New Book on The Loch Ness Monster

Tony Harmsworth, former curator of the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre has published a book on Loch Ness, Nessie (as others and himself sees her) and his life living at the side of Loch Ness.



Further details can be had from his website and once someone buys it for my Christmas, I will review it!

The Latest Nessie Photos

The latest Nessie pictures are out and the obvious question is it Hoax, Misidentification or Nessie? I wouldn't like to say but the account by the witness Richard Preston is as follows from the STV website:

Richard Preston, who has redesigned the castle grounds on the loch’s southern shores, snapped the image of a mysterious three-humped object on the water.

“I am not saying it is the monster. But I don’t see any reason why it cannot be some sort of a sea-going beast,” Mr Preston said.

The 27-year-old Yorkshireman, who is based at Broughton Hall near Skipton, was working at the castle when something close to the opposite shore caught his attention at about 3pm. “It was a glimmer,” he said. “It was like a reflection. The rest of the water was still and dark. It was quite odd.”

Mr Preston snapped a series of images on his mobile camera but when he turned around, the mystery object had disappeared.

“I was gobsmacked,” he said. “I have been working here for the last two or three years and have never seen anything like it.”

Naturally, the sceptics hold Mr. Preston to his initial words and say it is a reflection of the house on the opposite side of the shore (but why is the other house not reflecting?). The width of the phenomemon even looks the same as the house. The shadows on the grounds of Aldourie Castle also indicate the sun is somewhere behind him making the reflection hypothesis plausible.

The other point to note is that the object is white and Nessies tend to be dark in colour. Okay, pack up and go home? Well, maybe not quite.

One of the snaps (three I think) is below (copyright Richard Preston). The second is my zoom in.





The zoom is quite pixellated but its shows two things. First is the three part nature of the phenomemon which has prompted a three hump interpretation and secondly the the three dark lines which are seen above the "humps" from the observer's point of view suggested as shadow by some.

Now one could presume the dark lines are the house roof being reflected but my rudimentary physics suggests that should be "below" from the observer's point of view. But then again since the sun is shining behind the observer then that is where shadow would be if it was a raised object.

Can a reflection of a fairly uniform structure like a house produce this segmented effect? No doubt a critic would say "yes" via some mirage effect adding a shimmer effect. There is always a plausible yet perhaps not probable explanation for these things. Mirages do occur on Loch Ness. It is all down to when the picture was taken and the ambient weather conditions.

As for the shadow effect, This needs further explanation beyond the obvious one of a real shadow cast by a real object. Over to the sceptics who specialise in optics!

The DeNessiefication of the Loch Ness Centre

Take a look at the two flyers for the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit.



The one on the left I picked up at Edinburgh Airport a few days ago. The one on the right I picked up at Loch Ness in the early 1980s. Can you spot the difference already? The latest one has no mention of Loch Ness' most famous attraction, the right leaves you in no doubt about it. This is what I call the "denessiefication" of the place formerly known as "The Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition".

In fact, looking inside the new brochure, they seem to go out of their way to not say much about Nessie at all. The tenor of the exhibits is certainly gauged to steer visitors away from any notion that Loch Ness may harbour a large creature. It was no surprise to learn that Adrian Shine, Nessie Skeptic, wrote much of the exhibit material. In fact, the only time the word "Nessie" appeared was in connection with the shop which visitors are inevitably funnelled into at the end of the exhibition.

Contrast with the old brochure which can't stop talking about Nessie! The opening words are these:

"Opened in 1980, the Exhibition has forced sceptics to take Nessie SERIOUSLY."

Ironically, the Centre has now joined the sceptics and leads them!

More on David James

Continuing our intermittent tour of Tarasay House on Mull where the David James, Member of Parliament and Nessie Hunter lived we come to the press clippings.

Two rooms are devoted to Nessie memorabilia in the stately home. I have already shown the famous Sir Peter Scott painting of two Nessies in a seperate post but David James was also an avid collector of Loch Ness press clippings.

The first one shown here takes me back to 1975 when the famous head and neck Rines photographs hit the front page of newspapers worldwide. It was quite a furore and the press picked it up with glee.



