Why More Nessie Photos Are Not Taken

Simple really.

The Carcass Problem (Part 1)

Is there a Loch Ness Monster? Does anything swim in the dark depths of that Scottish lake? The proofs offered range from controversial photographs and films to close up sightings by various people of varying observational skills. However, the gold standard that will finally convince the majority is a piece of the monster itself. 

Once you deliver that pound of flesh to the laboratory of science, it is no longer a case of "if" but "what".  To be fair to scientists, that has been pretty much the stance of zoologists since this mystery came to the public's attention 80 years ago. Admittedly though, some have departed from this strict methodology. Dr. Maurice Burton, who worked at the Natural History Museum, was one of the early advocates of some large creature in Loch Ness. As we know, he eventually retracted such views.

There was also Dr. George Zug, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the renowned Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Having examined the 1975 underwater photographs of the Academy of Applied Sciences, he said: "I believe these data indicate the presence of large animals in Loch Ness, but are insufficient to identify them."

But, in general, zoological scientists demand a live specimen or a verifiable sample of a dead animal. From these, morphological and genetic analysis leads to the creature being classified and taking its place in the "official" tree of life. Clearly, the Loch Ness Monster still swims outside of that system, despite premature names such as Nessiteras Rhomboteryx.

Visit a few cryptozoological forums and it won't take long to find skeptics deriding any talk of large, unknown creatures in lakes, forests or mountains which do not provide the body. The Loch Ness Monster is no different and the question has to be asked, why has no physical evidence for this creature turned up after eighty years of searching?

The critics say it is because there is no Loch Ness Monster. This blog takes a different answer to that question. But for part one of this subject, I look back at some claimed carcass finds in decades past. To this end, I recommend Glen Vaudrey's "Sea Serpent Carcasses: Scotland: from the Stronsa Monster to Loch Ness".

Glen's focus is on the various bodies that have washed ashore on Scotland's coasts over centuries past such as the Stronsay Monster of 1808 and the strange Gourock beast of 1942. Most of these have or will turn out to be the ubiquitous Basking Shark carcass, others may live on in mystery.

Firstly, in terms of folklore, we have a few tales of Kelpies being killed or captured. Those captured were press ganged into forced labour and one tale of a dead one describes it as assuming a jelly like form by the morning. None of these tales centre on Loch Ness.

But carcass stories from around Loch Ness take up about a tenth of the book and range from whole bodies to bits and pieces. The oldest one is surprisingly from 1868 when a strange looking body was found washed up at the top end of the loch. I covered this one in a previous article and it may surprise people that such a stunt was pulled  65 years before the Nessie story began in 1933. But monster tales have been around longer than that and evidently some waggish boat crew took advantage of this.

So a monster hoax presumes a monster tradition, and that carried on through to 1933 when Marmaduke Wetherell found his fabricated tracks on the loch side. This is not strictly carcass material, but residual traces of monsters such as tracks or faeces could, in theory, provide DNA material. I mused on this subject in this article.

The most well known Nessie "carcass" is the one which was supposedly found at Loch Ness on April 1st 1972 and was apprehended by the police by the Forth Road Bridge as its owners headed south. An examination proved it to be nothing more than a dead elephant bull seal with some cosmetic alterations. The date also gave away the motives of the perpetrators.

There are other stories you can consult in the book such as the dead conger eels found in 2001, the plesiosaur fossil vertebrae of 2003 and the alleged tooth of 2005. But there are two stories not mentioned in Dale's book which I cover here. 

The first is the alleged carcass spotted by Robert Rines' team in 2001 as they sent a ROV down into the mouth of Urquhart Bay (below). It was found at a depth of about 330 feet. Now it has been speculated that it has a morphological resemblance to the Loch Ness Monster and that is conceded. 

I myself think it is nothing more than tree debris. A lot of logs and branches make their way down from the rivers Enrick and Coiltie into the bay. Moreover, the size of the object is not stated and as far as I know, no attempt has been made to recover it.

The second concerns the object in the postcard below.

Now the story of this foot was certainly doing the rounds in the late 1950s and into the 1960s and was presented as proof of the Loch Ness Monster. Tim Dinsdale recounts looking at it during his second expedition to the loch in July 1960. You can read his fuller account in his book "Loch Ness Monster". However, he found it at a house in Drumnadrochit and the owner allowed him to examine it. The foot was well preserved and measured thirteen by seven inches.

