George Edwards Confesses

As reported in the Inverness Courier, George Edwards finally admits he faked his photograph and is proud of it because it generated interest in the Loch Ness Monster and hence the area. This story received worldwide attention in early August 2012 but Steve Feltham broke the news on the 18th August that the object in the picture was most likely a 1.9m fiberglass prop used in a documentary some years back. George also confesses in a Wall Street Journal article (though insists a picture he took in 1986 is not a hoax).

The news has apparently angered Kevin Carlyon, Nessie's self-proclaimed white witch protector, who has promised to send a "psychic torpedo" in Edwards' direction on Halloween!

What prompted Mr. Edwards to confess is not clear and the article does not quote him saying he used the prop, but this must surely be the most likely explanation. George takes "the end justifies the means" approach in not initially admitting to the true nature of the picture. The reaction to that approach has been mixed but as far as I am concerned it would be short term positive gain versus long term negative gain where "gain" here is of the monetary kind.

Now these photographs are normally the bane of Nessie proponents as they can often be difficult to distinguish from a real monster picture. However, there is an important and unexpected slant to this which needs some attention. Dick Raynor is one of the recognised analysts of the Loch Ness phenomenon who has been involved with the mystery for over forty years. His various critiques of monster films and photographs throughout the years have been well received by those sceptical of any large creatures in Loch Ness.

Now since Dick does not generally miss an opportunity to point out what he thinks are problems with my analysis and those of others, I am sure he won't mind his own coming under the spotlight.

The problem here was his initial analysis of the picture which you can find at his website. Before the fibreglass hump revelation, he conducted an experiment with a 25cm plastic bottle at the location he thought was close to the Edwards picture. He placed the bottle in the water and attempted a size comparison by overlaying the Edwards photo and lining up the contours of the background hills. You can see the results half way down his webpage. Based on this, he estimated the object in the water to be 0.6m long or about 23 inches. The conclusion of Dick's analysis was that the object was an un-monster like length of about 20 inches and hence was dubious.

So, as usual, sceptics would congratulate Dick on his analysis, dump the picture and move on to the next target. That was until Steve Feltham turned up.

When the truth about the fibreglass prop came out, a contour comparison with that object showed it to be about 1.2 metres out of the water. This can be seen just below the bottle experiment on Dick's own webpage where he overlays the Edwards' object with a picture of Adrian Shine standing beside the prop. This means Dick was out by 100% in his estimate. The object was twice as large as he estimated and the combined image was an optical illusion, the hump though closer is actually larger and further away (In fact, since the bottle is further away than the overlaid hump, bringing it closer to the spot where the hump is, makes it slightly larger, increasing the error).

This issue is briefly mentioned on his webpage, but in a series of postings to cryptozoology.com, Dick admits his error in more detail and eventually figures out he got his camera height wrong:

"I finally figured out where I had gone wrong - I missed an upright handrail stanchion on the fly bridge of NH4. If that is the object in the bottom left, GE simply snuck a photo under the handrail while the crew were filming."

So what is Dick saying here? Did he figure out how to get the bottle-hump scaling right or something else? It is not clear but the implication of this is that the difference between standing somewhere different on the same boat at the same distance to the same object can result in a doubling of the estimate! Either way, it does not matter, the initial numbers were wrong.

So, the main point is this, if Steve Feltham had not stepped forward, many would have assumed that Dick's analysis was spot on because it involved maths and hard numbers.  The truth was nearer to four feet than 23 inches which is a more monster like length. It does not matter that the picture was proven to be a hoax on other grounds, a picture cannot be proven to be a hoax for the wrong reasons.

This was a possibly unique opportunity to test the practise against the theory since we have the actual object used. Something important has come out of this sorry episode - a demonstration of the difficulty in assessing alleged photographs of the monster and the lack of peer review.

This raises the question of how accurate are other sceptical analyses of monster evidence? For example, Dick and others attempted to reproduce the Lachlan Stuart photograph from 1951 on another webpage. The problem now is whether this is as accurate as made out? Like the bottle and hump overlay, are the Stuart objects actually bigger in size and subsequently further out in the water where it may be too deep to put hay bales? The reproduced overlay may again be an illusion. Indeed, Lachlan Stuart, being on land, could have taken his picture from a far more diverse range of camera heights than on a boat. Does this mean the possibility of error in estimation is significantly more?

In fact, Lachlan Stuart stated that the three humps were 5 feet across at the waterline and 2, 4 and 3 feet high from left to right.  Using the person in Dick's picture as a scale, it would appear that, like the Edwards hump, the superimposed Stuart humps are half the size of the original account. In other words, 100% out again. If the Stuart picture is overlaid and resized to Stuart's dimensions, the overlay no longer works.

One thing seems clear, just lining up the contours of distant hills on each picture is not enough when it comes to making judgements about close up objects.  I pointed this out in my own reply to this "hay bale" reconstruction back in January. Because the distant hill contours hardly change as one moves along the shore, there is an unscientific temptation to just cherry-pick the best spot to bolster one's own theory. This episode with the George Edwards pictures now proves the folly of presenting just one picture at one location.

All scientific experiments where possible carry error ranges. This reflects the fact that making measurements is not a perfect procedure. In this case, it is not enough to assume one camera position, a range is required to highlight the close range uncertainties in the experiment. This, of course, also applies to myself and other proponents of the Loch Ness Monster when we also carry out our pro-Nessie investigations. I am sure I could find similar examples in that regard.

