Frank Searle and Baby Nessies

I spotted an article by a Malcolm Robinson who writes on mysterious and paranormal subjects. This part looks at the Loch Ness Monster and although much of what he says is not new, he does include the transcript of an interview he did with Frank Searle some time in the 1970s or early 1980s.

You can read it at this link and I make a few observation here. 

Firstly, Frank claimed 38 sightings of the monster which of course will be subject to some dispute by Nessie cryptozoologists. This is more than double the total claimed by such Nessie personalities as Alex Campbell and Winifred Cary. How many of these might have been genuine, I have no idea.

Half he claimed to have a co-witness with him but Lieve Petin whom we mentioned previously said she never saw anything (as far as I can tell). If anyone did co-witness a sighting with Frank Searle, send me an email!

The other interesting piece (which was also in his book) was the claimed sighting of some "young" Nessies in a river measuring about four feet long. Now one may scoff at this report but the general theme holds - if there is a breeding population (as opposed to a visiting creature or something paranormal) then there will be smaller, juvenile creatures.

Here's one particularly cute version (credit to artist Tom Barnfield at www.runninghead.com):

Another more plesiosaur like one is here, though I cannot be sure who painted it.

Clearly, these smaller versions of Nessie have proven to be even more elusive than their adult counterparts as very few reports mention creatures of that size. However, this is to be expected for several reasons.

The first is because of their small size and this means they are just harder to spot. Compare it to how rarely otters are seen at Loch Ness and then extrapolate that to an animal that rarely surfaces (Searle himself saw the creatures as water-breathers with surfacings being purely accidental as they pursued fish, etc).

Secondly, apart from being difficult to spot because of their size, they are also less likely to break the surface.

Thirdly, since we have no idea of the life-cycle of a Nessie, who knows whether they spend the first part of their lives remaining in the depths, out of the way of potential predators.

Just my rambling thoughts ....

Update to Rip Hepple Nessletter Archive

I am glad to tell you that the earliest issues of Rip's Nessletter have now been added to the archive. Copies of the issues were supplied by Rip himself when I realised the copies could not be obtained from the National Library of Scotland. The added issues are listed below with their Google Docs links. I notice there is no issue 13 so need to check if that is an omission or Rip being superstitious!

I am now in the process of copying the other issues up to number 120 (in 1995) and these will appear once I have the time to complete the upload process.

No.1 January 1974 - link

No.2 March 1974 - link

No.3 May 1974 - link

No.4 July 1974- link

No.5 October 1974 - link

No.6 December 1974 - link

No.7 February 1975 - link

No.12 December 1975 - link

No.14 February 1976 - link

No.16 June 1976 - link

No.17 August 1976 - link

No.20 February 1977 - link

No.21 April 1977 - link

No.24 November 1977 - link

No.66 October 1984 - link

Hugh Gray: The Man and His Monster

Last year I published an article bolstering the case for the first ever photograph of the Loch Ness Monster. I attempted to show that the picture taken by Hugh Gray did not show the blurred image of a Labrador dog and indeed showed the perplexing image of a fish like head (look right and down on this webpage). That the head is there is undoubted in my opinion as it casts a shadow on the water below it. What it means to the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster is a continuing matter of conjecture. You can view all the relevant articles here. However, I wanted to address some loose ends and add some new information in this article. 

The first is the man himself, Hugh Gray. I managed to find a couple of photographs of him which help humanise the story a bit more and bring the history of the case up to date. The first was found on the South Loch Ness Heritage website where old photographs of the people and places of that part of Loch Ness are displayed. As I was browsing the content of this interesting website, I noticed a picture of a tug-of-war team taken in 1933. One of the team members was named "H. Gray" at which point the penny dropped!

The picture below was taken by Duncan MacDonald and is reproduced with the permission of the site's maintainer, Frank Ellam. Hugh Gray is sitting at the front in the tweed jacket, second from our right (Interestingly, the man sitting at Hugh Gray's left hand side is Jock Forbes who claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster cross the road in front of his father's horse and cart in 1919). The picture was probably taken a few months before his famous photograph. The picture can be seen with further information at this website link. Indeed, if you scroll further down at that website, you will see a 1912 photograph of another tug-of-war team featuring a younger Hugh Gray. 

