I read something on Facebook recently which gave a summary of arguments for and against the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster. The first piece of text summed up support for a large unknown beast in the loch in the following manner:
The monster is real. People fail to take photos or videos because they're transfixed by shock and awe. Apart from people who took old B&W photos decades ago that is. The monster isn't seen because it hides in the mud at the bottom and at the sides of the loch. The corpses somehow immediately dissolve or get hidden. Skeptics use psychobabble when they say Nessie is all in our minds.
For the opposite side we get this summary:
After 93 years of near continuous searching, and the last 20 of those with every local and visitor carrying a camera phone, we'd categorically have really good evidence at this point if the Loch Ness Monster was a real animal rather than a socially constructed myth.
People may already be noticing that the texts are not quite balanced, so let me make some comment because when arguments are reduced to soundbites, information can be lost in favour of persuasion. Starting with the statement of the "sceptic", it is doubtful that the loch has been subjected to 93 years of "near continuous searching". Much of the loch has been obscured by trees over that time and the south side of the loch has been even less visited than the north side. Tourists glancing at the loch for seconds whilst driving or for only minutes on the shore lack the focused concentration which characterizes meaningful "searching".
After the 1930s and a gap of 30 years, the word "search" did became more meaningful for a period of 10 years when the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau conducted organised searches, but the literature of the time demonstrated that this was not without its problems when looking for a creature exposing about 26 square feet in an area covering 26 square miles.
The last 20 years has certainly ushered in the era of pocket cameras that were made for close up pictures of family and friends or distant majestic mountain ranges. The problem is the monster is highly unlikely to get as close to you as your wife by the front door and it is certainly not as big as a mountain. Mobile phone pictures and videos turn up every year from the loch and it is no surprise that objects hundreds of metres out in the loch do not turn out well when the light gathering capabilities of such devices are inadequate to provide the necessary data.
I just returned from a trip to the Moray Firth and kept my eyes open for any sign of dolphins or orcas. After five days we saw a small pod of bottlenose dolphins at Portknockie. With this argument about mobile phones still fresh in my mind, I took my mobile phone and attempted to take some still images and video. The dolphins' position was easily pinpointed as they swam just beyond the small rocky islands beyond the bay which on a map came out at about 340 metres.
If you're having trouble spotting anything in the picture I don't blame you, so the zoom in below reveals the dolphins. I leave the reader to decide if the photograph proves beyond reasonable doubt and purely on the basis of this image alone whether I snapped two bottlenose dolphins.
Before that, we had spotted some harbour seals hanging out in Cullen Bay which is a mile further along the coast. They were about a hundred metres out this time as seen below. In this picture, the seal is basically floating in the water with its head pointing upwards. In this case, I used the digital zoom to magnify the view by a factor of seven, but unlike optical zoom, this procedure does not gather more image information. In fact, it required binoculars to identify the object was a seal and also its species.
As you can see, the mobile phone camera pictures are not very impressive, and these involve known creatures one has a reasonable chance of spotting! Ideally, an Orca would have been a better comparison shot as they are of a more comparable size to the Loch Ness Monster. Of course, if I had a professional camera with telephoto lenses set upon a stable tripod ready and waiting, the pictures would be a lot more impressive. Indeed, professionals do take such images as they know the best places to set up their equipment and wait because there are over 100 dolphins regularly swimming along these shores. The Loch Ness Monster is a little less predictable on that score. So to "categorically" state that we would by now "have really good evidence" using these mobile phones does not stack up for me.
We do have good photos taken over the years, the trouble is that too many former "believers" are now geared to reject them all because they have burned their bridges with cryptids and there is no turning back. They are indeed left with a myth, but one which they themselves have "socially constructed" with their own public narrative.
Moving onto the "believer's" statement, most of it is hyperbole. Not all people "fail to take photos or videos because they're transfixed by shock and awe" but some do miss that opportunity because their eyes are glued to a scene which is unfamiliar to them and their brain holds them to attention while it processes this new information. I do not get why this basic reflex should be thought of as impossible, consider the more extreme example when some danger is visibly approaching and your brain kicks into survival mode and almost instinctively takes control of you whether you want a picture or not - run!