So what is the conclusion of all this? Read the opinions and analyses of both proponents and opponents of the Loch Ness Monster and form your own opinion, readers. None of us are free from errors - no matter what tools we claim to use.

(NOTE: As part of any discussion in the comments section, I may include emails received privately).

From the Inverness Courier:

LOCH Ness cruise boat operator George Edwards has admitted the photo of Nessie he took last year is a fake – and he is proud of it.

Mr Edwards, of Loch Ness Cruises at Drumnadrochit, claimed in August 2012 that he took the picture – which attracted worldwide attention – near Urquhart Castle.

He said at the time: "I did not want to mention my sighting until I was sure that I had not photographed a log or something inanimate in the water in the water. I have friends in the USA who have friends in the military.

"They had my photo analysed and they have no doubt that I photographed an animate object in the water.

"I was really excited as I am sure that some strange creatures are lurking in the depths of Loch Ness."

Mr Edwards has now admitted the picture was a fake and was proud to be following in the tradition of the famous "Surgeon's Photograph" of 1934, supposedly showing the monster's head and neck, which was later proved to be a hoax.

"So as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly valid," he said. "It's just a bit of fun.

"I am quite happy to join the rogues' gallery along with the surgeon who produced the best known picture image of the monster in the world.

"How do you think Loch Ness would have fared over the years without that picture? I have no guilty feelings at all about what I have done."

It is understood Mr Edwards may have used a Nessie fibreglass hump which had previously been used in a National Geographic documentary to create his fake photo.

Yesterday Willie Cameron, of the Clansman Hotel agreed with Mr Edwards that the fake pictures would help boost the Nessie story rather than damage it.

"It brings the story back to the limelight," he said. "It will probably create another wave of interest in Loch Ness which is required to keep the story going.

"It's been running now for about 80 years and I think most people knew George's photos were fake, just like the majority of photographs of the monster."

However, Steve Feltham, who has hunted the monster from Dores beach since 1991, said the admission harmed Mr Edwards' credibility and the Loch Ness Monster brand.

"It does the subject no good and damages his own reputation," he said. "When you read things like this in the papers, people will think it's all just a fairytale.

"But if you read the reports and books you're more likely to think that something is there to be explained. He's supposed to be taking people out on tours but he's nothing more than a faker and a liar."

In 1989, Mr Edwards said he found "Nessie's Lair" after his boat recorded a depth of 812 feet in the loch near Urquhart Castle.

The trench was then named Edwards Deep.

Mr Edwards was criticised last year by the former boss of the Loch Ness centre Tony Harmsworth who said he should not have to resort to "fakery" to keep his customers entertained.

Mr Harmsworth, who lives in Drumnadrochit, subsequently resigned from the Drumnadrochit Chamber of Commerce after fellow members failed to back him.

From the Wall Street Journal:

DRUMNADROCHIT, Scotland—Steve Feltham was surveying the shores of the Loch Ness last summer when his cellphone rang, breaking his concentration. A local reporter was calling to say she had just received a photo of the Loch Ness Monster—its arched hump protruding from the waters—and she wanted to run it by him before sending it to print.

Mr. Feltham, a full-time monster hunter for 22 years, studied the photo.

"It is the best photograph I think I have ever seen," he told the journalist at the Inverness Courier from his home, a van parked on the pebbled shores of Loch Ness.

Many in Drumnadrochit, a village in northern Scotland, and throughout Britain, hailed the photo taken by George Edwards, a tour guide, as one of the most convincing monster pictures ever taken. It is the centerpiece of his tour company which operates out of Nessieland, a Loch Ness tourism center. He sells postcards of his photos to passengers for 50 pence (80 cents) apiece.

Monster hunter Steve Feltham, on Loch Ness, retracted his backing of a photo of Nessie, igniting a controversy.

 

But Mr. Feltham—who says a perfect day involves staring at the loch from dawn to dusk in search of the monster—now says his endorsement was a grave error. He says he soon realized the photo was actually of a 6-foot-long fiberglass hump used as a prop in a documentary filmed on Mr. Edwards's boat in 2011.

Other local experts agreed. Adrian Shine, a Nessie researcher and designer of the Loch Ness Center and Exhibition, and Dick Raynor, another researcher, say the photo is so obviously fake that it's an insult to visitors.

Mr. Edwards's photo has become the centerpiece of a fierce debate ripping through Drumnadrochit. It has exposed a bitter truth: Some key players in the Nessie industry don't believe the Loch Ness Monster exists.

One Monday afternoon recently, Mr. Edwards lashed out at his critics to passengers on his tour boat. Nothing irritates him more than the fact that some of his customers have just walked over from the Loch Ness Center and Exhibition, which sits 300 yards from Nessieland, where they are told the monster may not be real.

Incredulous, Mr. Edwards in May escalated his complaint with the town's fathers. "I carry thousands of tourists on Nessie Hunter every year and I am concerned when passengers tell me that after they have visited the self-proclaimed Official Loch Ness Exhibition and Center they come out feeling disappointed after [being] told that Nessie is a myth or a figment of the imagination." 

Mr. Edwards wrote in a letter to the Drumnadrochit Chamber of Commerce. "In recent years we have seen a decline in tourism across Scotland and maybe it is time for Mr. Shine to put up or shut up," he said in the letter.

Tony Harmsworth, another Nessie tour guide and editor of the chamber's website, in a written response accused Mr. Edwards of treating tourists like gullible fools and sending them away with "their heads full of garbage." Says Mr. Shine: "I would concur with that. That is exactly what he [Mr. Edwards] does and what he now admits of doing. He says people like this."