It was apparently found by Urquhart Castle, but Tim was in little doubt it was the foot of an alligator or crocodile. He speculated it may have been from the Gharial species, of which we have a picture below to compare feet. Also note the long snout which Tim speculated could be mistaken for a long necked monster!

But Tim (like myself) speculated this may actually have been a genuine carcass find at Loch Ness. Dinsdale refers to the story related by Rupert T. Gould in his 1934 book, "The Loch Ness Monster and Others" (page 140). Gould tells of a story from a Mrs. J. S. Fraser who was told to watch out for the crocodile by the shore of Dores in 1888. This was apparently due to a South African who had settled in a house between Dores and Foyers and had brought three young crocodiles. When they became too big to look after, he arranged for them to go to a zoo, only for one to escape into the loch.

A different slant on this story is given in a letter by David Murray Rose to The Scotsman newspaper of 30th November 1934. He tells of how three young crocodiles were presented to the Scientific Institute at Inverness by a John Fraser of Charlestown, Carolina in 1827. Two of them died and the other was placed in Loch Ness  at some unspecified time. Rose speculates whether the longevity of crocodiles saw this one survive to that present day.

In fact, one crocodile was definitely seen in Loch Ness in 1938 as this article from the Scotsman shows!

Gould also makes mention of a crocodile like skull that was found in the waters of the River Shiel in Loch Moidart some years before 1933. This is a long way from Loch Ness but interestingly feeds into that other Water Horse body of water - Loch Shiel. Perhaps one loch monster has a carcass to speak of?

Such is the story, but one must wonder how long a crocodile would survive in Loch Ness? The aforementioned foot seems to have been found in 1937 in the waters of Urquhart Bay, according to an article I found from the Aberdeen Press and Journal of May 8th 1958 (below). Could this have been the foot of this escaped crocodile? Perhaps, perhaps not. I leave it to the reader to form their own opinion. It may yet turn out to be nothing more than a trophy foot brought in from a foreign trader.

In conclusion, Loch Ness has its fair share of carcass stories, but all are hoaxes with the possible exception of our crocodile foot. I am not suggesting Nessie is a crocodile, but two independent sources suggest a crocodile may have once inhabited Loch Ness for some period of time. One wonders where this foot is now? It makes for a great story and a nice exhibit for one of the exhibition centres at Loch Ness!

Part two of this article gets down to the nitty gritty question. Why has no Loch Ness Monster carcass been found? There are three possible answers to this, I concentrate on one of them next time.

Shooting Bigfoot

A Sasquatch parenthetic here. The documentary "Shooting Bigfoot" will televise on British channel BBC4 this Monday (24th March) at 9pm.

"Shooting Bigfoot looks into the religiously obsessive, competitive and bitterly divided cult of Bigfoot hunting, as filmmaker Morgan Matthews accompanies three American Bigfoot search parties trying to capture proof of the elusive ape-like creature. Tom Biscardi has been hunting down Bigfoot for 37 years and adopts a military approach with his 'A team' of guys armed with thermal imagers and tasers in increasingly far-out attempts to capture the beast. Unemployed Dallas and Wayne in Ohio use more basic techniques, utilising cans of mackerel and Native American chants to lure the creature in. Only renowned 'master tracker' Rick Dyer is intent on shooting and killing the mysterious beast as he stakes out a stretch of woods in Texas populated by homeless people, many of whom claim to have seen Bigfoot. As truth and fact tip into malarkey, night-time hunts devolve into farcical displays of voodoo and comic stretches of the human imagination. What starts as a humorous look at perception gone off the rails, descends into a dark mystery as things get out of control during a close encounter in the woods."

This should shed some light on the Rick Dyer controversy ... I hope. YouTube trailer is here.

POSTSCRIPT (spoilers warning)

I just watched the program and it is intriguing to say the least. My assumption was that something was shot dead in the footage but that does not appear to be the case. Something was shot at, but no body was filmed. Morgan Matthews claims Dyer went back and did that. However, there is footage in the dark of something humanoid and hairy moving away with its back to the camera as Dyer races after it.

