Gavin Maxwell's Loch Ness Sighting

A reader of this blog passed this clipping onto me which recounts the story of naturalist Gavin Maxwell's sighting of something strange in Loch Ness about 70 years ago. As you may know, Gavin Maxwell was the author of the acclaimed book, "Ring of Bright Water".

This was lifted from the Gavin Maxwell Facebook page, which had this to say:

During the late 1960's, a wave of sightings and press reportings began to take hold of the British public's imagination, on the existence of a possible monster in Loch Ness. I distinctly remember that Summer of 1969, as a boy of 11 years old travelling down with my family from Inverness to Arisaig and witnessing the hysteria of tourists jamming every layby down the A82. This wasn't helped by the various TV cameras set-up on timber custom-build platforms every 5 miles down the lochside hoping to bring 'live' sightings of 'Nessie'. An article in The Scotsman newspaper dated 2nd August 1969 confirms that even Gavin Maxwell was a believer in this mystery. This article was published just five weeks before Gavin Maxwell died on the 7th September, about the same time that Gavin realised he had cancer according to Richard Frere. This article was/is possibly the last published writings of Gavin Maxwell.

Gavin's account is known to Loch Ness researchers, but this account adds more detail. The earliest I know about it was a BBC television programme entitled "Your Witness" which debated the existence of the Loch Ness Monster in July 1968. The program sounds like a Who's Who of Nessie personalities from the time and even today would doubtless be well worth a watch. Those called as "witnesses for the defence" included Gavin Maxwell, and this is the account as reproduced in Peter Costello's "In Search of Lake Monsters":

It was in September 1945. I was driving from Inverness to Mallaig. The weather was dull, drizzle, flat calm, and about five or six miles on the Inverness side of Invermoriston I stopped to relieve myself. There was a knoll about 80 feet above the loch. While walking round the broom bushes on this knoll, I noticed what appeared to be a line of stones, a submerged wall stretching out from the shore, perhaps 20 to 30 feet in all, shining wet. Perhaps two minutes later I returned. The “stones” were not there: there was only a slight disturbance in the water which subsided very quickly. I waited half an hour and saw nothing more.

I must admit I like Maxwell's almost prophetic reply to the skepticism of today when he classes himself as no fool as regards the accuracy of what he saw and would probably not take kindly to someone taking him by the hand to "help" him in what "he really saw". Given his stated two years of sea observation and a lot more years as a naturalist who observed the moods of the Scottish landscape on land and water, I would class him as a seasoned and experienced witness.

Having said that, what did Gavin Maxwell see? He said he had driven south to a point four miles out of Invermoriston, that places us somewhere just north of the Alltsigh burn that runs into Loch Ness and is the location of the famous John McLean sighting about eight years before as well as the curious land sighting of Alfred Cruickshank in 1923.

I scouted this area last year in connection with the McLean and Cruickshank cases and one likely spot for Maxwell's story is shown below. This is the shingle beach that runs past the back of the Youth Hostel and I walked it from Alltsigh Burn northwards until it ran out.

The object was described as looking like a row of partially submerged stones commonly seen on drystone walls. Not being exactly sure how that would look, I did an search for some similar images and came up with the following pictures of submerged walls below, though I do not claim that they are an accurate representation of what Maxwell saw.

The suggestion is therefore that the appearance of the object is somewhat narrower compared to normal hump like reports. Did Gavin Maxwell observe the uppermost part of the creature's back as it lay still just under the water near the shore? 

Or was it a line of stones just as the description suggests? After all, the account says it ran perpendicular to and close to the shore line. For what it is worth, I walked along this area right up to Alltsigh Burn and I certainly do not recall a line of "stones" similar to that described by Maxwell (albeit 70 years later).

The main point, though is that the objects were not there when Maxwell returned from relieving himself a couple of minutes later. If they were still there, we would never have heard this story. His mention of drizzle allows for the idea of the loch level rising from previous rainfall. However, given that he returned only two minutes later, it is unlikely the loch level would have risen that quickly and certainly other stones round about would have given that explanation away.