The Chamber of Commerce demanded Mr. Harmsworth remove his rebuttal to Mr. Edwards from the website, along with any other critical comments about Mr. Edwards. Disgusted members of the Chamber of Commerce, including the Loch Ness Center and Exhibition, have resigned in protest. Robert Cockburn, the Chamber chairman, says the group is officially neutral on Nessie's existence, and he is ambivalent on the Loch Ness Center's resignation.

Mr. Harmsworth argues that monsters cannot possibly live in Loch Ness. "Can anyone trust what the chamber is doing anymore?" he said. "To just feed people fake pictures because that's what you think they want is not really the way forward for tourism in the Highlands of Scotland."

 

Another battle front is the competing tourist centers, Nessieland and the Loch Ness Center. Their tours start similarly, with visitors walking through a dark, tunnellike entrance. But at Nessieland, tourists are regaled with tales of monster sightings and secret passages in the loch where Nessie may be lurking; the Loch Ness Center casts the monster as a myth. When it talks about supposed sightings of the monster since 1933, it plays circus music in the background.

The two tourist centers have a history of not getting along. In June, police cautioned and charged the owner of Nessieland, Donald Skinner, for stealing a sign outside the Loch Ness Center. He said he "took custodianship" of the sign because it was blocking one of his own. 

Mr. Edwards, who was laid off from his job as an oil worker in the 1980s, says his critics are trying to destroy Loch Ness, which depends heavily on tourism. "Can you imagine if Mr. Shine or Mr. Raynor came across to America and walked into Disneyland and told all the children there's no such thing as Mickey Mouse—don't be taken in by all this rubbish. That's what they're doing here." 

Mr. Shine says tourists would rather know the truth than be misled. He says Mr. Edwards asked whether he could run his tours out of the Loch Ness Center last summer, but that the center said no.

The Loch Ness monster has stirred debate for nearly 1,500 years. The first sighting may have occurred in 565 A.D., but interest in Nessie was revived in 1933 when a couple told the local newspaper that while driving, one of them spotted a creature rolling and tumbling in the roughly 23-mile loch. The creature then vanished into the foam. Loch Ness is 800 feet deep at its deepest.

Many were skeptical, but a year later, Col. Robert Wilson, a British surgeon, came forward with a photo he said showed the monster rising from the loch. Sixty years later, Christian Spurling, who made the model used in the photograph confessed that the photo was actually of a toy submarine with a sea-serpent head.

Mr. Edwards says he has no doubt that there are some mysterious creatures in the Loch Ness, including Nessie.

But he also has a confession. Throughout the fracas over his photo, he insisted to the local media it was real. He initially declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal. But he has relented, recently telling a boat full of passengers that he manufactured the shot to win attention for Nessie and prove how easy it is to fake photos.

However, he said another photo he took of Nessie—from summers ago—is for real:

"I've taken photographs over the years. One in particular, on the 6th of June, 1986, is an absolutely genuine photograph."

Henry Bauer on Abominable Science!

Veteran Nessie researcher, Henry Bauer, has entered the fray in critiquing Loxton and Prothero's "Abominable Science!". Last month, I pointed out its deficiencies from a Nessie point of view, but Henry has found even more holes in this Swiss cheese of a chapter.

He hopes to review the whole book in due time, but click on this link to get his critique of their Loch Ness Monster chapter.

An Interesting Photograph from 1938

Back in May of this year, I came across an auction for a picture which was described as a photograph taken at Loch Ness in 1938. The seller was actually not quite sure if it was but thought it the most likely place. The item sold for £26.00 and that was the end of that. However, my curiosity was piqued and I took a closer look at the JPEG image that I grabbed from the eBay website.

The eBay page is above but the actual image is shown below. Now this is the type of Loch Ness picture that would have been unlikely to make it into a newspaper of its time. After the excitement of the Surgeon's photograph four years previously, the bar had been set pretty high.

Nevertheless, was it taken at Loch Ness and what could it be? Using Google's ever useful StreetView, it came as no surprise that the picture had been taken beside Urquhart Castle at the place where the highest proportion of sightings have been recorded. Using the background hill contours as a guide, a rough location was determined.

Superimposing the two pictures confirms the location and increasing the transparency of the 1938 photograph gives an idea of the scale of the object which was photographed.

If you compare the size of the object (or area of water) with the boats to the left, it covers a fairly large distance in the horizontal. Perhaps 200 to 300 feet in extent using the boats as a guide. Of course, the Loch Ness Monster is not 200 feet long, but a large object could cause a similar water disturbance. Or perhaps it is just a plain old wind slick or windrow which is a common sight on the loch?

By way of cross reference, I wondered if there was a reported sighting in the vicinity of Castle Urquhart in 1938. A perusal of the archives brought up one possible candidate which was reported in the Scotsman newspaper for the 7th of September. This is reproduced below.

The photograph fits the article to some degree. This was a two hump sighting which was described as lower in the water than a previous sighting by a tug crew earlier that Summer. Certainly, if there is anything in this photograph, it would be low in the water. Also, the stated distance of three quarters of a mile is agreeable with our superimposed photograph. Unfortunately, such a distance is not commensurate with detailed photography.

However, I am not that convinced that this is a windrow and more that this is a genuine water disturbance. It does not appear to be a boat wake as the other arm of the bow wave is not visible. A higher resolution scan of the picture would help pick out details which are merely hinted at in this low-res image. For example, there does appear to be something like water being thrown up to the far left of the disturbance. 

