Nessletter No.159 now published

Rip Hepple, veteran Loch Ness Monster expert, has published the latest issue of his long running Loch Ness newsletter, "Nessletter" (dated November 2012). As usual, it is a good read, but if you want to find out for yourself, his address at:

Subscription rates are: £3 (UK) or $10 (USA) for 12 issues (published intermittently, not monthly)

R.R.Hepple
7 Huntshieldford
St John's Chapel
Weardale
Co Durham
DL13 1RQ
United Kingdom

 

I would point out that an archive of Rip's older newsletters can be found here. This is half complete, but I have now scanned the remaining newsletters and uploaded them to Google Drive. All that remains is to add these as links to the aforementioned archive link.

Rip's newsletter will enter its 39th year next month and has been a valuable source of information and analysis throughout those years. Here's to another year!

The Beast of the Beauly Firth

Whilst looking through some archives, I came across some items of interest on a creature reported in the Beauly Firth. This stretch of coastal water outside Inverness is about six miles long by two miles wide and has some significance to our interest in Loch Ness as the mouth of the River Ness meets the Beauly Firth at its exit into the Moray Firth (see map below).

The first report was found in a couple of far flung newspapers and the clipping below is taken from the Schenectady Gazette of the 1st March, 1955 (a newspaper from Schenectady county in New York state).

The next account is sixteen years later and is taken from the Inverness Courier for the 30th July 1971.

"Was there a monster in the Beauly Firth on Monday afternoon? Twenty boys of the Newcastle Cathedral Choir, who returned home yesterday after spending a nine day holiday in Inverness are convinced that they saw such an object some miles west of Inverness in the Beauly Firth. The boys were returning to Inverness by train on Monday afternoon after a day outing to Skye, when one of the party, Peter Harrison, noticed a trail of foam in the middle of the Firth. He shouted to his pals, and the three leaders of the party - Mr. G. East, Mr. R.? and Mr. G. Bolton - to look out of the window of the train.

After two minutes there was a splash and a large, black slimy object appeared. It moved eastwards for 40 seconds, at a speed of 25 miles per hour before producing another splash, again creating a trail of foam. The boys, who said the object had one hump and was too large and too fast to be a porpoise, managed to obtain a clear sighting of the object, and each was able to draw a sketch of what they saw.

Only last week, a family from Cupar, Fife, walking along the shore at the Longman, claimed they saw a 'monster' in the Beauly Firth."

I don't have any more on this second sighting despite checking back in the Courier archive. The reporter takes a somewhat sceptical stance and suggests his own explanation for the sighting:

"Porpoises are frequently seen in the Beauly and Moray Firths, swimming in schools, while seals are occasional visitors, and there have even been bottle-nosed whales. There may therefore be a simple natural explanation of these sightings, especially as the foam disturbance may have been caused by porpoises in battle with salmon or other fish which can be an awe inspring sight."

The famous Nessie witness Alex Campbell was a correspondent for the Courier at this time, but it is not known if he was the author of this report.

What are we to make of these reports? Apart from simplistic explanations about porpoises which are regularly seen in those parts and are easily recognised by their dorsal fin, could this alleged beast possibly be our own Loch Ness Monster out of its regular "chez mois"?

Now reports of strange creatures have been reported from adjoining Loch Dochfour, the River Ness and now the Beauly Firth. No doubt more could be dug up with further investigation. But should we seriously say that these were not the Loch Ness Monster but the Loch Dochfour Monster, the River Ness Monster and the Beauly Firth Monster?

Probably not. That the monster could get to these parts is not impossible and has been discussed since the days of Rupert T. Gould in 1934. His motivation for this topic was obvious enough having authored the book "The Case for the Sea Serpent" not long before in 1930. Gould believed the Loch Ness Monster could be a stray sea serpent and hence an access route from the sea which did not prove too difficult was uppermost in his mind as he traced the route from Loch Ness to the Moray Firth in his book "The Loch Ness Monster and Others".

A passage up and through the River Ness looked the most obvious while the other journey through the Caledonian Canal looked rather more daunting to a sea serpent considering the number of locks that have to be negotiated.

