Thursday 18 September 2014

Tim Dinsdale's Operations Newsletters



Tim Dinsdale spent over 25 years in his quest for the Loch Ness Monster. They were exciting times, frustrating times and challenging times, but something drove him on for a quarter of a century. That something was the prospect of another glimpse of that thing that had seized his attention long before in April 1960.

He wrote occasional books, magazine articles and gave lectures, but he also kept Nessie people up to date on his activities via his Operations Newsletters. I have some of these from 1973 to 1977 and have now put them up for public viewing on my Google Drive. Most of them were sent alongside Rip Hepple's Nessletter but the 1977 one was sent to me by regular reader, Brad. 

That one is particularly fascinating as it was owned by that other monster pursuer, Roy Mackal, whose collection is up for sale. Brad had bought Mackal's copy of Dinsdale's "Leviathans" and the newsletter was found between its pages. 

I am sure there are other newsletters and similar items published by Tim. If anyone cares to provide scans of these, I will add them to this archive.

The newsletters can be found at this link.


10 comments:

  1. Another glimpse of that specific outboard motorboat, or another one just like it?

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  2. Or maybe another glimpse of the head-neck, of which he had two in '70 and '71 respectively.
    Paddy

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  3. It’s interesting to note that these were intelligent, honest, trustworthy people. Tim Dinsdale in particular and if I remember correctly Rip Hepple was a member of the LNIB from the beginning, who endeavored to come to grips with this mystery. If there was nothing to it, why would they have devoted most of their lives and resources in this long going quest?

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    1. Because they wrongly thought there was something to it. A parallel is the multitude of faiths in the world. Each of the very varied faiths in the world has many very intelligent people following it. How do you explain that? Equally we see very intelligent people who believe in flying saucers from outer space, and other very intelligent people who don't. While Tim and Rip believed, many many scientific people thought the idea of Nessie was ridiculous.

      Tim's and Rip Hepple's apparent intelligence tells us nothing about whether or not monsters live in Loch Ness.

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    2. Would you say believing there is intelligent life on other planets is a matter of faith/trust despite there being zero evidence for it?

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    3. I'd say it's much like the Nessie story really. Some say there's evidence but we never see anything tangible. On the other hand, space out there is endless so of course there could be intelligent life out there we'll never see.

      As for the question of faith and intelligent life in the universe, well you could say the idea there definitely is NOT life out there is probably driven by earth-centric thinking, which can stem from religious faith! Who knows eh?

      As for Nessie, we're talking about a finite area of water, so I have "faith" we'd have seen a corpse by now if it were real. But in truth this cannot be proven without draining the loch. I'm going on my own personal weighing up of probabilities - as we all do on every subject.

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  4. It's a question of probabilities for me.

    Given what we know of the universe, and given the level of technology we have, i'd say its quite probable that there's intelligent life out there somewhere. Huge area, little ability to see into even a minute fraction of it, most of it completely outwith our technological ken.

    Now, thing with Loch Ness is the area is relatively contained, relatively well covered and the technology at hand is fairly good. Yet nothing.

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    1. Great points, Trevor. I think a big part of the intelligent life theory is simply playing the percentages. The vast, endless expanse of the universe leads even the most rational person to believe there's at least a one-tenth of one percent chance that there could be intelligent life out there somewhere. Loch Ness is a known, defined area and despite the many eyewitness accounts, there's unfortunately no tangible evidence to prove any large, unknown animals exist there. It would certainly be great if both things were proven true, but the likelihood of either is slim to none.

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  5. GB do u know if the new book by angus dinsdale is any good? Just spotted it on ebay!!

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    1. http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-man-who-filmed-nessie-review.html

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