So, with this in mind, I will ask the original eBay seller to pass this article onto the purchaser in the hope that a higher resolution picture will be available for further examination. Until then, the picture enters the archive of alleged pictures of the Loch Ness Monster after being hidden from view for 77 years!

Logs and Nessie

I have posted on logs being misidentified as Nessie before, but a recent video from a Welsh river was the best Nessie-like log I have seen in some time. This log steadily "swam" past the observers as the river currents paraded it in front of them. If it had just been a snapshot, some may have found it curious, but after viewing the video clip, it is clearly a log. The video itself can currently be viewed here.

However, this prompted me to write a provisional formula for determining the "reliability" of a sighting. That equation is:

R = reliability rating of the event
W = witness experience and trustworthiness
t = time spent observing the object
o = obscuration factor
d = distance from object

The equation will be improved in several ways but it gets across the idea of what goes into a credible  sighting. The experience of a witness concerns the observational skills of the witness. This can be influenced by several factors such as age, familiarity with water based objects and objectivity. There is also trustworthiness which is basically the hoaxer factor. Somebody such as Frank Searle would bring that number and hence the whole value close to zero.

Clearly, the longer a witness spends observing the object, the greater chance that misidentification can be eliminated. In contrast, the further away the object, the more chance of misidentification. The obscuration factor denotes the viewing conditions. Was it misty, were there trees hindering the view and so on?

But applying this formula to this Welsh "Nessie" would be pointless as we all know it is a branch. So, ultimately, a degree of human judgement is still required.

Nessie the Plesio-Turtle

Animal Planet re-ran the 2009 documentary "The Loch Ness Monster Revealed" recently as part of their "Monster Week". So while it is fresh in my mind, I'll review it here.

The plot is familiar, a group of experts in one or more fields came to Loch Ness in an attempt to shed some light on the 80 year old mystery. They go over the past, they do some exploratory work in the present and they predict what it might be if anyone in the future catches it.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The thrust of this documentary was to attempt identification with a few experiments thrown in. Three experts in marine science and paleontology were brought with Philippe Cousteau (grandson of Jacques) in order to provide some answers while Adrian Shine provided local support and expertise.

SIGHTINGS

The investigation began with what the Loch Ness Monster could look like based on eyewitness, film and video evidence. One could see them leafing through old Loch Ness Investigation Bureau reports from the 1960s. This is no easy task in general since the data set is corrupted by a subset of hoaxes and misidentifications. There is also a smaller degree of error in what people describe when they see the real Nessie.

Some of the old sceptical ground was covered as the Surgeon's Photo hoax was explained while the weak "bow wave" argument was trotted out for the MacNab photograph. To that end, some waves from passing boats were filmed and suitably zoomed in to make them look bigger (though I doubt anyone would be fooled by them).

Some vehicles of misidentification were also discussed such as the underwater currents generated when the thermoclines tilts and recovers. Then we had the ducks, logs, swans, logs and seals. Did I say logs twice? Well, you get the picture.

The Spicers' famous sighting was also discussed near the spot it happened and was discussed in a bit of a woolly manner I thought. The idea that the Spicers' long neck feature set a precedent for future Nessie stories is not tenable. It was perhaps the seventh report that made it into the newspapers. However, less than 20% of all reported sightings are head-neck, which suggests that being one of seven sightings is not statistcally significant. The more likely stance is that this is how the creature was always going to be reported.

They also mentioned the so called "King Kong" effect, of which much was made of. I covered this canard in a previous article.

CANDIDATES

Nevertheless, they came to the conclusion that a morphology not unlike our traditional plesiosaur was the best line of enquiry. So, that most familiar of Nessie candidates was examined along with some nice CGI of plesiosaur shaped Nessies swimming in a murky Loch Ness. You can always tell a Nessie programme is populist when it trots out the plesiosaur!

The speculation revolved around whether some plesiosaurs survived the great Cretaceous extinction and what form they could take today after over 65 million years of evolution. There was plenty of scope there for possible paths of modifications. But for me, plesiosaurs today could look very unlike their well known predecessors. In fact, they could bear little resemblance to their forebears.

But having decided plesiosaurs in this day and age were unlikely based on the the fossil record, they moved on. Other animals were briefly discussed but the discussion soon moved onto the modified sea-turtle theory. This basically was a sea going turtle with the shell removed, its neck extended and other additions such as blubber for the coldness of the loch and even some parthenogenesis to cope with low population numbers (it seems a Komodo Dragon performed parthenogenesis without male contact in a zoo recently).

This all seemed logical to a certain extent and I always wondered whether reptiles evolved adaptions to cope with the current ice age we are in which has so far lasted about 2.6 million years. In situations like that, your typical reptile species either dies, moves to warmer climes or adapts to the cold which exists at the fringes of the advancing and receding ice caps. Such adaptions could prove useful in the relatively warmer waters of Loch Ness.

FOOD

The matter of food stocks was addressed and attempts were made to measure the levels of plankton in the loch. Here we had a chance to see Philippe Cousteau take to the loch depths and comment on how it was like swimming in tea ... or whisky. Their estimate came out at 200 tonnes which they translated as 20 tonnes of fish and hence 2 tonnes of higher predator (monster). That doesn't seem a lot but the estimates were lowballed in my opinion.

The 20 tonnes of fish is consistent with the Loch Ness Project's estimate of 17-24 tonnes of pelagic fish but neither includes the migratory fish including salmon, trout and eels. The 10 to 1 ratio between fish and their predators (i.e. Nessie) looks more suitable for warm blooded creatures. What would a cold blooded plesio-turtle population require? How active could they be? Do they hibernate to conserve energy intake? Do they have other food sources? Crocodiles can drop to a ratio of nearly 1:1 in their domains. As you can see, not all the values in the equation were explored.