The other option not taken up by Gould is the famous or infamous subterranean passage running beneath the Highlands and out to some unknown outlet in the sea. Going by the sightings mentioned here, perhaps subterranean advocates should concentrate their efforts to find this fabled tunnel in the Beauly Firth area. Whether such a tunnel actually exists is another matter...

Forthcoming Nessie Lecture

I will be giving a talk on the Loch Ness Monster to the Edinburgh Fortean Society on Tuesday January 8th 2013. The title will be "Recent Events From Loch Ness" and reviews the various Nessie related events that have been going on at the loch in 2012 and also a look at 2011. 

It will look at events covered by the media such as the Edwards photo, the Atkinson sonar contact, the Jobes and Rowe photos as well as other sightings. Not all these items will be genuine sightings but then again, neither are they all hoaxes or misinterpretations!

There will also be a personal view from the grassroots as one who has been to the loch multiple times over that period armed with various monster hunting devices and visiting monster sites and monster witnesses.

The event will be rounded off with a Q&A session.

The talk will be held at The Counting House at 7:30pm and you can also check out the Society's webpage. If you can make it, that would be great.

Loch Ness Book Free Online

Tony Harmsworth, long time Loch Ness researcher, is putting his book "Loch Ness Understood" online for free viewing. The book also goes by the former title "Loch Ness, Nessie and Me". I reviewed this book last year but now you can read it for yourself at Tony's link.

Tony says the project has not quite finished, so check back for updates.

A Good Old Fashioned Nessie Documentary

I came across this old documentary from 1976 called "Mysterious Monsters" which was narrated by the well known American actor, Peter Graves, of "Mission Impossible" fame. Funnily enough, it was another actor from that program, Leonard Nimoy, who also narrated the similarly themed "In Search Of ..." series.

Actually, the documentary itself concentrates mainly on Bigfoot, but there is a nine minute clip near the start of the hour and a half film that talks about the Loch Ness Monster. It starts about 8 minutes and 50 seconds in but click on this link to go direct to the Loch Ness part.

In it you will see clips of Tim Dinsdale, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, Roberts Rines and his team at work and that perennial eyewitness, Father Gregory Brussey, from Fort Augustus Abbey talking about his long necked sighting. The snapshot of Dinsdale above shows him with his model monster which I have seen in films and books multiple times. I wonder if it survives to this day?

Good fun although a bit dated. The documentary itself typifies a more dynamic, mysterious and romantic age for these things. I remember as a kid in the late 1970s regularly going into one of the main bookshops in Glasgow to be confronted with row upon row of books on mysticism, monsters, ghosts and UFOs. This filtered through to TV, newspaper and magazine articles which abounded. I have some to this day including the 150 plus issues of the very popular "The Unexplained" magazine which I religiously bought from my newsagent every week. In some sense, it was exciting times, something to distract oneself from the troubles of that turbulent decade.

It was a generation of people exploring the weird and wacky but go into a bookshop today and you behold a different scene. Those books are gone but they are now replaced with a similar acreage of tomes on popular science and scepticism. You are not likely to easily find a book on the Loch Ness Monster. Such is the shift in culture after a span of thirty years. I wonder what the popular titles will be to excite the imaginations of men another generation from now?

Das Ungeheuer von Loch Ness

The fame of the Loch Ness Monster spreads far in place and time and Germany is no different as a country that loves a good mystery. The title is how I think the Germans label Nessie, I may be wrong (I did French at school). However, there is one little episode that caught my eye as I perused the newspapers of old some time back. I came across this article below from the the Courier-Mail of Queensland dated the 3rd of April 1934.

The headline reads thusly:

THE LOCH NESS

MONSTER

German April 1 Hoax

BERLIN, April 1.

"Captured at last; Loch Ness monster brought to Edinburgh." 

These headlines appear In "Berliner, Illustrierte Zeitung," a weekly magazine, devoted to the more stolid type of pictures, science, and exploration. Under the headlines a photograph shows a monster, 100ft long, with a 20ft tail weighing 30 tons, being caught in a huge steel net on the shores Loch Ness, with two tugboats waiting to head the monster back in case it escaped.