As it happened, I later found another picture of Hugh Gray in the London Daily Sketch for the 8th December 1933 which I don't think flatters him much (below). As you can see, the main banner  headline conveys the sensation the Loch Ness Monster created at the time.

Now, the debunking of the photograph has proceeded with varying degrees of credibility but one attempt can definitely be put at the bottom of the credible list and that is a piece that appears in Ronald Binns' "The Loch Ness Mystery Solved". In it, Ronald Binns quotes the 30th May 1933 Inverness Courier which describes a failed attempt by an "A. Gray" to capture the Loch Ness Monster using wire, hooks, a barrel and bait. Portraying this episode as a leg-pulling event, Binns speculates openly whether this is the same Mr. Gray and therefore should this joker be trusted. However, apart from being a Mr. A. Gray instead of a Mr. H. Gray, the matter can be laid to rest. For some reason, Ronald Binns failed to mention a key fact from the article that Mr. A. Gray was a bus driver whereas our Mr. H. Gray was a fitter at the Foyers Aluminium Works.

A more intelligent critique comes from Dick Raynor, who is an expert in photographic analysis. He suggests that the shadow of the object is not consistent with the time the photograph was allegedly taken. The position of the shadow indicates the object is somewhere between the sun and the photographer and he further suggests such a configuration is not possible given the stated facts of the case (the implication being that there is deception involved). So, for example, if Hugh Gray had been looking at the object across to the other side of the loch, then he would be facing nearer west which would place the sun in a sunset position. It is this objection to the photograph's authenticity that I wish to address for the remainder of the article.

But first, why would I wish to address something as mundane as the position of a shadow? Because this is symptomatic of the way critics treat such evidence. I call it the "Poison Speck" technique and it comes straight out of the lawyers' handbook. For you see, such pictures are not normally exposed by a big one-off event such as a hoaxer's confession or a model nessie found at the scene of "the crime". Rather, the normal procedure is to plant a "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the reader via small arguments (our poison specks). In the same manner that a lawyer will chip away at the evidence of the prosecution/defence, so the sceptic chips away until he thinks the audience has reached the point of "reasonable doubt". It may only take one or two chips but in this generally sceptical age, this carries extra leverage. When you preach to the converted, proof is not so vehemently demanded. 

So, by way of analogy, if I present a tasty and appealing pizza to you but point out that a tiny speck of something vile has been added, would you eat it? It doesn't matter if the offending particle takes up less than one thousandth of the meal, most will politely decline. Such is the tale of the tactic used and there is nothing illegal or immoral about that (I use it myself but for the opposite reasons).

Going back to the picture, we need to know three things. The position of the sun, the object and the photographer. The position of Hugh Gray can be determined with reasonable accuracy as being on the point indicated on Google Maps below. Tim Dinsdale in his book "Loch Ness Monster" visited Hugh Gray in 1960 and was taken to the spot by him. Dinsdale describes a half mile walk "along the shore" which I take to be starting from the Foyers estuary and hence use to estimate the location more accurately.

 

The position of the sun can be calculated from the date and time of the sighting. The date was November 12th 1933 but what was the time? My original article stated noon but there is some confusion here as other authors suggest the morning. Faced with this, I attempted to guesstimate the time. The account states he visited the local church first and then walked to the point on the shore afterwards. So he allegedly enters the church intent on keeping the fourth commandment, but leaves intent on breaking the ninth. How long was that interval? A church service would start at 1100 and took typically 1 hour 20 minutes (according to a current local minister).