In that light, the actual Nessie tonnage could easily rise above this meagre two tonne estimate. No one, in my opinion, can be dogmatic on these numbers ... but that doesn't stop us trying!

ENTRY AND EXIT

Finally, the issue of how the monster got into the loch was explored. As said above, Scotland was in the grip of a gigantic ice sheet which temporarily receded over 10,000 years allowing the Ness valley to fill with water and let animal life come back in.

How and when a Nessie sized creature got in is no mystery. It would have swam through the River Ness to the new loch when feeding opportunities consistently presented themselves. What is not so clear is this idea of Nessie getting "land-locked" as the land rose when the icesheets melted. I don't think Nessie was and is in any sense land-locked. Doubtless, the changes to the river made with the construction of the Caledonian Canal presented challenges, but that is it.

In an experiment that looked more fun that serious investigation, our team's boat tried to get over what looked like Telford's Weir in an attempt to simulate Nessie heading into Loch Ness. They failed miserably but given the fact that Nessie goes onto land for short periods, I would reckon it would be less of a challenge to her. How often the Loch Ness Monster actually attempts this, I have no idea.

All in all, a documentary that was more entertaining that informative. Could Nessie be a plesiosaur shaped turtle? I personally doubt it, just because I would expect it to be seen more often. Put a leatherback turtle in Loch Ness and see how good it is at hiding. I am not saying you or me personally would find it from a standing start, but I am sure adequate pictures would begin to turn up in the days and weeks ahead (assuming it survives in the loch). The Loch Ness Monster is a primary water breather, so excursions to the surface are rare to say the least.

The Classic Authors on the Classic Pictures

In the light of recent sceptical remarks about gullible and naive Loch Ness Monster proponents, I wondered what the classic books actually said on these well known pictures. So, I dug out what books I had on the pictures and drew up a matrix of opinion.

The authors I was interested in were Rupert Gould, Constance Whyte, Tim Dinsdale, Ted Holiday, Nicholas Witchell and Roy Mackal. What did they make of the Gray, Wilson, Adams, Stuart, MacNab, Cockerell, O'Connor, Dinsdale, Rines and Shiels photos? The answer was not uniform as one would expect.

The books examined were:

Gould, The Loch Ness Monster and Others (1934)

Whyte, More Than a Legend (1957)

Dinsdale, Loch Ness Monster (1961 and 1982 editions)

Holiday, Great Orm of Loch Ness (1968)

Holiday, The Dragon and the Disc (1973)

Witchell, The Loch Ness Story (1974 and 1989 editions)

Mackal, The Monsters of Loch Ness (1976)

The photographs in question are:

Hugh Gray (1933)

Kenneth Wilson (1934)

F.C. Adams (1934)

Lachlan Stuart (1951)

Peter MacNab (1955)

Hugh Cockerell (1958)

Tim Dinsdale (1960)

Peter O'Connor (1960)

Robert Rines Flipper (1972) ("RINES 72")

Rober Rines Body (1975) ("RINES 75 B")

Rober Rines Head (1975) ("RINES 75 H")

Anthony Shiels (1977)

Some pictures and films are not included but it always strikes me how thin photographs and film are on the ground. No photographs between 1935 and 1950 and very little between 1961 and 1971 despite the LNI's attempts. Put it another way, where were all the so called hoaxers? One simple rule should apply, the number of hoaxed Nessie pictures should be proportional to media interest. I don't actually see proof of that statement in the overall record.

I added the author's judgement on each photo/film designated by:

Y (green) = Accept

N (red) = Reject

I (orange) = Neutral

NA (yellow) = Not Applicable

NC (blue) = No Comment (photo not mentioned)

The "NA" applies to photographs published after the book in question. Sometimes the author's opinion seems ambiguous in that they offer a sceptical or proponent interpretation in which case the inconclusive or neutral category is assigned. The table is produced below and you should click on it to enlarge it for closer detail. There may be some mistakes in the table, point out any you think are there. These are judgements based on the written evidence, authors may well have altered their opinions later, confirmation with sources would be appreciated.

The results are not too unexpected, though some things should be highlighted. Firstly, the F.C.Adams picture is not so much rejected as ignored. Only Mackal accepts it while Witchell merely calls it an unidentified object in Loch Ness which to me is a neutral statement. The rest say nothing which may mean nothing but I suspect silence suggests the preconception of a very long neck is being mapped onto this picture and hence leading to a quite passing on.

Holiday is the most non-committal author in his two books as only four out of the nine he could comment on actually get a mention. I wondered if omission is as good as rejection here? The Adams and Rines flipper pictures would not have fitted in with his Tulliomonstrum invertebrate! I suspect where the "NC" appears elsewhere, there could well have been more personal bias than just no room to mention it in the given book, but that is very much for each reader's opinion.

Nobody backs the O'Connor picture, even Dinsdale drops it in later editions after giving it the nod in his first edition. Holiday gives it no mention although looking quite Tullimonstrum like! The Dinsdale film is the only one to get 100% green positives.

Comparisons between first and later editions tells us something about the given author's journey. Dinsdale grew cold on the Gray, Wilson and O'Connor pictures but "promotes" the Stuart picture along the way. Interestingly, Dinsdale only explicitly rejects the 1975 "gargoyle" head picture. One wonders where Dinsdale would have stood if he was alive today? The sceptics would doubtless have him over in their camp, but I would not be so quick to judge the man. I don't doubt he would have dropped the support for the Shiels pictures. What he would have done with Frere's pronouncement on the Stuart picture, I don't know.