But the formation of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau in which he played a large part also features in his clippings as this clipping from 1962 shows.



David James also contributed articles on the Loch Ness Monster and these were collected as well. This one was a reprint in some magazine originally written for The Field magazine on November 23rd 1961. The resolution on the image is good enough to zoom in and read the article yourself. There is also a small clipping there which mentions the well known film taken of a possible Nessie around that time by I think Dick Raynor (though he has since decided it was birds).

Frank Searle

Does anyone raise the hackles of the typical Nessie believer more than Frank Searle? Exposed as a hoaxer and general charlatan, he has earned a place in the annals of Nessie Lore for all the wrong reasons.

Since revisionism of Nessie icons is "Plat Du Jour" then why not Frank Searle? Perhaps his reputation is 100% unreformable, but let us see how far I get.

To begin on a personal note, I have had three involvements in the Frank Searle story. The first was when I met him personally in 1982. I was a student who cycled up to Loch Ness to the Altsigh Youth Hostel for a week of "Nessie Hunting". I made my way to his base at Foyers and came upon a rather tatty looking caravan and had a look for him inside. The walls were covered with various clippings, monster-like photos and notes by Frank. Nothing that excited the imagination so I went outside to see him making his way towards me smoking a cigarette. I introduced myself and we chatted about the monster scene. I can't remember now all what we said but there was a bit of the "them and me" about his situation with other "hunters".

Unbeknown to me, his time there was numbered and he was to be gone within a year or so. Around that time, I was in Glasgow coming out of a city centre library and got talking with a lady who knew Frank Searle and defended him against his adversaries. She gave me a booklet by him which turned out to be a book which had been pulled from publication. It was quite a diatribe against Loch Ness personalities known and still active today but I will come back to that later.

Finally and years later I was in contact with Andrew Tullis who was making a documentary about Frank Searle and asked me if I had any idea where he was. I did not, but I volunteered to look around Edinburgh in case he was still in Scotland. I drew a blank but Andrew did not as a speculative ad in a treasure hunting magzine led to his home in Lancashire but ironically he had only died a few weeks before. You can find out all in his documentary "The Man who Captured Nessie".

Fate had conspired to deny Frank Searle a final word on TV but we have his final book.

I was not minded to put my copy out on the Internet but someone else did and it can be found here courtesy of Mike Dash who writes on Frank here. It seems that Frank Searle, being dead, yet speaketh. A second link for Frank's booklet is also here.

So now is the time to review possibly the most controversial book on Nessie and her believers and skeptics called Loch Ness Investigation: What Really Happened.

The backdrop to the short book is warfare. War between Frank Searle and those stationed on the other side of the Loch at Drumnadrochit. Those under fire include Adrian Shine, Tim Dinsdale and others still around today. One is even insinuated as a sexual pervert, others as money grabbers and all as generally unsavoury. He counter-accuses those who accuse him of an attempted Molotov Cocktail attack on their boat. Clearly this is a book where one has to tread carefully else libel may be the dish of the day.

Now his accusation of profiteering on Nessie is hardly a revelation. Loch Ness is a major tourist attraction (even more so then) and this will inevitably attract entrepreneurs. That is nature of capitalism and free enterprise. Just because he quotes some metaphorically salivating at that prospect is really neither here nor there.

Nessie equals money, full stop. I don't take a purist view on this, I just ignore it. Unlike some, I have not given up my job to look for Nessie and so do not feel the pressure to supplement any pension or savings I may be relying upon with freelance Nessie work.

Frank tries and sets himself apart and aloof from this but this smacks of the hypocritical if he was already faking pictures for media money. The matter of Tim Dinsdale is interesting in this respect as he accuses him of asking for a fee equivalent to at least £2000 in today's money to act as a professional guide for a Japanese TV team over to make a documentary.

Now this I tend to believe. As I said, no one is a 100% liar or a 100% truth teller all the time. Some of what he said is by implication true - but what?

Dinsdale proferring his services for money? Why not I say? We need to dismiss this image of monster hunters as people detached from human nature and puritanically focussed on the big prize of the irrefutable picture or film to the exclusion of all else.