He then would have conversed with fellow worshippers, walked from the church to the estuary of the Foyers river and then a further half a mile along the wooded shoreline to the sighting point. The overall distance can be seen from the postcard photograph again kindly provided by Frank Ellam's website (original link here). In the foreground is the church and he would have likely walked to the estuary along the riverside and then turned left along the shoreline trees (top left photo). Note that hypothetical Labrador dogs would not have been allowed in church - unless Mr. Gray was a registered blind person. :)

That would take us to about one o' clock which by a strange coincidence is the time he gave to the Daily Sketch reporter in our aforementioned newspaper article. Applying an azimuth calculator we get the sun's position as 194 degrees East of True North and at an altitude of about 14.2 degrees. Note that the stated time of 1300 is outside of BST (British Summer Time) which was introduced to Britain in 1912 and hence does not need compensating for.

On a Google Maps view of Foyers we can now begin to draw some lines between Hugh Gray, the sun and object (Google uses Grid North which is essentially the same as True North). But what about the position of the object? It is stated as being about 200 yards from the observer but what is not stated is the orientation between the two. Was the object due West of Mr. Gray, South West, North West or something else? No one knows and the various accounts given do not give a hint.

In that light, the remaining question is whether the object can be oriented to produce a suitable shadow given the known positions of sun and observer. The answer is that it can by placing it along a line of observation towards the sun to produce the desired shadow effect and see how that pans out with respect to the observer. The resulting map is shown below but how would we know how such an object in such an orientation could appear to Hugh Gray at his vantage point?

At this point, it's time to introduce you to "Shuggy" our stand-in Loch Ness Monster ("Shuggy" is the name for "Hugh" in the Glasgow vernacular). Since it will be a bit impractical to float a forty foot reproduction of the monster at 1pm on the 12th November 2012 about 200 yards from a ledge near Foyers, we went for the next best thing.

Since there is only a need to roughly reproduce a similar shadow, this plasticine model will suffice. It's not an exact representation of what is in the photograph, but it's good enough! I would also point out that this is not a complete representation either, since we do not know what was beneath the water's surface, so it's a part-Nessie.

So in my back garden, I placed the model roughly perpendicular to a south-north axis at 2pm (add one hour for BST). I then placed myself as the observer at a 35 degree angle from the sun line and photographed the model. The resulting photograph shows a similar shadow to the Gray photograph. The model is oriented to face side on to the viewer.

There are one or two issues such as the altitude of the sun would be slightly different compared to November and my own crouching down to simulate the height of the observer was an estimate as well. However, I hope I have proved that the shadow argument is no longer relevant as there is a sun-creature-witness orientation that is within the parameters of the case. 

One final objection may be that such an orientation would include some shoreline. The problem with this argument is two-fold. Firstly, we do not have the complete negative and what has passed down to us is an enlargement. So any talk of shoreline on the original is open to debate.  

Secondly, I visited the site of the Hugh Gray photograph in July last year and took some photos and video which I hope to put in a follow up post. Suffice to say, it was simple to photograph a spot 200 metres from me looking in that general direction which did not include any shoreline (though I appreciate my digital camera and Gray's box camera had different parameters).

As I said, a follow up post will be written in due course.


The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Another Defunct Nessie Website

I will add this to the general link on the sidebar but I stumbled upon another as I was trawling around the Internet in my usual fashion.

It was Lieve Peten's Nessie web pages from the now defunct Yahoo! Geocities. Lieve was a Belgian lady who lived with Frank Searle during the 1970s as his assistant monster hunter. She admitted though in a 2005 documentary that the relationship went a bit further than just watching the loch. That Frank was quite the charmer it seems.

Lieve Petin website: link

There is also a Geocities specific archive site which looks better to me: link

Nessie Sonar Controversy Goes Commercial

The Nessie Sonar case gets more complicated each time something pops up on the media or someone else adds their opinion on the matter. However, I have been in email contact with the witness himself, Marcus Atkinson, to clarify and answer some points. I will come to those at the end of the post.

First off is a piece by Loren Coleman on the Cryptomundo website where he refers to Dick Raynor's website addressing some sonar questions. Dick Raynor skippers one of the boats run by another cruise company called Castle Cruises Loch Ness.

