The Quest - Trip Report

The last weekend of May brought the third "Quest" surface watch of Loch Ness organised by the owners of the Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition. Here follows my own account of the weekend as I packed my gear into the car and headed up the main road to the loch.

Friday 23rd May

Leaving at eight in the morning, I arrived at the loch before noon via the small road that winds down from Errogie to Inverfarigaig following the River Farigaig as it flowed its way down to the loch. Arriving by the lochside fulfils initial expectations, you get there and you're once again surveying its grand and beautiful vista. 

Having said that, even just getting there reminds one of unfulfilled expectations. Looking over at the River Farigaig was a reminder to me of the late monster hunter, Ted Holiday. He had related how he clambered around the mouth of that river, finding a large depressed area of bracken, evoking thoughts of a large beast, more talked about than seen. I hoped to explore that river mouth myself, but it remained an unfulfilled expectation as I drove on to Foyers.

Parking near the village of Lower Foyers by the campsite, I went for my first walk along the beach there. The first stop was where the beach meets the River Foyers. It was there back in 2020 that I encountered a large depressed area of grass as shown in the picture below. Of course, I cannot prove it was some lumbering two ton beast which had dragged itself out of the river estuary for reasons unknown.

Occam's Razor and all that will be invoked, but even the more mundane theories all had their drawbacks. Anyway, this is how I found it walking back there, fully grown as if nothing had ever happened.

Continuing to walk along Foyers Beach and ascending a slope at the other end led me to the Fraser Memorial and the spot where Hugh Gray took the first photograph of the Loch Ness Monster and that curious eel-like head (below) in November 1933. The picture below is of the loch taken in my camera's panoramic mode. Naturally, Gray's photograph has been a target for sceptical snipers over the decades. Much psychological mileage can be gained from debunking famous pictures rather than "so-so" sightings.

Questions have been asked, answers have been given, but they ask the same questions again. It is at that point you know they are not directed at you but at others whom they think will be taken in by their arguments. Walking around the Foyers Leat later near where Frank Searle used to live in his caravan, it was a pretty quiet scene with a couple of anglers at the mouth of the river and some deer were visible by the bushes drinking from the waters flowing into Loch Ness. After driving south past Borlum Bay, it was time to join the Quest at Drumnadrochit after checking into my accommodation.

At the Loch Ness Centre I met up with fellow monster hunters Paul, Dave, Alan and the "Glasgow Boys", a group of like minded people from my own home town. Back in the Loch Ness Centre, Dave brought us up to date on some analysis he had been doing on the James Gray photographs taken back in the year 2000. He is pretty convinced there is variation in the orientation of the object and I would tend to agree with him.

What we need to do next is get the best resolution copies of the pictures and take a closer look. Dave also had a theory about the Dinsdale film but time overtook us because the hunt was upon us! I do not mean the official Quest the following day but our own adventure near Urquhart Castle. After a visit to the chip shop and some scrambling over some obstacles we found ourselves at a location on the shore not far from the castle.

Alan had brought his hydrophone equipment in order to listen to the sounds from the loch about thirty foot below and devoid of the loud sounds generated by daytime human activity. There were about eight of us there having been joined by local enthusiast Jared and the rain was falling down upon us all. While we were listening to the sounds from the hydrophone speaker, we got a couple of tales in true camp fire fashion minus what would have been a welcome fire.

Jared told us about the big black cat of Drumnadrochit amongst the hills near his house. He told us about the farmer which had seen it and encountered various sheep carcasses consistent with an attack from a large predator. Jared himself had seen this large cat moving in the distant fields and confirmed it was indeed large when he visited the culvert where he had seen it enter.

Since the capture of the three lynxes, the subject of big cats in Scotland has become a subject of renewed interest. I am old enough to remember the capture in 1980 of "Felicity" the puma near Dingwall. In many cases, these may well have been released from captivity, but the sightings persist to this day long after one presumes the majority of releases happened. Perhaps some managed to acclimatize and breed? Who knows, but I was to leave one trap camera pointing across a forest near Foyers rather than across the loch.

The next tale concerned the "eyes" from a previous November trip but happened at the same spot we were now at. Alan and Dave recounted how the hydrophone had again been deployed and as they listened Alan peered into the water and shined his light into the depths only to see two spots akin to eyes reflecting back the torch light. This was naturally an unsettling sight and they backed off a bit while trying to keep these "eyes" in sight. Alan thought they were about 15 feet below and several inches apart. They did not waver in their position and after about 15 minutes they faded out of sight as if whatever they were attached to submerged back into the depths.

What was it? Alan thought fish were capable of producing eyeshine reflection. I took his word for that. The distance between the eyes which he indicated with his hands made me think of a Wels Catfish, sometimes hypothesized to be in the loch. I told him the tale of Beppo the clown from the 1950s who went for a swim in the loch and was drawn out "gibbering" about red eyes looking at him from below. What he and Dave saw six months ago remains a minor mystery.

Things got even better after that when Alan and Dave went over to another location near us to investigate something Alan thought was fooling some eyewitnesses in the recent past. After a while, I phoned Alan as he seemed to be a long time away. I was greeted by an excited voice telling me they had just seen something causing a big splash in the water not far out from them.

Once they made their way back to us, they related how they had been surveying the dark waters and threw a stone in followed by another. The second stone evoked some kind of a reaction from some dark form as a large splash erupted for a time longer than the sound of a splashing stone. Alan said he and Dave nearly fell over as they stepped back from the incoming waves.

Because the rain was falling quite heavily, Dave had not brought his video camera with him which had an IR mode. I had my thermal FLIR camera with me, but I was in the wrong place! So recorded corroboration of what it may have been was not possible. We discussed otters, birds and seals as possible explanations. To this day, I have not seen a seal or otter at the loch to this day and fancied it was not an otter as they are active mainly at dawn and dusk.