In conclusion, Gavin Maxwell's experience is not one that is going to make it into the classic sightings list. The fact we know about it is more to do with the man rather than the story. Nevertheless, it has taken its place in Loch Ness Monster history and people will form whatever opinion on it.

POSTSCRIPT:

Doug, a regular reader and Nessie enthusiast, adds these observations about Maxwell and Loch Ness:

The Maxwell family connection to Nessie was probably the strongest via his brother Eustace. He had a boat on the loch in the early days of the search and was very active there up until his death. Ted Holiday mentions him directly in ‘The Dragon and the Disc’: ‘In 1969…Major Eustace Maxwell chartered a trawler and a crew of professional fishermen. Bringing these into Loch Ness, he trawled the bottom but brought up only leaves and some plastic bags. 

Hundreds of large hooks, baited with herring, were lowered to the loch-bed by cable but nothing relating to the mystery was captured’ (pp31-32). In a later chapter, Holiday also mentions that Eustace Maxwell had told him of a Nessie-type sighting of his own in Loch Fyne: ‘Major Eustace Maxwell told me how he once saw a huge hump projecting out of Loch Fyne which he took to be a sandbank. As the car moved behind some trees, he knew it couldn’t possibly be a sandbank. When the car was at once reversed to the original spot, the object had gone’ (p184).

I also recall reading in Douglas Botting's biography of Gavin Maxwell, ‘The Saga of Ring of Bright Water; The Enigma of Gavin Maxwell’ that when one of his otters (Edal) savaged a visitor (Margaret Pope), Maxwell was so frightened of the potential for bad publicity that he asked her to put the story about that she had actually been bitten by something while paddling in Loch Ness! Not sure if this story ever did fully do the rounds, but it's quite interesting grist for the LNM mill nonetheless.


The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

New Analysis of Nessie and Sea Serpent Reports

Charles Paxton has written on the statistics of aquatic cryptids before and has had a new paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Volume 30, Number 1). You have to become a paid up member of the Society for Scientific Exploration to access the article or wait two years for it to become free. I did get a copy from Charles having helped him on this article, so can make a few points.

The article is entitled Consistency in Eyewitness Reports of Aquatic “Monsters” and is co-authored with Adrian Shine. With Charles' permission, I include the abstract for the article below:

Little work has been undertaken on the consistency/repeatability of reports of natural historical  anomalies. Such information is useful in understanding the reporting process associated with such accounts and distinguishing any underlying biological signal. Here we used intraclass correlation as a measure of consistency in descriptions of a variety of quantitative features from a large collection of firsthand accounts of apparently unknown aquatic animals (hereafter “monsters”) in each of two different cases. In the first case, same observer, same encounter (sose), the correlation was estimated from two different accounts of the same event from the same witness. In the second case, the correlation was between two different observers of the same event (dose). Overall, levels of consistency were surprisingly high, with length of monster, distance of monster to the witness, and duration of encounter varying between 0.63 and 1. Interestingly, there was no evidence that sose accounts generally had higher consistency than dose accounts.

If you don't read the article, the one thing to take away from the abstract is the consistency between estimates of distance and size between multiple witnesses and multiple witness accounts. That, of course, does not equate to accuracy, but neither does it exclude it. Though there will be caveats, this can be taken as a positive for witness integrity rather than a negative. I say this because a low precision would not be consistent with high accuracy.

Charles' study used a dataset which was a combination of sea and lake monster reports. It would be interesting to see further results for the single case of the Loch Ness Monster. Note that this does not address the other issue of witness descriptions of what they see, which is a more complex affair than estimating a simple number.