Witchell between 1974 and 1989 has definitely grown more negative about the evidence. Three pictures are downgraded and the 1975 Rines pictures are rejected. Though these were not mentioned in the 1974 book, they were promoted as positive evidence in the 1975 edition. Witchell seems to have completed his journey over to the "other side" in later years.

Roy Mackal is still with us and I would like to know how he would assess his 1976 list today. The one person that interests me most would be Ted Holiday. Since he believed in a paranormal Loch Ness Monster, how would that have influenced his assessment? He and Dinsdale had about seven sightings between them and that has an effect on assessment. If you do not think there is a large creature in Loch Ness, then the whole line is red. But I don't think that Holiday and Dinsdale would run the red line right through.

One thing seems for sure, I doubt many pictures would be promoted as opposed to downgraded today.

Abominable Science! and the Loch Ness Monster

(This review also appears on the Amazon website)

A book has been recently written by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero that seems to have to caused a bit of a stir amongst the skeptics. That book is called "Abominable Science!" and one reviewer has gone so far as to describe it as a "groundbreaking new book on the subject of cryptozoology". Groundbreaking? Does that mean it breaks new ground on the subject of my favourite cryptid, Nessie? Only one way to find out and that was to buy it (at the cheapest possible price, of course).

Being numbered at 411 pages, it certainly carried weight gravitationally. Would it carry weight in the matter of cryptid critique? Now, I am only reviewing the specific chapter on the Loch Ness Monster as well as the general chapters on the science and culture of cryptozoology. The latter two would give an idea of the authors' generic approach to the Loch Ness Monster.

I will not presume to judge them on the Sasquatch, Yeti, Sea Serpents or Mokele-Mbembe sections. The simple reason being I would not be able to tell how weighty their specific arguments would be. I may find these chapters entertaining, prosaical and historically informative, but that is not the main point ... how accurate are the arguments against the cryptid in question?

But onto the Loch Ness Monster which occupies about 67 pages including notes. Now I have been interested in the Loch Ness Monster for nearly forty years and continue to believe there is a mystery to be solved in the loch. 

The question for me is where this mystery finds its true place between the overly simplistic view of excited tourists seeing boat wakes and the fantastical view of a resident colony of dinosaurs? Would this book prove to be ground breaking and offer new insights? The answer is a definite no.

Loxton and Prothero play it safe by taking refuge in the over hyped theory of misidentification and hoax. Is there anything that could be called original and new in this chapter? Somewhat, but I will come back to that. 

But let us get over with the formalities first. Yes, we know there have been hoaxes. Yes, we know people can mistake everyday objects for monsters. And, yes, we know, no one has yet produced a specimen, dead or alive. Does that kill the story? Of course not.

Indeed, it would have been better if they just stuck to their empirical mantra "show us the body", moved on and left the rest of us to get on with it. The problem here is that they won't and we end up with an inadequate explanation for what over a thousand people have claimed to have seen in the last 80 years and beyond.

So, we know about the fake Surgeon's Photograph, Marmaduke Wetherell's Hippo tracks, the 1975 underwater tree stump  and the other spurious inventions of men. These aside, the authors began to dig a hole for themselves in terms of accuracy.

They first attempt to prove that any timeline of evidence before Nessie appeared in 1933 is fabrication. The matter of the dreaded water horse is rejected as irrelevant to Loch Ness and "none of them is indigenous to Loch Ness" anyway. This is just plain wrong. The imagery and folklore attached to those creatures is as much a cultural expression compared to the present day when we see all manner of strange representations of Nessie in film and other media. Do we doubt people claim to see things in Loch Ness just because a horror film depicts a green, seventy foot, man eating Nessie? Neither should it be the case with the Kelpie cultural representations two hundred years before.

The authors' claim that no water horse was "indigenous to Loch Ness" is also wrong. There are multiple references to such a beast in the old literature. In fact, there is even a reference to such a story from 1852 a mere two pages on in their own chapter! An epic fail on the proof reading front?

Furthermore, a monster hoax is mentioned from 1868, but it doesn't seem to occur to the author that a monster hoax in 1868 may presuppose a monster tradition in the loch pre-dating 1868. A major omission is also made at this point as this old article says that a "huge fish" attested to by only the "most credulous natives" was occasionally seen in the loch. What was this "huge fish" and why do the authors omit this reference? Note if it was only a sturgeon, I doubt anyone would be dismissing these dumb natives! I find this omission strange to say the least.

The author makes a further error when he quotes Rupert T. Gould's 1934 book "The Loch Ness Monster and others". Gould refers to a letter from the Duke of Portland talking about stories of a "horrible great beast" back in 1895. The authors make mileage out of Gould when they quote him as saying these "stories are of no great value as evidence". Evidently, this is meant to demonstrate the irrelevance of these old reports. Yet, in an astonishing act of omission, Loxton and Prothero do not quote what Gould then says:

"But the same cannot be said of a statement which I recently received from Mr. F. Fraser"

Gould then goes on to describe Mr. Fraser's sighting from 1904 and others from before 1933 also gain Gould's attention. It was clear to me that Gould's disinterest was towards second hand accounts as opposed to those with which he could interview the witness face to face. Basically, Gould has been misquoted in this tactic of promoting the weak evidence and ignoring the strong.