The only flying things around at midnight were bats and Steve Feltham informed us later that he was aware of no reports of seals in the loch. I asked Dave to make a voice note for me so as to preserve his testimony as fresh as possible and he further transcribed it which is reproduced below.

Okay, so it is now Saturday the 24th of May. We've just come back from a night time vigil at Urquhart Castle where we were on the pier trying to see if we could get some similar results to what happened last November. One of the things Alan wanted to do was go and try and see if we could locate the pipe just off the castle that people have been mistaking as a head and neck, which Alan has dismissed and found evidence of, but it's always nice to try and find this extra evidence.

So obviously we went around the castle at night and we made our way down to the shoreline. The water's quite low at the moment so there's actually a bit of a pebbled beach which is where we were. We noticed that actually about five foot ahead of us, the ledge was there and it was a deep, just a sheer drop basically, we’d got about five feet of water and then straight down.

So, we were exploring the area. It had gone actually quite deathly silent at one point so what we were doing, I think initially what it was, was Alan wanted to throw a rock into the water to see if it actually was the ledge and if you could hear something, or if it was quite a shallow part and stuff. So, he threw a considerable rock/slash boulder into the water and we just, you know, it's like okay, that's obviously the ledge.

We're obviously quite close to the ledge which is, you know, im not great with heights and so forth. Anyway, he threw another one in, went in the water, same thing again - just very, very deep and stuff and we both turned because we were going to go and meet everybody else back at the pier. As we started to walk away, we heard an almighty kind of splash right behind us!

Obviously, it wasn't a rock because we weren't throwing anything in. We both turned around at exactly the same time to see. For me there was a split second of almost, like a slimy black hump that went very very quickly straight down into the water.

It was like it had come up and it had gone straight down with such a force that it created such a massive splash, almost like a torpedo. We both said at the time like a torpedo effect. Up and straight down and there was a massive wash, a massive splash that came after it and we could see that quite clearly because we had our torches on it as well and both at exactly the same time.

What the, you know, what the hell was that? You know, it was big you know and this was just, you know a second, second and a half. That was how quick it was! I'd say about five or six foot away from where the ledge was so it was pretty close to the shoreline in that respect.

I mean it was so much so that me and Alan both stepped back immediately. You know it made us nervous and we both saw it because the white of the splash reflected back on us. You could see that straight away but whatever it was it was quick.

It had reacted, I presume with throwing these rocks in and stuff especially after the second one. Was it responding to us? Was it reacting to that? You know had it been I don't know, the talk of ledges on the sides of the loch - had we disturbed something? I don't know. I'm just saying this now so it's still in my memory.

It's still ingrained in my memory. Could it have been a seal? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know though. I just don't, it was bigger than what a seal or an otter would have been. And for me there was a hint of almost like a black shape.

Very very quick - like split second just as it went into the water which gleamed off it as this splash kind of surrounded it and that went under it and the splash just appeared and followed afterwards. So yeah, I'm making this as a testimonial. It was about 45 minutes ago which would have been Friday the 23rd of May. Actually, it might have just been after midnight to be fair. I'd say about midnight just to make it try and put a context on it. So, it was about midnight.

It was at the shoreline just underneath the castle. It was looking out at the loch and this item by the way went towards Inverness. It would have been going north and it was against the waves. So, it was big enough and powerful enough that it propelled through the water and pushed a splash back. A considerable splash came backwards.

So, it was going in that direction towards Inverness/north. So, it was south to north, right to left. I mean obviously we were scanning for ages then and actually we started throwing more rocks in just to see if we could get a reaction again or just happened to put our torches on the waters and see a head and neck just staring back at us. That kind of thing would probably would have terrified us as well. 

But I think there was a bit of a, again I thought I saw a bit of a second hump. It wasn't as powerful or as eventful. It was almost like just a slight splash on the surface. So again, maybe something surfaced and they went down but it wasn't as powerful. It wasn't the same kind of event or thing. It was just almost like a smoother motion but left. Again, quite a bit of a splash. 

This is a seven-minute recording, but I'm making sure - I'm trying to get all the points that I wanted to get for you, whoever's listening. So yeah Dave Hastings, Alan McKenna as well. Both saw this thing!

And with that it was out of the rain and into the comfy bed awaiting the Quest the next day.

Saturday 24th May

The Quest itself consists of a number of observation points scattered around the loch and indicated so by signage. I had arranged to meet fellow Nessie hunter Paul at the Clansman Hotel point for the 1000-1100 observation slot. There was some light rain and the traffic in and out of the hotel was busy as one would expect for a late May weekend. Now I had previously been here in April to look into the location of the Arthur Grant land sighting of January 5th 1934.

However, I had new information in the form of the original report made a few days later at the Drumnadrochit Police Station taking testimonies from various personnel including Arthur Grant.  The report ends with a sketch of the creature by Grant. In other words, Arthur Grant's fingerprints were probably still all over the page. That aside, there was enough information to pinpoint the location the creature crossed the road with more certainty. One of the key statements was:

He explained to me the spot where he saw it cross the road and plunged into the loch near the tenth milestone from Inverness near to where there is a black wooden fence on the low side of the road ...

Walking along the road at the north end of the Clansman Hotel revealed the tenth milestone was still there. Milestone were granite blocks with the distance to main towns painted onto them. They have now been replaced by the tall metal signs familiar to us all. From there, Paul and I took the nearest turn down to the loch from the milestone. This was at the entrance to the Jacobite Cruiser Pier from where we doubled back to the beach past the customers waiting for the next boat. We surveyed the beach before us and speculated as to the possible route the creature had taken down the slope those ninety-one years ago, but all that is for another article.