On the cryptozoological theme, I note the same issue carries a review of a new by Karl Shuker entitled: "A Manifestation of Monsters: Examining the (Un)usual Suspects" and it is reviewed by a man well known to Nessie researchers, Henry Bauer.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

You Can't Keep A Good Monster Down

After trying to ignore the Loch Ness Monster for years and diverting potential tourists to other attractions around the area, the tourist agency, VisitBritain, has decided to recruit the monster into their services with a promotion drive in France, Holland and the USA. The ad campaign cleverly uses some themes of monster hunting as a route into promoting other aspects of Highland tourism.

Back in  2008, a bid to make the Loch Ness area a UNESCO world heritage site carefully ensured no mention of the monster was made. One would have also thought the repeated attempts of sceptics to reduce the mysterious creature to logs, waves, birds and liars would have had its effect. Evidently not, people still like monsters while bow waves and cormorants don't cut the mustard.

From my own point of view, I am ambivalent about increased tourism around the loch. The increased traffic noise on the loch is, in my opinion, a deterrent to the creatures surfacing. That doesn't mean they never surface near boats, it just means that as the noise coverage over the loch increases, open water sightings proportionally decrease.

For me, it also makes it more difficult to find secluded spots for trap cameras as tourists like to clamber along the shore lines.  On the other hand, more tourists means more potential videos and photographs - assuming this is not cancelled by the increased noise. Oh well, maybe I should only come up in the winter.

 

Frank Searle's Newsletters

This blog has brought you Rip Hepple's Nessletters and Tim Dinsdale's Operations newsletters. Now it is the turn of Frank Searle.

Back in 1969, Frank Searle arrived at Loch Ness with nothing more than a camera, a tent and a lot of hope. Seven years and several alleged monster photos later, he was elevated to the status of famous monster hunter which led to the publication of his book and the start of a quarterly newsletter sent out to a crowd of subscribers.

I haven't read all the newsletters, but they tend to start with Frank's own investigations as well as stories of other sightings from those who came to his camp. As the years pass by, the tone changes as he begins to criticise the activities of the media, commercial operations and other investigators. The last newsletter is dated December 1983 as he announces his impending departure from the loch. This final newsletter was published between the "petrol bomb" attack on Adrian Shine's boats and the fire at the Loch Ness exhibition that Frank Searle so hated.

The newsletter roster is incomplete as it lacks the issues for December 1981, all of 1982 and March 1983. The issue for 1976 is undated, so I am uncertain what may be missing for 1976 or whether the presumed missing dates elsewhere were actually published. If readers have any missing issues, feel free to send me scanned copies for inclusion.

The archive can be explored at this link.

Talking Nessie with Bruce Collins

I was again interviewed on the mysterious matter of the Loch Ness Monster by Bruce Collins and you can listen into that tomorrow. He broadcasts on West Coast People's Radio.

Who are the Monsters of Loch Ness?

With the upcoming book on Frank Searle, I was minded to follow up on a few things in advance to perhaps raising awareness of this topic. When you think of Frank, you think of personality clashes, vendettas and even vandalism and violence. However, the perhaps not so surprising thing is that this little piece of monster hunting history was only the most publicised aspect of a general thread that has run through the decades. In other words, monster hunters and ex-monster hunters are not some cosy conclave of nice but eccentric folks akin to bird spotters, but rather a microcosm of the all too inevitable failings of human nature.

Whether this sub-plot of rivalry played out in the early days of the Hunt is not so clear, but when large numbers gathered at the loch from the 1960s onwards, the ingredients for conflict also came together. Perhaps this is best summed up by Paul Harrison who went public with his views on 2001 when he wrote for the CRYPTO magazine:

To the unwary, Loch Ness is almost like some surreal real life fairy tale, tiny hamlets surrounding a huge expanse of water, exhibitions, tourist shops, whisky and the occasional ‘Monster Hunter/Researcher’ running around in search of the creature(s). To the tourist, a huge farce is played out as the so called ‘experts’ expound their own personal theories, almost demanding to be elevated to the position of world’s number one and sole expert on the matter.

