A series of comments were recently made on the Loch Ness Exploration Facebook group about the famous land sighting from 1936 made by Margaret Munro. The thread can be found here. My own main article on this account can be found here. The original Facebook post was about sightings of large Nessies but it soon moved to the Munro account when one comment was posted as shown below.
What the picture depicts is the well known sketch of Munro's creature and the still frame image is of a seal thermoregulating on a sand bar at the nearby Beauly Firth. This is a technique used by seals where they expose a part of their body to either cool down (perhaps into a wind) or warm up (facing the sun). In the image we see the seal raising up its rear flipper on the left while its head is lower down on the right.
Now the value here is in the "eye candy". It looks like the Munro image, so the implication is that this is the explanation. But herein in lies the problem of relying on a snapshot from a longer sequence of frames. As shown below, and as one could guess, pretty soon that "rear end" begins to act a bit strangely as the seal's head begin to move around and respond to its surroundings. After a minute or two, anyone with half a brain would have figured out the seal's "arse from its elbow" to use a technical term.
But perhaps while these seals galivanted about, a long, strange cryptid came into their midst as shown below? Then again maybe not when one realizes it was just the two seals above overlapping each other from the camera's point of view.
Now when we look at the Munro sketch again, some other problems arise. Here we use the oldest sketch taken from The Scotsman dated 5th June 1934 so you can see all the options. The question is what accounts for the flippers in both sketches? If the neck was indeed a seal's raised rear flipper, what accounts for these as seals do not have such rear limbs? The final nail in the coffin for all of this is when Munro is stated as saying "Finally, it lowered its head, quietly entered the water and disappeared". Quite simply, this means that the "seal" entered the loch backwards!
So you can see how presenting one solitary frame here is the classic instance of taking a text out of its context to make a pretext. However, another assertion is made in response to another comment on Facebook and it concerns that easy target by the name of Alex Campbell.
So this suggests Margaret Munro described nothing of real note and Alex Campbell wrote a fabricated piece purely to keep interest in the Monster going. Where do we start with this "evidence"? For a start, it should not be regarded as evidence. It is not even a deduction but rather a speculation which is barely a notch above a guess. The Inverness Courier mentions its "representative" and "correspondent" in the Munro report without naming them but most take it to mean Alex Campbell.
However, this case also involved another investigator by the name of Cyril Dieckhoff, who was a monk at nearby Fort Augustus Abbey. Constance Whyte, in her book "More Than A Legend" quotes Dieckhoff's diary which described the story in very similar words to the Courier report. The house from which Munro observed the creature was that of her employer, Mr. Pimley, who was a teacher at the Abbey School. He was undoubtedly known to Mr. Dieckhoff and they must have talked about the story and perhaps Margaret too.
With all that access, Dieckhoff wrote what he wrote with no doubts raised. What is not clear to me is whether Dieckhoff's words were copied by Campbell or vice versa. Ultimately, I see little convincing evidence that Campbell "bigged up" eyewitness accounts. I defended Campbell in three articles found here, here and here. Finally, we move on to the third comment made on Facebook.
This comment should not be taken seriously purely on the basis that it is such a generalized and sweeping statement. It takes no account of the distance between object and observer. Is a size estimate between an object 100 metres away and 1000 metres away both "simply unreliable"? No one would take that seriously. The answer is that the reliability of estimation is inversely proportional to the distance (all other things being equal).
Neither does such a statement take into account the observational skills of the observer. Is it to be taken seriously that someone who has never seen a lake before is to be equated with someone who has lived beside one for years or decades learning about its moods and watching numerous objects of various sizes upon it? Obviously not and each report has to be judged by its own merits.
I suspect the underlying motive here is the desire to remove the most important parameter in any monster report. Get rid of that and everything else falls apart. But as they say in the Godzilla movies - "Size Matters" and it stretches credulity when we are asked to believe that the likes of a thirty foot estimate was actually only a three foot creature like a bird or log - consistently across hundreds of accounts.
So, a seal thermoregulates by Loch Ness, seen by an eyewitness who would never be capable of estimating its true size which is then exaggerated by a serial liar. I would rather give eyewitnesses some credit rather than dumbing them down with the circular argument that says there are no monsters in Loch Ness and therefore you must be an unreliable eyewitness.
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