Whilst Matthews holds back, something with a fleeting, hairy face lunges at him and knocks him to the ground and is seen walking away as Matthews is left in a daze. Man in a hairy suit or Sasquatch? Matthews won't say and the film is not detailed enough to decide, it is too dark.

Anyway, puts me in the mood for my planned night hunt at Loch Ness next month, except I won't be packing a rifle!

The Vagaries of Loch Ness Monster Journalism

Paul Cropper sent me an interesting article from 1934 on the Loch Ness Monster as it was covered abroad. Paul himself is focused on more antipodean cryptids such as the Yowie, but he occasionally sends me anything he finds of Nessie interest. So, thanks again, Paul.

The article itself is from the Californian Fresno Bee publication of March 4th 1934 and is a syndicated article from London.

I am not sure if you can read the article (click to enlarge) but the gist of it concerns a monster hunt, the Arthur Grant land sighting and a few more sightings. The man in the kilt is Lord Scone, Member of Parliament and son of the Earl of Mansfield. Since we are told that the Loch Ness Monster was the talk of the Upper Classes and Lord Scone was a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, he was the perfect man to cover as he headed north to seek out the monster for himself.

Though he never caught sight of our famous beastie himself, Lord Scone apparently interviewed upwards of fifty locals and tourists who had claimed to have witnessed the monster in its various aspects. We are told about Alexander Ross, the master of Temple Pier, who saw the monster on three occasions the previous August, November and December.

But the piece de resistance was the famous (or infamous) Arthur Grant, who had seen the creature cross the path of his motor cycle earlier in January at the midnight hour. The picture below from the article says "Men examining prehistoric bones on shores of Loch Ness", but this is complete nonsense. The man on the right I would suggest is the now notorious Marmaduke Wetherell who was around during the Arthur Grant event, conducting his own search for the Daily Mail. 

Wetherell went to the location of the land sighting and examined some bones found at the site which were no doubt nothing more interesting that those of a sheep or similar. The photo below gives some context to what I am saying. Clearly, the author of this article is being economical with the truth and he further embellishes Grant's account with stories of eyes bigger than street lamps and roaring belligerently.

What was most interesting was the article's talk of the "Society Monster Hunters" and a photograph of them flying over the monster swimming away at "30 miles per hour". We are pointed to the plane with the right arrow and the monster in the loch with the left arrow. Who is this mysterious organisation and what is the provenance of this photograph?

Things get stranger when an enlargement of the creature is provided in the next photograph below. On closer examination this turns out to be the Malcolm Irvine film of December 12th 1933. This is the first ever alleged motion film of the creature, but all we have left now is this still. However, Irvine claimed he took it from a hillside opposite Urquhart Castle on the other side of the loch. Clearly, this one is alleged to have been taken from a road by the Castle.

But when I saw that picture of the plane, beast and castle, I thought "Where have I seen that picture before?" and a look at Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story" revealed the photo below (page 73 of the 1974 edition).

It is the same photo, but a close examination of it showed no plane and no monster! Overlaying the two pictures confirmed there is nothing at the same location on the original picture. The photo had been retouched to give the impression of a plane flying over a monster in the loch. It seems the editor of this article was not prepared to wait for the arrival of Photoshop. Note the monster hunter in the car is not even looking in the direction of the "monster"!

What are we to say to these things? Shoddy journalism in search of a bit of sensationalism is nothing new. I doubt this particular article had any big effect on the overall scheme of things, after all, who today knows about this alleged photograph?

But in the light of my recent modern folklore article, here we see the modern storytellers adding their cultural layers of "interpretation". Eyes like street lamps, roaring monsters and the mysterious band of "Society Monster Hunters" all were added to the mix and copied across various countries to present a picture of the monster which lacked the realism of what the witnesses claimed to have seen.

Fortunately, not all recorders of cryptid history are so fast and loose with the facts. But it is to be recognised that one has to sift and assess to a certain degree, though certainly not to the degree that everything is tossed into the bins of hoax or misidentification. The Loch Ness Mystery is much more subtle than that simplistic approach.

A Webcam Photo from Loch Ness

A reader of this blog called Luke emailed me a few days back with a couple of screen grabs he had taken of Loch Ness. The question concerned the dark shaped object that is there in the first snap but not in the second.

