in the accounts springing from the Witchell text. Along this line there are indeed hazardous shallow points where boats can run aground. In fact, the general advice to vessels is not to go within 300 metres of the Loch Ness shoreline. 

I am not aware of any contemporary record of a vessel sinking in that area in the 1880s, though records of others are available, such as the schooner "Margaret Wilson" which sank in 1861 just up the loch at Port Clair with a similar cargo of guano fertilizer worth £1400 (or about £125,000 in today's money). The Merchant Shipping Act of 1854 required all ship losses to be officially recorded, so a deposition by the captain was made and mentioned in the Inverness Courier. There should be a similar record for our boat and a search of the appropriate shipping register may be appropriate to this end.

Now when such diving accounts are found, the first thing that should spring to mind is the viewing conditions underwater. As we know, the peat stained waters of the loch make viewing more difficult. The account states the diver as being at a depth of thirty feet when he encountered the creature. How good is viewing at ten metres down? That depends on a number of factors, such as the diver's eyesight, how far away the creature was, what lighting aids he had, how strong the sun was and how settled the silt was. 

With those factors in mind, I looked around at the various stories of people diving in the loch and I think he could have had visibility up to 20 feet away. That is not much distance between you and a strange looking creature. As to the actual description, there is not a lot to go on. It was lying on the same shelf of rock the boat had been, it was staring at him, it was like a frog in appearance, it appeared to be placid and perhaps motionless, it was as big as a sheep or goat and may have been yellowish in colour.

Run your mind through the classic representations of the Loch Ness Monster and a frog like creature the size of a goat does not readily spring to mind. What was it that made Duncan MacDonald liken it to a frog? Was it the posture, the wide mouth, the colour or the large eyes that we normally associate with a frog? Since the creature was portrayed as lying down rather than sitting up like a frog, we may exclude that.

The colour described as "yellowish" by Alex Campbell does not sound very frog-like. One wonders if the peat stained water which has its own yellowish hue may have contributed to the perception of colour? In fact, the only physical characteristic mentioned are the eyes. If the creature was staring at him, that would suggest the stereoscopic eyes of a predator. The fact that he could see the eyes does not necessarily imply they were as big as a frog. 

Maybe we just go literal and say this was a frog the size of a goat? Well, we know the Goliath Frog can grow up to 12 inches long and even comes in a yellowish colour. Then there was the extinct Devil Frog which may have added another 4 inches to that length. Ordinary frogs or toads have been photographed in Loch Ness, but one cannot quite see how these tropical frogs could make it to the loch let alone reach the size of a goat.

One could speculate that the diver was just looking at the front head of the Loch Ness Monster looking at him but the rest of the long body was lying on the rock shelf and just vanished into the peaty darkness beyond his limited visibility? Perhaps, but Karl Shuker offered one theory that is interesting and suggests that Duncan MacDonald met a Silurus Glanis or Wels Catfish. This is based on the idea that the face of a catfish has a frog like look to it with that wide mouth shown below.

Indeed, as you can see in the picture, some catfish can be leucistic or lacking skin pigmentation to give that yellowish look further accentuated by the aforementioned peaty water. Though this condition is rare in nature, it is possible one left in the dark waters of the loch could lose their pigmentation over time. The eyes are not affected by this and so would appear more pronounced against the lighter skin. Now though I do not think the Loch Ness Monster is a Wels Catfish, that does not preclude the idea that someone dumped one or two in the loch back in Victorian times. I quoted such an instance of British introduction in an older article where a book from 1853 states:

Through the indefatigable exertions of Mr. George D. Berney, of Morton, Norfolk, the silurus was last year introduced into England, and consequently is now included in our Fauna.

However, Loch Ness is too cold for catfish to breed and so the likelihood of a viable breeding population is small. Nevertheless, perhaps the original individual(s) could have lingered for a number of years finally to be seen in their underwater abode by a diver - and before the Loch Ness Monster grabbed them for a snack (lol!). One may think it unlikely that our diver would bump into one or two catfish in a body of water as big as Loch Ness, but perhaps all that lovely guano attracted the fish which have a very well developed sense of smell?

So much for speculation. Was it the Loch Ness Monster, a Wels Catfish, an illusion seen through hazy waters or something else entirely? Whatever the solution, tales of divers encountering large unknown creatures in dark waters has all the ingredients for a visceral tale.

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