Another picture depicts a vast crowd viewing the monster at Edinburgh, the caption stating that an American circus proprietor's offer of £500,000 was likely to be refused owing to scientific reasons. This and other equally wild pictures are the only justification found.

Now hoaxes are not unheard of concerning the Loch Ness Monster, but one from Nazi Germany adds a little bit more grist to the mill. That date of April 1st 1934 has already been suggested as the actual date the Surgeon's Photograph was taken, but certainly the editor of the Berliner got there first. 

By a stroke of luck, I managed to find one of the hoax photographs that the Berliner had concocted. I found it in an old issue of The Scots Magazine and it is here below. I would love to see the other pictures that are mentioned in the article, but nothing as yet has turned up.

As far as Nazi Germany was concerned, not much more is mentioned in the literature. That may be partly due to the language barrier as the vast majority of Loch Ness researchers speak English (the one notable exception here is Ulrich Magin who has made some good contributions to the Loch Ness story - great if you could email me at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com). 

Indeed, as wartime austerity and fuel rationing set in, Highland tourism dropped and so did Loch Ness Monster reports. Add to this the demand for column inches on the war effort and we have little from any country on Nessie. In 1940, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, wrote a double page piece for the Hamburger Illustrierte which espoused that the Loch Ness Monster was the invention of the tourist trade and that a nation which believed in such nonsense was so monstrously stupid that they could not win the war.

Looks like he was wrong on both counts. I guess he was just jealous because Germany had no lake monsters. Scotland must have more lake monsters per head of population than any other country, but I wouldn't swear to that as Ireland might have a claim.

A year later Mussolini's paper Popolo D'ltalia claimed that bombing of Britain had been so  successful that the Loch Ness Monster had been killed by a direct hit. An Italian bomber pilot had apparently seen the body of the stricken creature. Subsequent post-war reports of the creature proved he must have mistaken an otter in a heat haze or a flock of mersanger birds for the great beast!

For indeed, in 1943, Commander Russell Flint was in command of a motor launch as it made its way south towards Fort Augustus at 25 knots when:

"there was the most terrific jolt. Everybody was knocked back. And then we looked for'ard. And there it was. There was a very large animal form disappeared in a flurry of water. It was definitely a living creature - certainly not debris or anything like that."

Flint sent this message to the Admiralty:

"Regret to inform your Lordships, damage to starboard bow following collision with Loch Ness Monster. Proceeding at reduced speed to Fort Augustus."

For which he received a "bit of a blast" when he got back to HQ. Cynics may reply Flint was just covering up some botched navigation. I won't pretend to have all the answers and just class it as an interesting story from those dark, war torn years.

 

The Marks of Honesty and Deceit

While the final part of the series of the Lachlan Stuart photograph was in progress, a thought occurred to me as I was considering this oft vilified forester.

Lachlan Stuart and other authors of classic Nessie pictures have been branded as hoaxers by mainstream Nessie analysts today. For example, it has been suggested that Hugh Gray knowingly photographed a dog, Kenneth Wilson was in on a plot hatched by Marmaduke Wetherell to fool the Daily Mail. Likewise, Lachlan Stuart is accused of setting up some hay bales in the water whilst Peter MacNab deviously photographed nothing more than a boat wake and then touched it up in his photographic dark room.

Of course, there are others such as Frank Searle and Tony "Doc" Shiels, and the list of the accused is long and wide. 

Now, I reject the contemporary statements that all the classic Nessie pictures have been explained away. I have critiqued that assertion on this blog before and found it wanting. However, it was a series of similar statements from debunkers that got me thinking.

Whenever a photograph was discussed, such critics would, of course, reject it but they would sometimes add a statement to the effect that the hoax got out of hand or what started out as a simple joke blew out of all proportion when the media got their hands on it.

The implication of such a statement being that the hoaxer underestimated the public reaction to their photographs. This led me to ask a question. If the so called hoaxer was taken aback by such a media reaction, what then should his reaction be? One might retort that the answer depends on the personality of the hoaxer. That is true but tells us nothing. But if we look at the reactions of known hoaxes, we may get a better picture.