Luke cleaned up the image a bit to produce this clearer view of the object.

The webcam says the first image was taken on the 29th January 2013 at 14:17:22 and the second one ten seconds later. You can see a Caley Cruise type boat progressing down the loch on the top right. 

So what is it? In terms of similarities to previous Loch Ness images, it reminded me of the photograph taken during the Edward Mountain expedition of July-August 1934 with that dark line and the blur above it (which I take to be spray thrown upwards).

I agree with Luke in his assessment that it is not something on the lens like the rain drops. The rain drops remain on the second image whilst the object does not. My own initial thought was that it might be an insect flying past the lens. The body is the extended dark line and the wings produce the blurred motion. However, what type of insect that might be I was not certain and I was further unsure whether insects are to be found flying around the cold Highland air in Winter?

However, if it was a large object in the water, then it would have clearly disappeared from view within ten seconds by the time the second webcam shot was taken. This being the case, I would expect some kind of water disturbance to be evident from this disappearing act.

Readers' comments are welcome.

Fake and Real Photos

Like me, you may occasionally search around the Internet for items of a cryptid nature. This image below came up and immediately caught my attention as it was a claimed photograph of Nessie. The website attributed it to an Alfred Gescheidt. As it turned out, Mr. Gescheidt was a famous photographer who died in 2012, but was well known for his pre-Photoshop like montages. He admitted to fooling people with a series of UFO photographs, and the raison d'etre behind this photo began to become clear. You can read his Wikipedia entry here.

The San Antonio Express for the 3rd October 1976 summed up the story:

More recently, Gescheidt plunged into the Loch Ness Monster controversy. “I got so far into that one that I came to believe Nessie might really be swimming around Scotland,” he said “After all. I had my own pictures to prove she was real ." Gescheidt became involved in the Loch Ness Monster after various newspapers published pictures from scientific sources, which were supposed to prove that the monster exists. “I looked them over and said to myself, if this is evidence, I can do better myself’ and did I — with a papier mache monster on Lake Michigan,”

One presumes the underwater Rines photographs were being referred to here. Again, we see the problem of taking a convincing photograph of the real Loch Ness Monster which avoids the charge of being faked. Of course, if Mr. Gescheidt had included the backdrop of Lake Michigan's distant shore line, we would have more information.

So chalk this one off next you stumble upon it.

The Folklore of An Niseag

Where does folklore end and reality begin? What is the overlap between these two planes of "existence"? This was a question obliquely asked in a recent article by “Dr. Beachcombing” when he reviewed my book “The Water Horses of Loch Ness”. You may wish to read his article first before proceeding here.

 

The Doctor (as I will call him) holds the article in tension between two schools of thought. On the one extreme, there is my view that these old tales had a biological basis in truth. That is, An Niseag (the old Gaelic for Nessie pronounced "An Nee-Shack"), was a real creature hidden under the various layers of folkloric accretions. But in opposition, was the dismissive view of Daniel Loxton, co-author of “Abominable Science”, who viewed all folklore as irrelevant to the question of what is the Loch Ness Monster. I reviewed that book from a Nessie perspective back in September.

He ultimately is sceptical of any real creature beneath the folkloric or real waves and sides with Loxton in that respect. However, he sides with this author in regards to Loch Ness folklore and opposes "Abominable Science". There was a tradition of a beast in Loch Ness which people believed to be true.

Delving further though, he had issues with some of the stories I presented. He though I was indulging in "special pleading" regarding the Richard Franck story of the 1658 "Floating Island". He does not say why, but given what I know about Loch Ness, I highly doubt Franck's mass of vegetation has any mileage. I refer him and readers to my article on that subject here.

DAVID MURRAY ROSE

There is also the issue of historian David Murray Rose's letter to The Scotsman on the 1st January 1934 which gives various known and unknown pre-1933 monster stories but (infuriatingly) without the name of the original sources. Another article by the Doctor which I covered here, partly vindicates Mr. Rose on another old story, but sadly progresses us not an inch on finding these particular old sources.

Indeed, I recently found another letter from Mr. Rose to The Scotsman for 30th November 1934 when I was looking for references to crocodiles at Loch Ness. The relevant portion is below and refers to dates around 1828 and 1850 but what quite prompted David Murray Rose to mention those dates, I have no idea (though he refers to his "notes" further in the letter). 