And then we come to the story of St. Columba and his monster encounter. Keen to get rid of this most ancient of Loch Ness tales,  the author basically rubbishes it as religious propaganda. I don't doubt the story is embellished, but Loxton and Prothero completely fail to explain why the story happened in of all places, Loch Ness. Coincidence? Some people may jump here and say it didn't happen in Loch Ness but in the River Ness. That's okay. Adamnan calls Loch Ness "the Lake of the River Ness". It was all the same river complex as far as he was concerned.

Moving into the Nessie "era", it came as no surprise that old Alex Campbell comes in for a bit of a bashing. Campbell reported the first Nessie story involving the Mackays around March 1933. He is accused of hyping the story to further his monster agenda. Furthermore, the authors try to palm the whole thing off as two seals. I address these weak arguments in this article.

Campbell is further accused of embellishing a reported sighting from 1930 involving three fishermen. However, Campbell is again vindicated by Gould who interviewed the witnesses who spoke of two or three shallow humps which were not seals! But since the authors footnote Gould's book, surely they would have known this?

Is there anything novel in this chapter? There is one thing. It is the suggestion that the famous Spicers land sighting was a rehash of a scene from King Kong involving a Diplodocus chasing some men. Loxton and Prothero are somewhat ambiguous in deciding whether George Spicer lied about the whole thing or in some strange way "filtered" the scene through a view of an ordinary animal. How exactly does one do that (and how did he convince his wife to lie?).

Loxton begins this King Kong theory with a very unscientific "I believe .." which suggests the evidence for his stance is not going to be strong and this is the case. Firstly, he selects a still from the Diplodocus scene that most resembles the Spicer drawing and redraws it accordingly. This makes one wonder what is wrong with the other stills? The answer is they do not support his theory.





Loxton then attempts to tick off a comparison checklist:

Both had long neck? Check.
Both had no feet visible? Check.
Both had tail curved round side of body? Check.
Both had victim in mouth? Check.

On closer examination, only a sycophantic skeptic would swallow this argument whole. The Spicer neck writhes and undulates, the Diplodocus one is rather stiff. Yes, both feet are not visible, but why is this "a striking detail"? And where exactly does a Diplodocus' feet begin?

The tail is plainly seen not to curve elsewhere in the film and George Spicer cannot ultimately decide whether there was anything in a mouth or not. A bit of a mixed bag and not very convincing.

Both Spicer and Gould had seen the Kong film, and various Nessie sceptics have flagged this film as an important influence in the perception of the Loch Ness Monster. Though one can understand how the dinosaurs in "King Kong" would make people think of the Loch Ness Monster, it is not clear how that translates to people allegedly mistaking birds for plesiosaurs on Loch Ness.

Indeed, a look at the newspapers of the time does not exactly strongly link the two in the minds of the local, Scottish and British public. For starters, the only Kong you will see mentioned at the Highland newspapers archive is Hong Kong!

Widening out, the nationally read Scotsman newspaper only mentions the film nine times to the end of 1934 but a review of the film in October 1933 does say the monsters of Loch Ness would feel quite a home on Skull Island!

The more widely read London Times only mentions "King Kong" eight times in the same period and makes no linkage at all with the Loch Ness Monster. Not exactly compelling evidence.

Exception must also be taken to a loose piece of logic when this quote appears:

"Before Spicer's land sighting there were no long neck reports at all and it was the long neck that was so crucial."

The problem here is a statistical one. There were in fact only two other reported sightings in 1933 before Spicer which were correctly stated as involving no long neck. But only about 10%-20% of sightings are known to involve a long neck which means our two sightings are not statistically significant. You would perhaps need at least 10 sightings on the record before you could attach any meaning to the long neck of the Spicers (note to myself - Ulrich Magin list claims 3 more reports - but not on my photocopies - double check).

Going back to the photographic evidence, the authors seem to be selective in what they say about the first picture of the monster taken by a Hugh Gray in November 1933. The book says there is nothing to see in this picture but omit to mention the fish like head that can be seen to the right. They must surely have known about this as a google for "hugh gray loch ness" reveals an article at the top of page one which discusses this very thing. Or perhaps they only got their Nessie data from books published up to the 1970s? Again, it is what is not said rather than said that is significant here.

Like Alex Campbell, the indirect approach of character assassination is chosen. Gray claimed six sightings and in a piece of flimsy guilt-by-association, Hugh Gray is lumped in with arch-hoaxer Frank Searle. Why? Because Searle also claimed multiple sightings!

So, how often is someone allowed to see Nessie before they are branded a liar? Two, three, four? However, Loxton has not done his homework here. Consulting Dinsdale's book "Loch Ness Monster", it turns out these other sightings were only low grade wakes and bow waves. So, ermm,  why didn't our liar Hugh jazz up his sightings a bit with humps and lomg necks?

You can't win with skeptics. Gray is taken to task for holding onto the film for nearly three weeks. Yet if someone like Lachlan Stuart in 1951 has his picture processed the very same day, they also object with the accusation of fast profiteering.

Speaking of Lachlan Stuart, this three hump photo was always an easy target for skeptics because the creature was in shallow waters. An easy spot to dump some hay bales according to a Richard Frere. Frere alleged that Stuart had owned up everything to him. However, the written record of what Frere said is contradictory and would not make it into a court of law as evidence. As it turns out, critics of the Stuart picture are quite accommodating to this contradiction ... a lot more than they would be to any flaw in an eyewitness account of a creature in Loch Ness!