As it turns out, only one photograph (as far as I know) had a public confession and that was the Surgeon's Photograph. The confessor was Christian Spurling who admitted to modelling the now iconic image. However, the man who was the focus of attention was Dr. Kenneth Wilson and his reaction to the limelight was markedly different. As Alastair Boyd and David Martin point out in their expose book, Wilson did not confess but was very evasive in his answers to Loch Ness researchers, even to the point of obliquely suggesting all was not as they thought with the photograph.

But was not Wilson a great practical joker who loved a laugh? I wouldn't wish to dispute that, but when a practical joke such as this becomes a media monster of international dimensions, even a hoaxer knows when to stand back and say no more. 

Wilson, of course, did the right thing, the hoax had produced the desired effect at the time but there was no need to prolong it or succour it any more and he henceforth minimised his involvement with the affair. Pushing it any more would be counter productive, intrusive and possibly detrimental if it ever was exposed in his lifetime.

I would put it to you that Kenneth Wilson is the model one-off hoaxer and provides a template as to how other hoaxers would proceed once the initial, desired effect has been achieved - they tend to retreat and shut up. In that light, how have other alleged hoaxers reacted to the spotlight being trained on them?

In the case of Hugh Gray, after the initial flurry his photo caused, he did not batten down the hatches but continued to retell his story with deliberate conviction. So, we find that he met up with Constance Whyte 22 years later in 1955 to openly discuss his photograph. Five years later, Tim Dinsdale met up with the man he described as a gentleman and courteous in 1960 and they walked to the spot where it all happened. I suspect Hugh Gray was aged about 70 by the time he met Tim, so the record of his persistence in being public about his story probably did no extend much further.

In the case of Lachlan Stuart, there was the initial publicity as reporters from the Sunday Express plus Constance Whyte and Maurice Burton who engaged Stuart during their investigations. However, again, this Loch Ness Monster photographer did not shirk the limelight thereafter as he appeared seven years later on the BBC TV documentary "Legend of the Loch" in 1958 to be interviewed for national broadcast. Details of that interview can be found here.

When Peter MacNab's photograph hit the headlines in 1958, it became a classic, possibly only outdone by the Surgeon's Photo. Did MacNab do a Wilson and duck the attention of the media once the initial hubbub was over? Not a chance. In the decades ahead, he would readily correspond and help out various Loch Ness researchers such as Mackal, Raynor and Boyd. In fact, nearly 25 years later, he would take part in the making of the "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" episode on the Loch Ness Monster which was televised in 1980.

So we see nothing in the way of distancing themselves from the supposed hoax or any attempt to offer subtle suggestions that what they photographed was perhaps not a Nessie. The psychology of these so called hoaxers is running counter to the one test case we have.

But what about Frank Searle and Anthony Shiels you may ask? Did they not hoax photographs but continue to defend them to the hilt? Does this not nullify any argument here about hoaxers distancing themselves from their work?

I would suggest the answer to that is "No". The difference between Searle and Shiels and the other grouping is that these two were serial hoaxers whilst the other alleged hoaxers were "one shot" perpetrators.

If you are a serial hoaxer, you do not cast doubt upon your own work because after one picture is out in the public domain, the seed for the next one is already planted. If you distance yourself from one, you have to distance yourself from the rest and this is counter-productive to your lifestyle. This group has to be treated differently to the others in terms of modus operandi.

(As an aside, I presume the charge of hoaxing against Shiels is sustainable. He produced at least four monster photographs which put him in the serial hoaxer class. The main charge against him is a taped interview of him discussing how to fake a monster picture. I have not yet critiqued this accusation and even then may find nothing to dispute the hoax label. So until then, I side with the current view on him.)

In summary, the scenario of the "single hit" hoaxer based on Kenneth Wilson suggests an underestimation of the media attention and an attempt to walk away from the story without confessing outright. The high such a hoaxer gets from this adventure is short lived and further intrusions into normal life tend to be unwelcome as one is obliged to repeat at length a lie. Gray, Stuart and MacNab displayed no such behaviour which suggests they may have actually been telling the truth.

PREVIOUS POSTS:
A Look At Some Nessie Books