Away from the tourists, these same ‘experts’ (they are indeed the only one’s who class themselves as such) appear to be hell bent on destroying not only the opinions of others but also on succinct character assassination. The reality with Loch Ness research is that it is a complete and utter mess, sighting reports (old and new) held by some and other valuable information is selfishly withheld by those who choose to keep it from the public domain, as these folks absurdly believe that their personalities are bigger than the tradition itself of the Loch Ness Monster. Virtually everything that can be postulated about the Loch Ness creature(s) has been printed in countless books, magazine articles and newspaper columns, therefore I do not intend to dwell on the subject, other than to say until serious and sensible cohesion can be brought to bear on research matters then the real search for the truth will never progress.

As for ‘lake monsters’ such as those believed to inhabit Loch Ness, perhaps the real monsters are of the human kind, whatever it is or they are that inhabit Loch Ness, they are not as mysterious as the personal politics involved in research there. Seals, boat wakes, eels, standing waves, floating logs, or just plain old hoaxes, Loch Ness will continue to be the epicentre of Dracontology and Cryptozoological matters, a great shame it could not set the ideal academic study and research example. Loch Ness is indeed the tip of the Dracontology iceberg, but its also drifting towards oblivion, a Cryptozoological subject which may be cynically dismissed by new researchers as ‘untouchable’.

When Paul speaks of those who wish to be seen as the "world’s number one and sole expert on the matter" or are "hell bent on destroying not only the opinions of others but also on succinct character assassination" I can readily empathise with that, having experienced it first hand for myself on the new platform of Internet forums.

Whether it is the same people involved in 2016 as in 2001 is not a matter I wish to pursue in this article. The point is that the problem has not gone away and it is appropriate that Paul is the author of this new book on Frank Searle entitled "The Monster Hunter - The True Story of Nessie and Frank Searle". That phrase, "the true story" implies there are things about Frank Searle that have been either omitted, exaggerated or just plain fabricated. What those are remains to be seen, but I have spoken before about Frank's unpublished second book, which was pulled after protests by Adrian Shine. That book was, until recently, available online. I note that link has gone dead, so you can now download and read the PDF from my own archives at this link.

It is a publication you should take with a pinch of salt given the high tensions of the period, but to state it is wholly fabricated is something that should also be taken with a pinch of salt. Apart from a couple of less than flattering claims made against a prominent Nessie sceptic often seen on cryptid Internet forums, the one that intrigued me most was the claim that Tim Dinsdale was at Loch Ness in April 1960 with another man with whom he later had an argument and was seen bundling into his car after he collapsed.

This sounds fanciful but is based on what a claimed local eyewitness who approached them told Searle years later. The fact that no one has stepped forward saying they were that mystery man seems to mitigate against it. Such are the claims and counterclaims of the Frank Searle story.

As a prelude to Paul's book coming out, I decided to look again at the infamous "petrol bomb" incident of August 1983. What we know of this mainly comes from those who were Frank Searle's enemies. Since the phrase "the victors get to write the history" is a truism even in the Highlands, I decided to look beyond these people. A search of the newspaper archives at the invaluable National Library of Scotland turned up two articles. The first is from the local Inverness Courier dated the 23rd August 1983. Click on the images to enlarge for reading.

The second comes from the Aberdeen Press and Journal of the 22nd August 1983.

Clearly, something happened on the 21st August 1983 when somebody lobbed a lit plastic bottle filled with petrol at a boat and somebody had daubed words against Adrian Shine on the walls of Urquhart Castle two days before. The Inverness Courier took a neutral stance in talking about an "alleged petrol bomb attack" and did not name any suspects. The Press and Journal had a similar approach but also mentions police involvement and the vandalism at the castle.

However, things get obscure beyond these newspaper clippings. A further search makes no mention of the outcome of this police investigation and no mention of Frank Searle. One can only presume the investigation fell through due to lack of evidence.