After lunch at the Clansman Hotel, it was back to the Loch Ness Centre where Paul was to get the mini-bus for one of the boat excursions and I had an appointment with the BBC to have a long discussion concerning another monster hunter from years past. I hope they do a fair and balanced piece on him and more details will follow as and when the date of broadcast approaches.

After a sit down with Jared and Dave in the Hotel Cafe, I headed back to the rental to prepare for the Quest Debate later that evening which comprised of myself, Alan and Gordon Menzies, who ran a cruise boat business from Temple Pier and has lived by the loch all his life. I would take the "pro-Nessie" position, Gordon would take the opposing view and Alan would attempt to sit in a more neutral position.

We had an audience of about 20-odd people who would listen to various questions discussed between ourselves from the MC and then would chip in with some of their own. Amongst the more familiar set of questions, I was asked one question as to what it would take to convince me that the Loch Ness Monster was not there. That was a question which did not provoke an immediate response!

I answered that a likely scenario was something akin to setting up a device which continuously monitored the loch over a sustained and unbroken period of time (maybe a year). If nothing was detected that would indisputably resemble the signature of an unexpectedly large creature, it would point to the unlikely existence of such a creature. Well, there were a few caveats in there and I did suggest a setup such as a sonar beaming across the loch (not below it) continuously to a certain depth. Of course, all of that would have to be scrutinized live or as recordings.

Yeah, I know, not likely to be set up any time soon. I expanded on that thought and applied an analogy from Astronomy. Finding evidence of the beast was not akin to pointing an optical or radio telescope at a certain point in the sky and recording all the necessary data. It was more like looking for a supernova, you don't know where and when the next one is going to occur and it may be an amateur astronomer that finds it, but when it is seen, the telescopes are turned towards it. But constant surveillance is required by a lot of people to first see the exploding star.

After this, Dave and I headed off to see if Steve Feltham was around for an evening chat. Steve was there closing up, so Dave retold his account of the strange splashing object near the castle. Steve noted his sincerity by the way he related the story and told us he was not aware of any reports of seals in the loch. We then got into a discussion on the Chie Kelly photos published a couple of years back. Steve was now leaning towards the diver explanation and had watched and filmed some divers out on Dores beach previously. He has since published that video as a comparison to what Chie photographed. 

By 10:30pm, we were all back near the castle for another night session. We headed to the place where Dave and Alan had their encounter the previous night and attempted to set up the hydrophone to listen in but this was a risky operation as the shallow shoreline before the drop (what they called the "ledge") could cause the line to be snagged, but for some strange reason no one wanted to wade into the dark waters to un-snag it. lol

I turned the FLIR thermal camera on to scan the area where Alan and Dave had their prior encounter. There would be no hump like object making its way in front of us (and the dark would have largely shrouded it anyway) but the view was clear enough to capture something as shown in the clip below. What caught my attention was the long "streak" occupying much of the field scanned. In the absence of boats and birds leaving water trails, I had to explain this but could not.

I am not saying it was produced by a large creature but rather I was in a new paradigm where the usual water effects proposed for daytime sightings had to be evaluated in a new way for two reasons. First, were they viable explanations in that midnight setting and secondly, what would they look like when processed by a thermal camera? I did not know because I did not have a familiar frame of reference. That requires more study (e.g. use the thermal camera on visible and recognisable daytime windrows, slicks, etc.).

I did pour into the water some "Nessie Nectar" produced by Irn-Bru, but even that failed to stir the beast from the depths. Did the company properly test this on the monster before giving it that name - I doubt it! So, after some more hydrophone monitoring further along the shore, there was nothing of note detected and, though the rain was not as bad as the night before, we called it a night after midnight.

Sunday 25th May

So the Quest drew to a close and we met up for breakfast in Drumnadrochit before splitting up. Some would stay a little longer into the week, but we also looked ahead to the next visit and then said our goodbyes. I drove on to the south side of the loch and placed a couple of trail cameras in that region. True to what I said above, I placed one far from the shore in the hope of catching some wildlife of the feline kind. I will be lucky to even catch a snap of the wildcats known to roam the area, let alone the bigger kind that have stirred media interest over the decades.

Frank Searle once wrote in the 1970s how he came across a wildcat litter during his forages and took one to become his pet cat called Toby. At least we have photographic evidence of that but we shall see what passes by that trail camera in the months ahead. As I headed further up the road I had the good fortune to stumble upon a trail camera I had set up in late 2023, but had forgotten where I had placed it! The batteries had long expired but there were a few hundred pictures on it but sadly none of a cryptozoological nature.

While I was retrieving that, I heard the noise of a distant helicopter near Dores, perhaps closer to the salmon farm. It was hovering over a spot on the loch for a long time - may be at least quarter of an hour, but I could not see why it was doing that. I saw no winch in operation or anyone down below, but I wanted to get closer to be more certain. By the time I drove to the spot, the helicopter had gone. If anyone knows what was going on in that area that day, I would be interested to know.

And with that it was time to head back south. It had been a satisfying trip and though I had seen nothing untoward, I think others had and that is always a good thing. What they may have seen requires some more thought but the main lesson was that of the Scouts - Be Prepared! We had infra-red equipment which could have captured images of great interest from the darkness, but they were not employed for perfectly legitimate reasons. This beast can make an appearance when one least expects it and it isn't going to strike a pose while we fumble around with our cameras!

Until the next time.

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Some Observations on the Arthur Grant Land Sighting

 

It is one of the most famous of all stories regarding the Loch Ness Monster, the tale of a man who almost ran his motorcycle into a large creature on a moonlit winter night. A newspaper account of the time summarized the events of that night (The Scotsman 6th January 1934).