Moving on, the Doctor is hesitant to accept stories from witnesses before 1933 but only made public after 1933. He feels there may be some form of Nessie "contagion" introduced into these accounts. I agree the possibility is there in theory but I do not accept that this invalidates all these accounts (though the Doctor does not do this either). Sceptical researchers can either dismiss them as fabrications or as people who genuinely saw something they could not explain years before (to which the usual boat wakes, birds and otter explanations are retro-fitted).

With the introduction of the Nessie genre in the 1930s, those witnesses may well have applied the monster template onto them, but that by no means lessens the degree of mystery they attached to what they saw. Hence, they should be assessed each on its own internal evidence, in the same manner as a more modern report.

THE ROOT

But it is then asked why one should accept the Kelpie tradition as being an indicator of something physically unknown anymore than the equally prevalent tales of fairies in the Highlands? Now, I may not believe in a race of indigenous fairy folk inhabiting the North of Scotland, but does that mean one must dismiss all Highland tales as having no tangible basis in reality? If people, outside of the Highland traditions, had not continued to report strange sights in Loch Ness, perhaps we would have. 

Actually, this is where things dovetail into my separate paranormal studies. Since the days of Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia" and John Keel's "Operation Trojan Horse", there has been a growing school of thought that many strange phenomena from centuries past up to this present day are merely different manifestations of the same underlying cause.

From diminutive fairies to Adamski's blond Venusians to today's skeletal grey aliens, none of them cohere together at the surface but they are all the same stuff of folklore both ancient and modern. The underlying cause is a matter of speculation and ranges from Charles Fort's "Cosmic Joker", to the Collective Unconsciousness of mankind to another intelligence. Or one could play it safer and speculate on something that emanates from our deepest psyche. I have no fixed opinion on the matter.

But as to the accretions of folklore, be it green-jacketed fairies or talking kelpies; these can be discounted as man's attempts to reconcile these shady phenomena with man's surroundings. The Doctor correctly points out that Kelpie folklore was important in providing part of the "kindling" that ignited a new level of story telling at Loch Ness, one which changed into a dinosaur (for me the same creature, but a different representation).

PERCEPTIONS AND CYCLES

The way I see it is represented in the diagram below which was part of my Kelpie talk at last year's "Nessie at 80" Symposium. In this we see two parallel but similar worlds. There is the ancient and modern branches which have a common root called "The Reality". From this springs what witnesses claim to have seen moving in the waters of Loch Ness. Here we have the first level of perception.

The next level of perception is the local group perception. Here the accounts of the witnesses are recounted, either to the local community of old or the researchers today who record the stories as faithfully as possible. 

The final level of perception are the storytellers or their equivalent in the modern media. They take the recorded accounts and turn them into stories compatible with the culture of the day. So, in the diagram above, that transforms to the Kelpies, Water Horses and Water Bulls of fireside raconteurs. Today, it translates to the various green and fierce monsters of films, books and artists.

Finally, we have the downwards arrows feeding back from media and storytellers to community and researchers and finally to witnesses. These represent the cultural and scientific ideas of the time which shape to varying degrees how future generations will feed back up the loop. That in itself is a controversy as some say this is sufficient to form a positive feedback loop that can disengage from "The Reality" while I say there is no such thing as a free lunch in this matter and has to be sustained by whatever lies beneath the waves to propel it, else the whole cycle collapses after a short time.

Moreover, I would suggest that An Niseag was the "seed" for other Water Horse tales that sprung around ancient Scotland (perhaps Mhorag also helped). One proof of this is the higher than usual concentration of Kelpie lochs around Loch Ness. However, unlike An Niseag, these derived lochs have no underlying reality and hence peter out over time. 

There is also a modern parallel to this when other aquatic cryptids gained prominence when Nessie appeared and a lot of modern sea beasts are often referred to as "The Loch Ness Monster of ...". 

That much seems certain to me, but the root cause called "The Reality" which has no resolution because it is yet to be unambiguously observed foments controversy. To the skeptics it is simply a collection of unremarkable, everyday events. To others it is a creature of more interesting proportions.

