A Sighting from 1964

One of my articles was linked from Cryptomundo a while back and a comment was posted in which a veteran Nessie hunter called Barry from the 1960s recounted an experience he and a friend had back almost 50 years ago. I reproduce it with his permnission for your interest.

In the early sixties I myself was involved with a privately [self funded] investigation which involved a total of three trips per year to this famed locale. These trips covered a span of five years or so, and over this period my colleague and I experienced quite a few inexplicable sightings of something that was “not quite the norm”. We saw “humps” at a distance [not standing waves] disturbances in the water for no reason what-so-ever, but nothing really tangible to photograph.

I think now the year was 1964, we had been pursuing this legend since 1961 after the release of Tim Dinsdale’s book. This specific day was unforgettable to say the least. We started to set up our equipment on the lawn at the Foyers Hotel. I was patiently setting up a Russian 1000mm telephoto lens with camera attached onto a sturdy tripod, meanwhile my associate was busy scanning the bay below through powerful Binoculars. All of a sudden the silence was broken. He yelled for me to come and see what he had in his field of view. I could not leave what I was doing, as the lens which was a very big and expensive item needed careful handling. He sounded agitated, so I set the unit onto the grass and dashed to the edge of the lawn expecting to see some kind of prehistoric denizen cavorting in the bay below. 

I “glassed” the bay carefully following his instructions as to location, but all I saw was the head of “something” [not recognizable] just above the surface, that was moving across the bay at a steady clip. I went back for the lens and attached it to the tripod in record time, then returned. The head was now fully submerged with no sign of any disturbance in the water, — it never to came back up. Disappointment is not an apt description for what I felt, and yet my colleague was still in a state of high euphoria. 

Once things had settled down and he had “taken stock” of the situation I questioned him on just what he had seen. Now these are his exact words [or close to them] “What I saw lying just submerged, was what looked like a gigantic Turtle without the shell”, — “It also looked like it was “flattened out” and seemed extremely wide”. He also noted that it had four appendages of which he could just about make out. In length he thought it would have been 25 feet plus in length, size is a hard thing to estimate in the heat of the moment, with only a little more than a fleeting glimpse.

This mans word I could take to the bank. He was not one for imaginary flights of fancy. At the time he was in his early seventies and resided in Birmingham dealing in rare books. 

So you see GB, the Turtle theory may not be far from the truth. In 1967 I left the UK to reside in Canada. I’m now living in British Columbia still searching for those elusive cryptids.