ONE of the most remarkable developments in the Loch Ness mystery occurred early yesterday morning, when an animal presumed to be the monster was seen on land by Mr. Arthur Grant, a veterinary student in Edinburgh, son of Mr. James Grant, the proprietor of  Polmaily, Glenurquhart. He was motor cycling to his home in the glen at 1.30 yesterday morning, when he observed a huge object on the roadway near Abriachan. As he almost struck it, the creature leaped across the road and dashed into the loch.

... "It was," said Mr. Grant, "a bright moonlight night after rain had fallen. When almost forty yards away under the shadow of the hills, a short distance from the part of the reconstructed Glasgow-Inverness road near Abriachan, I observed what appeared to be a large black object on the opposite side of the road. I was almost on it when it turned what I thought was a small head on a long neck, and the creature, apparently taking fright, made two great bounds  across the road and plunged into the loch.

"I had a splendid view of the object; in fact, I almost struck it with my motor cycle. It had a long neck with an eel-like head and large oval-shaped eyes, just on the top of the small head. The body was very hefty, and I distinctly saw two front flippers. There were other two flippers, which seemed to be webbed behind, and there was a tail, which I estimate would be from five to six feet long. The curious thing about the tail was that it did not, so far as I could see, come to a point, but was rounded off. The total length of the animal would be from 15 to 20 feet.

"Knowing something about natural history, I can say that I have never seen anything in my life like the animal I saw. It looked like a hybrid. I jumped off my cycle," said Mr. Grant, "but the animal with great speed had rushed into the loch, splashing the surface violently and making away."

Mr. Grant's story created great interest along Loch Ness side, where there were many motorists moving about in the hope of seeing the monster.

When I was writing my book on land sightings, I looked into where the incident took place as it was normally stated as near the the village of Abriachan. It turned out it was bit further south near Brachla (sometimes written as Brackla) in the area now occupied by the Clansman Hotel. By coincidence, there is a statue of a large monster near there and a stream runs past it down to the beach below.

My speculation was that a stream could be a plausible spot for such a creature to come ashore, but of course, the habits of such creatures are not exactly well documented. At that time, a group of people from Edinburgh led by Mr. A. F. Hay, a fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland, were already there on a nine day investigation and made their way to examine the site of the encounter. Their investigation with Grant was subsequently reported in the same newspaper on the 22nd January, from which I quote:

We spent the next two days in his company, a part of the time in going over the ground and foreshore where he had seen it, measuring up spoor and hunting for clues as to the identity of the beast ...

We checked the tracks at the point where the creature had gone down the steep bank into the loch and confirmed the fact that there was no “body drag" though without doubt something large had gone down there. The marks of the feet or flippers – as they were scrapes or “skids” in the soft earth, there was no telling the nature of them – were roughly five feet apart ...

Some seventy yards further up the beach from this point (near Abriachan) what appeared to be a set of foot or flipper prints in the shingle measuring some 24 inches long from toe to heel, 38 inches cross from right toe to left, and 30 inches from heel to heel. Nearby was a large crushed down area in the bracken as if an over-sized cow had lain there, though no farm beast could have reached that spot.

When I was up at the loch a week or so ago to pick up some game cameras, I had time to drive over to the area of the Clansman Hotel and have a look from the road down to the loch. I parked the car and crossed what was a busy road to the layby opposite the Loch Ness Lodges where the earthen bank slopes quickly down. Once down at beach level I surveyed the scene. The photo below is looking northwards.

I looked back at the slope I had scrambled down and I could see the opportunity those men 90 years ago had to examine slide tracks in the softer earth. Quite how it looked in January 1934 is not certain though January implies a minimum of vegetation. Furthermore, the path from road to loch was not obstructed by any walls both then and now.

Looking at the beach, it was evident that beyond the embankment, the large shingle provided no opportunity to provide further tracks (photo below). This tallied with Mr. Hay saying nothing more about tracks immediately after the slide down the embankment. 

However, Hay mentioned some tracks being impressed in the shingle "some seventy yards further up the beach" towards Abriachan (i.e. northwards). I walked roughly that distance and came to a smaller area where the shingle was smaller and well capable of leaving a good impression from something like a large animal's forelimbs. I pressed my own considerably lighter feet into this smaller shingle and left a footprint with no problem.

The waters in the foreground of the first photograph below is a stream flowing down from the Clansman Hotel. So the testimony of the gentlemen from 1934 seemed to agree well with what I was observing today. It was stated at the time that a plaster cast of a track was made and sent off for examination. This spoor was not the four toed track of Marmaduke Wetherell, but a three toed one. No further mention is made of this item in any newspaper, magazine or book I have consulted. I do not even know if it could have survived to this day, which is all a great pity.

Readers will also notice in the background of the photograph some gorse bushes. Mr. Hay had further stated that "nearby was a large crushed down area in the bracken" commensurate with a large animal laying down there. Note "bracken" is more usually applicable to fern leaves, but those would have died back to the ground by January and so the plentiful gorse around the loch was more likely in mind.

To the right of the gorse bushes you can see a pile of large, broken rocks. I wondered if these were blast fragments associated with the road building that had been going on nearby over the 1930s. Perhaps they were, though just beyond them was the expanded pier that had been built for the Jacobite Cruises some years back. I am not certain how much rock debris that produced and so cannot exclude that explanation.

Mr. Hay did not give an indication of which direction those tracks were pointing. Did they indicate the creature was going to or coming from the loch? That is not certain and so one possible scenario is that the creature on that moonlit night came ashore on that lighter shingle where I stood and clambered up the stream and then onto the road. As it proceeded to do whatever Nessies do on land, eventually it moved about seventy yards further south before Arthur Grant approached on his motorcycle.