THE GREAT FISH

One of the items from that time proved most interesting to the Doctor (as it does to me). The article in question was printed by the Inverness Courier on the 8^th October 1868 and is reproduced below.

A STRANGE FISH IN LOCH NESS

“A few days ago a large fish came ashore on the banks of Loch Ness about two miles to the west of Lochend Inn. Neither the name nor the species of the strange visitor could be satisfactorily explained, and large crowds of country people went to see and examine for themselves, but left without being able to determine whether the monster was aquatic, amphibious, or terrestrial. Some of the most credulous natives averred that a huge fish, similar in size and shape, had been occasionally seen gambolling in the loch for years back, and with equal determination protested that its being cast dead on the shore boded no good to the inhabitants – that, in fact, its presence presaged dire calamities either in pestilence or famine, or perhaps both.

At last, however, an individual better skilled in the science of ichthyology appeared on the scene, and ascertained that the strange visitor was nothing more or less than a bottled nosed whale about six feet long. 

How one of the denizens of the ocean came to be cast ashore at Loch Ness was the next question, but, this too, has been set at rest, for it was ascertained that the blubber had been taken off! 

The fish had, of course, been caught at sea, and had been cast adrift in the waters of Loch Ness by some waggish crew to surprise the primitive inhabitants of Abriachan and the surrounding districts. The ruse was eminently successful.”

This the story where folklore ends and reality begins. No longer the Kelpie of fireside ceilidhs, but a huge fish seen for years back. A great fish that coexisted with dark tales of aquatic horses was now in the process of decoupling from the legend. Let us take a closer look.

The background is a strange carcass found on the shores of Loch Ness near Abriachan. Being as yet unidentified, some of the local natives presumed it to be the Kelpie of old. We know this because of the supernatural construction they put on it by predicting calamity for the community. If you are familiar with this genre of folklore, it was known that bringing harm or imprisonment to a Kelpie was a sure path to ruin.

However, the correspondent seems to get his local natives mixed up as he also quotes them talking of a great fish. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Kelpies will know they were never likened to  fish. Nevertheless, the author of the report assigns the label "credulous" and "primitive" to these people.

These derogatives very much explain the attitude of the Inverness Courier to any talk about strange creatures in Loch Ness and why we rarely heard anything about them. Quite simply, such tales were regarded as nonsense and superstition by the editors of the newspaper. With the Industrial Revolution transforming Scotland and Victorian academics assuring everyone that such tales were mythology, Highland newspapers were jumping on the progressive bandwagon.

So, any story you are likely to meet on this subject is going to be framed in a sarcastic way that not only entertains but very much advertises the modern, dismissive stance of the newspaper. This is corroborated in at least two other Loch Ness newspaper accounts of the time which leave the reader in no doubt about how the newspaper treats such a subject.

The other interesting point is why the Inverness Courier does not simply dismiss the tale of a great fish as yet another sturgeon story? A casual search of digital archives reveals various stories of sturgeons being caught around the Moray Firth and the River Ness. Why not state this as such a case? After all, the carcass was stated as being six foot long, which is a typical sturgeon size (though it is unclear how the locals decided their fish was six foot long - unless they were saying that six foot was visible at the surface). I would suggest the way the "great fish" story was related by locals to the journalist precluded such an explanation.

HOAX

And, finally, the reporter says the carcass was dumped "by some waggish crew to surprise the primitive inhabitants of Abriachan and the surrounding districts". Why did they do this? The phrase "primitive inhabitants" is linked to the previous phrase "credulous natives" and their great fish. I would suggest the crew were aware of the local tales of this beast and decided to pull off a hoax.

But you may say "A monster hoax at Loch Ness in Victorian times?" and I say "Yes". There was a sufficiently strong and contemporary belief in a large creature in Loch Ness to put the "progressive" newspapers in sarcastic mode and those itinerant fishermen into hoaxing mode. Or to put it another way, if there is a monster hoax, it presupposes a monster belief. 

CONCLUSION

Did nothing more than waves, logs and birds cause the modern and ancient legends of the Loch Ness Monster? Are even modern stories just a continuation of the folkloric traditions which themselves will be discussed and pored over centuries from now? Or does it take more than the mundane to kick start these strongly held beliefs? 

Regular readers will know this blog's answer to that question.