Straight after that, there is speculation about the man who got the sonar hit, Marcus Atkinson, who works for a competitor cruise company called Cruise Loch Ness. To quote Cryptomundo:

But perhaps truly damning, this year “Cruise Loch Ness” are running special monster hunting trips with underwater cameras on the boat skippered by…Marcus Atkinson – the man behind all the publicity of this new “discovery.” Therefore, some locals are questioning Atkinson’s big splash in the media this week. Is it a marketing move?

The cruiser website carries information on this monster hunting variant of their trips here. One wonders who the concerned "locals" are in this instance.

Now as regards so called marketing moves, what is this meant to tell us about anything? If I refer you again to Scepticism's Seven Deadly Sins, Mr. Atkinson had committed "sins" number two and six. That is, you are not a credible witness if you are involved in a commercial outlet near the loch or have gained financially from the sighting. The second point is answered as the William Hill £1000 prize that Mr. Atkinson won was not announced till months after his sonar story.

The first point is not relevant in my opinion as the original sonar hit story was on the 15th September 2011, way past the peak of the tourist season and only a few weeks before the whole industry slowed down significantly for the Autumn and Winter. Hardly a judicious time to stage such an event and rather more likely to add to the sincerity of the testimony. As for the current story, the newspapers I consulted (The Daily Mail and The Sun) don't even mention these new monster hunting trips.

However, the fact that Cruise Loch Ness sees an opportunity here needs to be looked at from both sides. The ramp up to the new season began only two weeks ago at Easter time (though things tend to dip again until the school holidays begin) and this rerun of the story is only a week old so any talk of "cashing in" would be premature. Moreover, if the company has upgraded their "monster hunting trip" variant with underwater cameras then that looks to me like a cash investment which means a degree of risk is being taken on. That's how capitalism and free enterprise works. If people (and competitors) don't like it, they could petition the Scottish Government to nationalise the entire fleet of all Loch Ness tour operators (okay, that's a bit tongue in cheek).

For completeness, it looks like there are five cruise companies operating in Loch Ness:

Castle Cruises Loch Ness (http://www.lochnesscruises.com/home.htm)

Cruise Loch Ness (http://www.cruiselochness.com)

Jacobite Cruises (http://www.jacobite.co.uk)
Loch Ness Cruises (http://www.lochness-cruises.com)
Deepscan Cruises (http://www.lochness.com/loch-ness-cruises.htm)

They operate at various points around Loch Ness near Inverness, Abriachan, Drumnadrochit and Fort Augustus. But essentially they are competing against each other since tourists tend to only pick one cruise when they visit the loch. In other words, one cruise company's gain is another's loss.

Such is the world of business at Loch Ness, but going back to the sonar trace itself, what it shows is still the subject of continued controversy. The Dick Raynor link above talks about sonar seeing debris and plankton along the thermocline though he does not explicitly state that this is what Marcus Atkinson saw that day. My own take on that interpretation is what does a sonar hit on the thermocline look like on these cruise boat sonars? Mr. Raynor has been using such devices for a long time and has been collecting various images for years of things that can fool witnesses. Since the thermocline plus debris/plankton/etc is not exactly a rare event, perhaps a picture of his own would help his theory?

It is one thing to theorise, it's another to prove it. I'll admit Nessie cryptozoologists such as myself will not be forthcoming with evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the phenomenon is a particular exotic species but this is also a problem with sceptical interpretations of Loch Ness Monster reports. A theory is proposed but too often no follow through to prove it is undertaken. It is just assumed people will accept it because it is plausible. This is clearly not scientific and leaves things in a suspended state. Understandably, some theories will not be testable due to their nature and people have other priorities and lives to lead. But at the same time the "trust me I am an expert" line is not the way forward.

Proposing makes it plausible, testing makes it probable (or improbable). In general, if it can't be tested, it's not fully scientific.

In contrast, Tony Harmsworth, another seasoned Loch Ness Researcher, is doubtful of the thermocline as a cause if the boat was moored somewhere in Urquhart Bay since the combination of shallow waters and the rush of water from the rivers would disrupt it too much. He goes for a different interpretation such as a layer of fish.