At the moment of closest encounter it crossed back towards the safety of the loch down the embankment and across the rougher shingle into the loch. An ordnance survey map from 1904 shows this to be a quieter place in those days. The likely spot was near Stevenson Cottage, one of the small number of houses represented by black rectangles on the OS map. It is not clear which of those buildings survive to this day as part of the Loch Ness Lodge or Clansman Hotel complex.

The stream previously mentioned is named as "Allt Coire Shalachaidh" which has an uncertain translation from the Gaelic but one suggestion is that it means "Stream of the corrie of (the) willow place". Now having said all this, there is uncertainty due to the fact that Grant's estimate of the location is expressed in miles and an error of say plus or minus 5% puts us out by 80 metres either side. So, we can hold these observations lightly pending any further information coming to light.

Of course, one can dismiss the entire episode out of hand by accusing Grant of fabrication for whatever motives. I covered such objections in my land sightings book, but I quote what Constance Whyte said about Grant in her book "More than a Legend":

Memory of the event is still vivid in Mr. Grant's mind, though for many years he has preferred to say nothing about it on account of the treatment, amounting to persecution, to which he was subject at the time.

I might be going out on a limb here, but I would say that hoaxers prefer not to suffer for their sins and much rather confess them, do their penance and move on in life. Well, unless you're a glutton for punishment.

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Frank Searle: Monster Hunter Extraordinary

 

Last year I came across an unpublished manuscript by Frank Searle entitled "Monster Hunter Extraordinary: Ten Years in search of the Loch Ness Monsters" as shown in the above image. Last week, the BBC televised John MacLaverty's documentary "Loch Ness: They Created A Monster" and so I thought it appropriate to look over this manuscript and what may or may not be truth in the midst of Frank's many stories.

Now this bears a close resemblance to Frank's previously published book "NESSIE: Seven Years in search of the the Monster" as you can see below. The only real differences are it was now "Ten Years" and it was now "Monsters". That extra three years spanned the years 1976 to 1979 and five years later in 1984, Frank left the loch, never to be seen there again. Twenty years later, film maker Andrew Tullis tracked him down to his home in Fleetwood, Lancashire, only to find he had died just weeks before.

Prior to his departure from Foyers, Frank let off a final salvo with a third and final booklet entitled "Loch Ness Investigation: What really happened" (below). This was the most critical of the trio and you could say that it completed the time gap from 1979 to 1983, thus having three items covering about 14 years.

So any words from Frank have to come from his written works - the book, the manuscript and the booklet. The manuscript fills in some of the gaps, though as one can guess, it is mainly a reproduction of the 1976 book but with 1977 to 1979 added in. The manuscript is small like its predecessor at 73 pages and was produced on a pre-PC typewriter. I haven't gone to the extent of comparing the period of 1969-1976 in both documents but there is one big difference which Frank complains about in the manuscript.

Basically, any criticism of his opponents at the loch over that time were omitted by the publishers. Various other names were not there, presumably because the publishers had taken an opt-in approach rather than an opt-out for various individuals mentioned. The manuscript presumably restored some or all of his criticisms, though one can imagine they would have been whipped right out again by any potential publishers. Curiously, he says the publishers retained his pointed words about Robert Rines and his 1975 underwater pictures.

Who was the object of Searle's ire in the manuscript? It is basically about half a dozen people associated with the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau starting with its co-founder David James MP and percolating out to other individuals. James gets most of the criticism being the leader and is accused by Searle of being only interested in profiting from the organisation. 

Certainly, David James was an active promoter of the LNIB and regularly solicited funds from various bodies, be they private or public. I have scans myself of letters David wrote to branches of the UK government in the 1960s asking for funds. However, those letters described the need for money to hire or buy equipment and talent to further the search for the Loch Ness Monster. It is more likely Frank saw them as a threat dissuading tourists and their donations from visiting his own site. Thus the need to portray them as only in it for the money.

How much money Frank himself made from tourists, fees to reproduce his photographs and any other activities is not stated. In the manuscript he claims that thousands would visit his site every year and he also says that 40,000 copies of his book were sold and not long after that he purchased a boat to extend his hunting activities. 

Later in the manuscript, Frank blames these "enemies" as persuading the publishers of his book to print no more copies. The truth was a lot less palatable for him as the Scottish Sunday Mail ran a double spread expose of his faked photographs a short time after his book came out. The timing of this article was probably no coincidence, but that article was why his publishers pulled the book. If his "enemies" were part of anything, it was the production of the Mail article.

Frank's attempts to debunk the expose article are disingenuous and he made no mention of the slam dunk item which featured in the recent "They Created A Monster" documentary. I refer to the infamous Brontosaurus postcard and a very similar photo that he took in 1976 as shown below. Even Searle's pet cat would have seen that these two images are one and the same. No wonder he avoided any mention of it.

In fact, Frank's manuscript takes a decided turn after he moves on from the Mail article. He continues to talk about sightings reported to him, battling his "enemies", the next "Girl Friday" that shacked up with him and so on. What he does not mention any more are those sensational close up photographs that peppered the previous years. How could they have so suddenly dried up? Frank goes on about the bad weather as if it continued for a straight three years. The more likely truth is that the Mail article led to the media not touching his pictures with a barge pole, so why continue to produce them?