Mike Dash, Fortean researcher, wrote on this incident as he was there as a volunteer with the Loch Ness and Morar Project. He did not witness the incident at 5:30am but was there to observe the consequences. He said a female volunteer identified the man who threw the bottle from a photo of Frank Searle, but nothing came of this important witness evidence.

Combining this with Searle's account of the incident in his unpublished booklet, it would seem the police quickly visited Frank Searle at his Foyers base only to find him painting the ceiling of his small exhibition. They also asked him if he would take part in an identity parade, to which he refused since he claimed he was too well known to allow an unprejudiced procedure.

Searle's booklet makes no mention of the castle incident, let alone making a defense against it. Though he does argue against the petrol bomb incident, claiming that the idea was stupid since a molotov cocktail had to be made of glass and the waves were so high that morning they would have extinguished any flame.

A final source was a friend of Frank Searle by the name of Graeme Caisteal. He countered Mike Dash's account by claiming Frank had a prosthetic foot from his army days which would make it nigh impossible for him to clamber up to the castle and daub the walls. Perhaps, but he also said that the police found the engine of Frank Searle's boat to be stone cold and that there were a group of tourists there to vouch as alibis.

Frank Searle claimed he had an idea who perpetrated the bottle attack and claims he was set up. He does not name the person and we are left in the awkward position where Frank Searle is the obvious suspect, but evidently not obvious enough to press charges. Counter arguments can be made against such arguments as parties classed as monsters by the other party clash with all teeth bared.

As for me, I will simply await Paul Harrison's book to see what it has to say about that day on a shingle beach thirty two years ago. I do hope no one tries to block this book as they did with Frank Searle's.

Meanwhile, the envenomations will continue as personalities and agendas trump research in the great Loch Ness Monster debate!

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Scott Mardis talks Plesiosaurs

Fellow lake cryptid fan and researcher, Scott Mardis talks about cryptids as plesiosaurs on Monster X Radio. Scott is one of the leading experts on the monster of Lake Champlain, commonly known as Champ. He also runs the popular Facebook group, the Zombie Plesiosaur Society, which you can find here.

Go this link for the podcast.

Sit back and enjoy this special edition of Monster X Radio: Animal Extant, Relict Plesiosaurs with special guest Scott Mardis. 

Monster X Radio: Animal Extant is a show about general cryptozoology and possible relict extant species that may still roam among us. Hosted by Mike Richburg and Dorraine Fisher, each episode will explore the possibility of the existence of mysterious unknown creatures and those perhaps thought lost to time. Future episodes will focus on the Mokele Mbembe, The Dogman, Lake Monsters, Megalodon, Giant Birds, Large Melanistic Cats, The Jersey Devil, The Chupacabra, and many more.

Scott Mardis has been an active field investigator of the Lake Champlain “Monster” since 1992. He is a former sustaining member of the defunct International Society of Cryptozoology and a former volunteer worker in the Vertebrate Paleontology Dept. of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences (1990-1992). He co-authored a scientific abstract about the Lake Champlain hydrophone sounds for the Acoustical Society of America in 2010. He currently lives in Bradenton, Florida.

Mike Richburg was born and raised in South Carolina, where he had an encounter with a Swamp Ape in 1978 that had a profound impact on the course of his life. Mike has since been very involved with Cryptozoological Field Investigation, interviewing eyewitnesses and investigating such things as The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, The Fort Motte Devil, The Dogman, Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, The Rimini Goat Thief, Giant Birds and Snakes, just to name a few. Mike is very much at home in the swamps of the American Southeast, and frequents places few others would. Mike previously was a part of The Big Thicket Watch, and CryptoLogic Radio.

Dorraine Fisher lives in Florida. She is an author, photographer, and team writer and associate for the research group, The Crypto Crew, who's written numerous articles on the subject of cryptozoology.