Regarding the Dinsdale film, the authors repeat the ongoing controversy about whether he only filmed a boat, but conclude the film's mysterious blob cannot tell us for sure whether it was a monster. Rather, Tim's observational skills are called into question because he had two false alarms before then but it is a fact that his own self-judgement rejected them! On this basis, a head-neck sighting by Tim 11 years later is also called into question. But surely after eleven years of subsequent loch observation, Dinsdale would have been one of the most experienced observers of the loch and conversant with almost every deceptive appearance the loch presents?

Furthermore, the ad hominem implication that Dinsdale was not a fit witness because he believed in the supernatural/paranormal does the authors no credit at all. Finally, the alleged issue of the Dinsdale family not publishing the film in order to allegedly hide the "truth" is also now a non-issue. They put the whole film on the web this year.

The authors also look at other ventures such as expeditions and sonar. The 1972 flipper is correctly shown to be "over-enhanced" but I must admit that having seen that picture, I can still see a similar flipper shape in the unenhanced picture! Pareidolia or something else?

Surface watch expeditions such as the LNI from 1962-1972 are discussed and the authors compute that quality evidence should have been obtained. Unfortunately, they again indulge in selective quoting when they quote Roy Mackal in his book "Monsters of Loch Ness" where he says there are about 3,000 recorded sightings in a 30 year period since 1933. However, they then completely ignore what Mackal says on the next page of his book when he reduces that number to 10 valid sightings per year (a number I agree with but for different reasons). Why did they not use this number instead? Because 100 sightings per year bolsters their argument better than 10!

The sonar evidence is dismissed on the basis that false positives from reflection and refraction can mislead. Which leads me to ask whether the authors consider sonar a viable instrument given these limitations? Sadly, the three mysterious sonar hits from Operation Deepscan in 1987 are dismissed as "wobbly scratches". On the other hand, Loch Ness researcher, Adrian Shine, says he cannot explain them (though that does not mean he admits they are monsters).

Misqouting is also evident when the authors state that work by Adrian Shine found only 22 tonnes of fish in the loch. This is not true either, his sonar work only refers to the open pelagic area of the loch which omits the littoral and abyssal regions. That would exclude the bulk of shore hugging fish such as migratory salmon and trout and the deeper fish such as eels.

So the authors plump for the misidentification of everyday objects and hoaxes as the reason we have the Loch Ness Monster. What can we say about this? The first thing that came to mind was the author's own plea for scientific testability in chapter one. When you bring anecdotal evidence to this theory, how is it testable? Or to be more accurate, how is this theory falsifiable? What theoretical eyewitness case would falsify this theory? None it would appear because the theory is a classic example of circular reasoning. To wit, "if it is not misidentification it is a hoax" and "if it is not a hoax it is misidentification". This theory would appear to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot in evaluating eyewitness testimony.

The diversity of descriptions of the creature is not a game changer either. It is readily admitted that a proportion of stories are hoaxes and misidentifications. This is inevitably going to corrupt any attempt to form a picture of what any creature may look like.

Faulty perception and memory are also said to play a big part in what people claim to see in Loch Ness. That is a pretty generalised statement. It would be more accurate to say the reliability of a sighting is proportional to the experience of the observer, the distance to the object, the time spent observing it, the clarity of the scene and the time elapsed since the event in relating it. But this book seems intent on whitewashing every witness with the same brush. We have witnesses who have claimed to have seen the creature close up and we have witnesses experienced with the loch's conditions. But you know why these are not a problem? Because we just shunt them in a non-falsifiable way into the "hoax" section!

The discussion on memory distortion is over-stated and like real-time misperception, is not very well cross-referenced in the book's footnotes (i.e. next to no research has been done to prove any of this in a cryptid context). In fact, shall we say that much of the evidence is ... anecdotal!

Many sightings are recorded within days by the newspapers or by on site investigators.  If you are talking about years and begin to ask detailed questions about time of day or weather conditions then you will get some degree of error. But put it this way, if you saw a ten foot hump rear itself out of the water only 200 metres from you, how burnt into the memory would that be? It is a well established fact that traumatic events are more easily imprinted on the memory. That fact does not seem to be factored into our authors' thinking.

So where does this all leave us? A lot of misquotes, faulty reasoning and weak assumptions.

Do the authors offer anything valid in their defence. They do.

The lack of a live or dead specimen is the strongest argument. I don't necessarily accept their argument about finding bones. If the Loch Ness Monster was a fish like animal, its cartilaginous bones would dissolve in the waters quicker. That is why advocates of the Sturgeon theory are less likely to find a dead specimen at the bottom of the loch. The bottom of the loch is also about 12 square miles in extent and barely explored. Furthermore, the bottom is in a continual state of silting up which perhaps progresses at about a rate of one millimetre per year.

The loch's chemical nature also ensures decomposition progresses at a slower rate allowing scavengers (and other Nessies?) to strip a body before it bloats and becomes buoyant. Nevertheless, it is the strongest argument against large creatures in Loch Ness.

The point about the infrequency of sightings is also explained if the creature is not the plesiosaur type that is so often set up as a straw man argument, but a primary water breather. What that might be is a matter of speculation.

Finally, the matter is raised about Nessie-type fossils or rather the lack of them in the surrounding region. I confess I could not point you to one, primarily because I do not know what species the creature belongs to. If I had an idea of that, I would begin to look at the fossil record. Until then, I do not have the information to make an informed opinion. But the question has started a train of thought.

So, going back to the beginning. Something that lies between boat wakes and a colony of dinosaurs. Like the dark abyss of Loch Ness that lies between surface and bottom, no one seems to want to explore that region much!