It is ironic that the last of his photos cut out from that dinosaur postcard was the one that ended his "extraordinary" monster hunting career which was now approaching the exit door. The subsequent booklet regurgitated some of the older criticisms but brought in new targets such as Tim Dinsdale, Adrian Shine and Tony Harmsworth. Tim is not mentioned in the prior manuscript which struck me as curious as Tim was a lead part of the LNIB that Frank regularly panned. Maybe he had a degree of grudging respect for someone whose 1960 film was part of the reason he settled at Loch Ness nine years later?

Throughout the manuscript, Frank does not really say anything positive about previous film or photo evidence for the monster. He mentions various well known sightings such as Greta Finlay and so on, but the only photos that get the nod are his own. Some other items are interesting though, such as his encounter with some "mini Nessies" in June 1975 related on page 34.

You will have noticed that Frank mentions one of his girlfriends here. He identifies her as a French Canadian school teacher called Martine Paquetto. I would guess she would be about 75 years old now and I presume she now goes by her married name. If Martine exists and really did witness these things, then we would obviously be very interested in hearing from her. As we would from the other alleged women mentioned in his manuscript - Carole Kennard and Lynda Tate. The other lady was Lieve Peten, who has already appeared in the recent "They created a Monster" documentary.

Other stories also are a bit strange as in this one about the monster bull and its "harem":

Make of that what you will but £3000 a day in 1975 equates to over £22000 in today's money. One highly doubts that the LNIB had that kind of money to throw around after reading about their begging letters to various organisations! By the way, here below is Frank's account of the photograph from February 1976 which turned out to be that fatal Brontosaurus postcard.

Considering that if this photograph was genuine, it would surpass anything else taken at Loch Ness, Frank treats it in a casual manner and moves quickly on. He spends more time talking about having a cup of tea with his visitors! Actually, we should conclude there were no such co-witnesses as Frank often brought in other characters to act as "corroboration" and I do not think I have yet met any one of these people. Maybe these people did really exist, maybe they even had a cup of tea with the Monster Hunter Extraordinary, but they assuredly did not have their little tea party interrupted by a huge beast crashing to the surface near them!

CONCLUSION

It goes without saying that you should take Frank's manuscript with a huge pinch of salt. If Frank did take a genuine picture of the Loch Ness Monster, it is lost in the noise of all the fakes. Statistically speaking, if you believe there is a large creature in the loch and if he really did spend those thousands of hours watching the loch, he should have seen the creature at least once. But once again, that is lost in the noise. Some things he said I do accept, like when he said he took his cat Toby from a wildcat litter. Beyond that, I do not care to commit myself!

So as regards publishing the manuscript, it is still under copyright. This applies whether a document is published or unpublished and extends out to 70 years after the author's death. That would mean the manuscript could not be freely distributed until about 2074. Before then, the ultimate decision to publish lies with what we may term the "Frank Searle Estate" or his inheritors. According to the intestacy rules in England, a succession of relatives have decreasing priority to Frank's worldly goods.

It seems Frank had no children (though given his sexual proclivities, I would not entirely dismiss that). Since Frank would be aged about 100 years old if he was alive today, it is unlikely any siblings would be around either. If Frank had any nephews and nieces, then they could still be around. However, to this day, no such people have turned up and they must have surely been aware of his well publicized activities at the loch.

If these people do not exist, the the whole estate reverts to the Crown. If no claims come in 12 years after the author's death, the Duchies of Cornwall or Lancaster become the owners. This technically means that either Prince Charles or Queen Elizabeth II became the owners of this manuscript in 2016. Given that King Charles III was once a follower of the Loch Ness Monster story along with his father, that is quite ironic. Do I need Royal Assent to publicly distribute this manuscript?

When Fortean researcher Mike Dash wrote about Frank's booklet from 1983, he decided to just upload it and provide a link on his webpage concluding that there were no living relatives of Frank Searle. That link is now gone, though I suspect more because the link expired rather than someone claimed ownership of it.

The other issue is that the manuscript is potentially libelous against various parties. Some of these people are now dead though I understand that libel laws no longer apply to them. That would not be so with those still living and in fact various people threatened action against Frank's publishers on at least one occasion back in the day. Whether they care fifty years on is another matter. Either way, maybe I should get writing that letter to His Majesty the King!

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Sea Monsters of the Roman Empire

 

This blog has occasionally diverted off into the dim and distant ages to look at tales of aquatic creatures not only in Loch Ness but around the Highlands of Scotland and beyond. Now someone claimed last year that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. My trip to Rome and Naples late last year certainly has had me thinking about that Empire as I considered the fabulous animals said to inhabit the seafaring routes of the Roman Emperors. But others would question whether those beasts merely inhabited their ancient minds?

I had seen these various artforms from 1600 years back or more when I was previously in Rome, but this time I took more care in searching out such images. They basically took three forms. They were either mosaics made from thousands of tiny coloured stones or were frescoes quickly painted onto wet plaster walls or, on rarer occasions, were statues sculpted from marble or other materials.

The mosaics were certainly the best preserved and as a consequence the more abundant. They would tend to be found on the floors of villas owned by the rich, perhaps located some miles away from Rome or other bustling centres of activity. Such places would also have frescoes, but these have not fared so well when exposed to the environment over long periods of time.

Most of these items were in the National Museum of Rome, the Vatican Museum and finally the Naples Archeological Museum which derived most of its objects from the nearby ruin of Pompeii. In an attempt to ascertain what these creatures may or may not have represented in the real world of the Romans, one should try and understand them in what is left today. The mosaic pictured below best summarizes the creatures under consideration and was retrieved from the villa of a man named Severus dated to the 2nd and 3rd century AD.

This striking mosaic would have appropriately been situated in the bath complex and is structured at three levels. At the centre is the face or mask of a god being circled by four hybrid creatures beyond which at the corners are more familiar dolphins and fish. The images are interspersed with lines indicating the flow and currents of their underwater world. The four fabulous creatures are hybrid because they comprise a front half reminiscent of land animals and a rear half that is decidedly aquatic.