Again, a typical cruise boat image of a shoal of fish for comparison should not be beyond the wit of man. Also, I am not sure fish are known for shoaling in Loch Ness which makes me wonder how diffuse such an image would be in comparison to our strong sonar image here? My other observation is that you will see the presence of crescent-like images around the larger trace in the above sonar image. These shapes are normally indicative of fish, so what is the larger object if those are fish? Admittedly, a clearer image would have helped in this assessment.

However, what the experts are both agreed on are the vagaries of sonar interpretation in Loch Ness and this would seem to be exemplified by their differing views on this image. This has implications for both sides of the Nessie debate.

To wit, if people cannot agree on what they think are common objects, how are they going to fare with uncommon objects? Let me put this another way; if the monster exists, what would its sonar trace look like? I don't know and I bet none of the experts do either. We can guess, but we can never be sure. Though some don't think they need to be sure - they don't believe there can ever be a Loch Ness Monster!

Now getting back to Mr. Atkinson, it's good to get things from the source and so his input is helpful in clarifying matters.

Firstly, he (or his company) did not stir the thing up again. In fact, he says it's "a bit weird that the whole thing has blown up again". He points out that the original story in September 2011 was not given to the papers by him but by monster hunter Steve Feltham. But (in accord with my above bit on business), now that the publicity has come to them, they are not going to turn it away. I don't blame him for that, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

As regards the sonar trace itself, Marcus says:

"I have always said I don't know what the picture is, and I would like to know."

Something mysterious? Yes. What exactly? That's what everyone has been discussing to no firm conclusion.

Marcus admits he is not an expert but he told me that he has had seven years experience of using the sonar hardware and that means he is no novice either. And with 17,500 miles on the loch clocked up after just three years, he says it is going to be people like him that are more likely to get the unusual sonar hits. In that light, he says he has never seen a trace like it in his time there.

One final point he makes is concerning the thermocline explanation. His colleague went back to the same spot an hour or so later but the contact had gone. I can see his point there. Even if the thermocline varied in intensity, one would still expect to see something there.

But we are not convinced it is the thermocline and so the debate continues.



PREVIOUS BLOGS
More on Nessie Sonar Contact
A Story About Ted Holiday

On This Day

Tim Dinsdale got his famous film of the Loch Ness Monster all those 52 years ago. A lot has happened at Loch Ness due to that one singular event and many lives today would have been completely different if Tim had never made that auspicious trip north. How many would be living near the loch today without that film or would we even have the various Nessie-oriented facilities that are used by so many today?


It also happens by some strange coincidence to be St. George's Day because the patron saint of England also famously pursued and killed his dragon. The story of this brave feat was brought back from the Crusades and some think the story took place in the town of Lydda near modern Tel Aviv. A dragon there had to be offered animal and human sacrifice to allow access to the local water supply. But when the lot fell on the king's daughter, George took up the challenge and after protecting himself with the Sign of the Cross, slew the beast.
Like Tim Dinsdale, this monster hunter's actions also had a significant effect on the local community as they converted to Christianity en masse.
[Image]

The area around Loch Ness was also reputed to be the haunt of the last dragon in Scotland, slain by a Fraser of Glenvackie. Apparently, this dragon was not the same beast as the Each Uisge which haunted the nearby loch, so scope for dragon hunting continues to this day!

More on the Recent Sonar Sighting

The Daily Mail reprises Marcus Atkinson's sonar hit from last year (see link). The interesting piece is a claim by a Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton that the trace shows a bloom of algae and zooplankton on the thermocline (the boundary between cold and warmer water layers).

However, I find that explanation a bit unconvincing due to the peaty nature of the loch. Algae need sunlight to photosynthesize and at a depth of 75 feet the loch has essentially become dark. Dick Raynor, who has dived at the loch says at his website that at about 70 feet all light would be lost from the surface when diving.

So, basically, no algae at 75 feet, certainly not enough "in bloom" to register on sonar. Mr. Boxall should think "Loch Ness" and not "English Channel"!

The Sun is also running the story here. Not sure why this is being rerun - it was all publicised back in  September.