Frank Searle is of course the perfect example with his live in lovers and his story about decking Nicholas Witchell when he discovered him snooping around his base. Big deal, I say.

Drug taking and booze sessions amongst the student volunteers of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau? Is that all? What about orgies I ask? Well, perhaps that is going too far but that was the Hippy 60s after all.

Human nature red in tooth and claw. Frank Searle helps dispel any notion we may have that Nessie hunting is akin to a bit of congenial bird spotting in a leafy booth. I won't accept his more extreme suggestions but in general there is a grain of truth in some of his observations. Nessie people, like Frank Searle, are imperfect. We just have to take a look at ourselves to begin to appreciate that.

So, if anyone says Frank Searle was a 100% liar, take it with a pinch of salt.

UPDATE: As it turns out, Monster Researcher, Paul Harrison, did locate Frank before his death and conducted interviews with him that he intends to publish this year. Watch this space.

You can also find an archive of Frank Searle's newsletters here.

The Seagull and the Surgeon's Photograph

Is there a seagull present in the Surgeon's Photograph? The thought never occurred to me until some years back when I read Edward Armstrong's book called "Sticking My Neck Out" which primarily focusses on the "escaped elephant" theory of the Loch Ness Monster. There is however a section on the idea that a seagull can be seen flying near to the left of Nessie in the famous 1934 picture.

The problem is that you are not likely to see this on any image you may care to consult apart from the one reproduced in Constance Whyte's book "More than a Legend" published in 1957. Armstrong quotes Whyte from her book who says that the chemist who developed Wilson's photographs made a second negative for himself and a print of the second less well known photograph. It is from this second negative that Whyte produced her print for the book.

This led Armstrong to postulate that there were three negatives.

Negative 1: The original bought by the Daily Mail which is probably now lost.
Negative 2: A copy made of the original by the chemist.
Negative 3: A replacement for the lost original made form a print perhaps in 1934.

Based on this theory, he suggested that negative 3 produced a higher contrast image that blotted out the bird image.

Armstrong took the Whyte image and zoomed in on this feature in his book and the image does indeed look like a bird in flight. That image is reproduced below though it is not of great quality because it is an enlarged photocopy printed onto a self published book which lacks the quality of a professional print. Nevertheless, Armstrong calculates that if this is indeed a standard sized bird then the length of the neck has to be at least seven feet and not the 12 inches of the Spurling confession.

To verify this with the aid of modern PC technology, I scanned in the photo from my own copy of the Whyte book and zoomed in for a closer look which is shown below. The image is somewhat different but you get the same impression of a bird in flight.

What do we make of this? Is it a bird or is it something added later such as a defect on the print? How does one distinguish between these two cases? If it is a bird then the Spurling hoax theory is untenable, if it is a defect we just move on.

Just to prove that Nessie believers do not swallow every pro-monster idea, I tend to the idea that it is a defect on the print. You will notice on my own scanned picture that there are darker areas to the left and right of the bird image which are not apparent on Armstrong's photocopy version. The fact that they can form a straight line suggests they are part of the same thing - a defect. Armstrong himself thought there may be a second bird which I presume to mean the mark to the left of the main bird image.

In fact the lesser known photo in the Whyte book also has a similar defect in a similar area which backs up this argument. (Note that despite all this Nessie skeptics doubt these two pictures came from the same four plates).

What do others think?

More on Torosay House

I posted something on David James' house with its Nessie exhibits a while back (see link).

But here is a delightful object which I photographed when we first entered the house and alerted me to the Nessie possibilities of the place.



The image is a bit shaky but the form is unmistakeable as a model of Nessie or to be more precise the Nessiteras Rhombopteryx version of Nessie. You can see the tail to the right and the lowered head to the left.

It appeared to me to be a plaster cast of some sort and the flippers you can see were damaged in the past but repaired. I imagine it was made in the late 1970s during the media hype concerning the Rines photographs which inspired the Sir Peter Scott painting from which I think the model is derived.

(I have since found out the item was sculpted by Lionel Leslie).