I initially thought the god in the centre was Neptune, the god of the seas, but the museum display said it was another deity called Oceanus. This figure was said to be the father of the innumerable river gods (potomai) and spring water goddesses (oceanids) as well as being the great river said to encircle the world. With that in mind, we rotate through each creature in turn, coming first to the Hippocampus.

This is the first and most familiar of these crypto-creatures, also called a Sea-Horse or Mer-Horse. They predate the Roman Empire by centuries and have made their way into diverse cultures right up to the modern day. As you can see, the front part is all equine and the rear is a serpentine body ending in a fluke tail. The rear was often displayed in this coiled manner and its equine function on land progressed into the water as it became a steed for supernatural beings.

That being the case, they are often depicted as pulling the chariots of various aquatic deities as well as being ridden in horseback fashion by lesser beings such as the mermen Tritons and the female Nereids. The most familiar representation of this is the world famous Trevi Fountain in Rome which depicts Oceanus with the help of two tritons breaking in two hippocampi attached to his shell chariot.

The next creature shown below is the Taurocampus or Mer-Bull which is easily identified by its two horns on opposite sides of the head. Like the Water Horse, this reminds us of the water bull legends that pervaded the Scottish Highlands and to which Loch Ness was said to have its own specimen. The role of this creature is less certain but it has been depicted as also being ridden in horseback-fashion by lesser deities. 

The last two beasts take on a carnivorous form and are described as "marine tigers and panthers" by the museum. Instead of front hooves, we now see front paws and claws and heads reminiscent of the big cats. The first picture below looks like a spotted leopard and it is a fact that there was a Pardalocampus or Mer-Leopard described in other works. These are also depicted as harnessed to chariots and one imagines they were the fierce and fleet footed animals which sped their owners through the waters. I suppose the supernatural Ferraris of their day.

The next is the Leocampus or Mer-Lion which presumably had similar Ferrari-like capabilities. The Hippocampus and others also had their representation in other artforms such as statues and frescoes, but for various reasons, the floor mosaics have endured the most. In fresco form, I came across these works. The first rather faded image has one of those feminine nereids riding the beast.

And we have the marble statues as well, the first below is of a Hippocampus and the next perhaps a Pardalocampus. Note that the front hooves of this Hippocampus have taken on a more webbed form as one would expect from a sea faring creature. This is zoomed in further down and we see four front digits and one at the rear. How did the sculptor conceive of this morphology? 

Five forelimb digits is the general pattern for land and sea animals, but they tend to be forward facing. So the sculptor has the correct count but what animal has four forward and one rear finger?  Animals such as dogs, lions and deer have a small digit separate to the rest but to the side and rear called the dewclaw which never touches the ground when standing. Horses do not have dewclaws and I am not aware of aquatic animals with a dewclaw, but I await anyone coming forward with possible candidates. 

So we currently have a minor mystery there, but when one looks at these varied images, one wonders how much of the form is mythological precision. biological accuracy (such as those webbed hooves) or  artistic license.

Another impressive floor mosaic was in the Sala Rotonda room of the Vatican Museum. Sitting on top of it was a large bath made of porphyry marble which was a material highly prized by Roman Emperors for its royal colour of purple plus its rarity and durability. However, the mosaic below was of more interest to me. As you can see from the battling centaurs in the foreground, the theme is decidedly mythological.

Moving round the large mosaic, an assortment of Mer-men and Mer-creatures came into view. In the first image below, the familiar Hippocampus on the right looks on at a Triton perhaps subduing the other beast with a rope. The second image presents a similar scene but with no Hippocampus and more of these creatures which do not look like any horse, bull, lion or leopard.

Zooming in on five of these creatures around the mosaic, they have their similarities, but also their differences. The feature that may strike cryptozoological readers are the necks of these beasts which are longer and thinner than the previous creatures. Certainly, these are more in line with reports of sea serpents and lake cryptids. All of them have manes which suggests the Romans regarded them as more more mammalian than reptilian (as far as the Romans understood modern taxonomies). They also all possess the usual coiled hind parts.

Note the last image contains another Hippocampus alongside another of those longer necked animal. In fact, these five non-Hippocamp creatures can be divided into three types:

• Creature 1 (images 1 and 5 (right)) - creature with extended fin-like forelimbs.
• Creature 2 (images 2 and 4) - creature with webbed claws and wings on back.
• Creature 3 - (image 3) - creature with webbed claws and finned upper limb.

Of course, we are not going to use these images to classify them zoologically as there are elements of mythology. biology and artistic license in all of them. Can we say that these three creatures are aquatic representations of land animals as per the first mosaic we examined? It is not clear what land animals they may simulate. Creature 2 has the horns of a Capricorn in image 2 but is winged in image 4, while creature 3 has a Griffin-like look with its beaked head but no wings. One cannot presume there was a standard to which they all held, but neither would one presume it was a chaotic free for all.

CRYPTID ASSESSMENT

But did these creatures have any basis in biological reality? Taking the sceptical view, one may argue that they are no more real than the hybrid-humans in the form of tritons and nereids that rode them. Very few believe that mermaids are real animals, so why should these hybrids be any different? The conclusion would be that Greek and Roman mythology took a symmetric view of creation where similar animals inhabited the seas as the familiar ones that inhabited dry land.

Moreover, of necessity, these gods of the seas and rivers were going to need some form of animal to provide them with transport, whether it was on the animal's back or hooked up to a sea chariot. Sceptical interpretations will take things further by attaching psychological and figurative interpretations to the given creature such as making it a symbolic expression of some aspect of human nature, society or the sea's chaotic nature. It is not clear whether the Romans would recognise these more abstract interpretations.

In that light, one has to ask what the Romans (and Greeks) thought of these marine creatures? Looking back at the first mosaic, the four creatures move between their water god on one side and the dolphins and fish on the other side. This gives the impression of a set of creatures moving between the natural and supernatural. But were these hybrids ever detached from the supernatural and depicted in more natural settings?

The Romans would produce artwork showing sea life in more familiar surroundings. The mosaic below from the Naples Archaeological Museum shows the diverse lifeforms that Romans would capture in their fishing nets. Would you anticipate seeing a Hippocampus in this depiction? I don't think they were expecting to capture one in their nets and neither would they want to unless they wanted their boat smashed to pieces.

Looking at other images, The first below is a fresco from Naples showing the previously mentioned Mer-Griffin swimming between dolphins with no gods in sight. The second fresco (from the same villa) shows a Hippocamp in a similar situation. In the third image below, the Vatican Museum had a striking sculpture of a dolphin being attacked by another Mer-Griffin as we see it biting into the dolphin's dorsal fin. So we could deduce from these that the owners and artists regarded these creatures as being as natural as the dolphins beside them.

 

Moving to the classical writers of that period, we see these animals mentioned in the epic poems such as the Iliad and the Argonautica (from which the film "Jason and the Argonauts" was based). If one reads more historical documents such as the works of Pliny the Elder (c.AD 23-79), we get some idea on how they viewed sea life. In Pliny's "Naturalis Historia" is a chapter entitled "The names of all the animals that exist in the sea" (XXXII:53). He enumerates one hundred and seventy six types of creature found in that environment. In fact, he asserts:

And yet, by Hercules! in the sea and in the Ocean, vast as it is, there exists nothing that is unknown to us, and, a truly marvellous fact, it is with those things which Nature has concealed in the deep that we are the best acquainted! To begin then with the monsters that are found in this element. We here find sea-trees, physeters, balænæ, pistrices, tritons, nereids, elephants, the creatures known as seamen, sea-wheels, oreæ, sea-rams, musculi, other fish too with the form of rams, dolphins, sea-calves, ...

It is a bold man that declares that everything has been discovered. The fact that the sequence of names that followed is still not fully translated leaves what they did know as unknown to us. Pliny makes no mention of the Hippocampus here yet does mention the tritons and nereids. Indeed, in an earlier chapter (IX:4), he recounts a tale of one seen:

A deputation of persons from Olisipo, that had been sent for the purpose, brought word to the Emperor Tiberius that a triton had been both seen and heard in a certain cavern, blowing a conch-shell, and of the form under which they are usually represented. Nor yet is the figure generally attributed to the nereids at all a fiction; only in them, the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales.

The French naturalist, Georges Cuvier, once the number of potential marine candidates had been exhausted, dismissed such a story as fraudulent. Whatever creature was reported to Tiberius, it was not the type of triton represented in mosaics and statues as it had full body scales. Another creature mentioned is the sea-calf or the vitulus. This can also be translated as the bull-calf and is identified as a species of seal by commentators. Did the ancients regard its fully grown male version as the Taurocampus? The fish that is described as like a ram also sounds interesting, but again Cuvier says such instances may be a species of dolphin (despite the dolphin having its own Latin word, delphinus).

Pliny does mention the word hippocampus elsewhere when being used as an ingredient in various remedies for illness, though one concludes the familiar little seahorse is in view there. All in all, the vagaries of what the Latin words may mean adds some difficulties, but if Pliny admitted to tritons swimming the seas of the Empire, how much more their steeds, the Hippocampi?

As we have seen already, researchers like Cuvier came along centuries later with their interpretations. Back in 1965, Bernard Heuvelmans published "Le Grand Serpent-de-Mer" with an examination of Sea Serpent reports that he grouped into nine categories, one of which was the Merhorse and so the Hippocampus was reborn. Heuvelmans' depiction of this category in his book is depicted below.

He describes it as possessing "a long floating mane", having a "slender medium length or long neck" plus "only one dorsal curve". To this he adds "very big eyes" and "long hairs or whiskers on the face". Of the 358 cases he analysed, Heuvelmans states that 37 were of this category of creature which puts it at 10.3% of all sightings, second only to the other category of generic long-neckers at 13.4%. He further thought it to rarely exceed sixty feet in length and mainly inhabited the depths between 50 and 100 fathoms (90-180m).

When one looks at Heuvelmans' global map of how these cases are distributed, it became apparent that the majority of the Merhorse cases occur in a cluster off the coast of Western Canada where the famous "Cadbororsaurus" is reputed to inhabit. The other reports cluster off North East Australia and the Atlantic coasts of Norway, Scotland and Ireland. The Romans may have engaged with some of these northern cultures, but the Hippocamp genre was long established closer to Rome as evidenced by images of them in the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations going back to at least the 6th century BC.

So people have claimed to have seen Hippocamp-type creatures in modern times, but not near their Mediterranean birthplace. We should not be expecting much in eyewitness reports on papyrus or tablets two thousand years later, but I am not sure how many there are from that region in recent years? However, the Hippocamp comes across as a universal creature and like the water horse stories from Scotland which preceded the modern reports of strange creatures in some Loch Ness and others, I suspect there is or was a kernel of biological truth to those old statues depicting webbed hooves creatures of the deep.

I include those strange long necked animals from the Vatican Museum in this view and certainly we have more instances of reports of Heuvelmans' generic long necked sea serpent from around the Mediterranean. So were and are these mainly mythological or biological? Did they inhabit the seas or the mind? I'll leave everyone to form their own opinion.

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