Does the caveat that this does not apply to "old B&W photos" taken "decades ago" present a paradox to the reader? What is being referred to here are the "classic" photos taken during a 27 year period between 1933 and 1960. Opinions may vary as to what pictures should be so labelled but there are at least seven of them which are the Gray, Wilson, Cumming, Stuart, Cockrell, MacNab and O'Connor photographs. Their regularity is uneven with a big gap of 17 years between two clusters of 1933-1934 and 1951-1955.
So the suggested paradox is that these classic photographers did not seem to suffer from "shock and awe" yet everyone after them does because they are too "shocked" to produce more quality photos. The sceptical answer is that there is no paradox as the classic photos are all fake, so no one would be in "shock or awe". But the resolution of this supposed paradox is more complex than that. Firstly, there are photographs of similar and better quality since 1960. Included in that group are the Gray (2000), Johnston (2001), Jobes (2011) and Kelly (2018) pictures. Of course, people will dispute these pictures as well and of course everyone is entitled to their opinion and you're getting one particular set of opinions in this article!
As a consequence, this paradox argument has become somewhat dated as it came out of the 1980s when more sceptical eyes were turned on the classic photographs. By that time, no high quality pictures had come out of the searches of the 1960s and 1970s, hence their revisionism. There were still pictures of lower quality which I number at perhaps 5-10 images from that 20 year period (excluding Searle and Shiels) and one may ask why the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau did not produce the goods, but their aim was to deliver quality 35mm film and not still photographs.
Overall, if total eyewitness reports per decade are compared against all photographs taken then their ratio varies between 1% and 3% until the 1990s onwards where sightings dip per annum but number of photos increase such that the ratio shot to over 40% in the 2010s. The "best" plot line below is that subset of photos which I consider on a par with the classic photos and the sightings count is the left axis. Each year on the horizontal axis represents one decade, so 1960 is 1960-1969 and so on.
Sceptical interpretations tend to dismiss them as ghost images reflected of the sides of the loch or inconclusive because the calibration of the device is questioned. Yet when asked what a reflected ghost image would actually look like is not conclusively answered. But at other times the predicted large upside down crescent image expected of a large animal are seen but still dismissed because - after all - there cannot possibly be large creatures in the loch!
As to whether these creatures resort to the bottom or sides of the loch to live (not "hide") is largely irrelevant if sonar hits are being produced when they do actually take to the abyssal region. Furthermore the statement that "the corpses somehow immediately dissolve or get hidden" implies there is no explanation for missing corpses, but there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. When such animals die, they first of all sink to the bottom as positive buoyancy leaves the lungs or they no longer move their limbs to stay afloat.
As decomposition sets in, any gases produced that get caught in body cavities produce positive buoyancy causing the carcass to rise and return to the surface. But in the case of Loch Ness (and any other deep body of water) this is retarded due to the extreme pressure of hundreds of feet of water causing these gases to compress and therefore proportionally lose buoyancy. In fact, for every 10 metres of descent, the pressure doubles and so at the greatest depth of 230 metres, the pressure exerted is 23 times that at the surface.
Finally, do "believers" say that "skeptics use psychobabble when they say Nessie is all in our minds"? That is accurate enough for the purposes of this article and I agree with the definition of "psychobabble" as "repetitive, formulaic speech that claims to offer insight but lacks genuine meaning". This goes back to 1934 when scientists blamed mass hysteria for the phenomenon and said it was more a problem for the psychologist than the zoologist. You would think this theory of "wishful thinking" would be less relevant the closer an eyewitness got to the object being observed.
However, even with encounters within 100 yards or less, this theory is almost fanatically applied irrespective of the description of the object or the observational skills of the eyewitness. Hence the term "psychobabble" is appropriate when a scientific sounding explanation is indiscriminately applied to everything in the hope that something sticks. Now I don't think anyone denies that people will look at a distant object and wonder if they're looking at the Loch Ness Monster.
If an object is halfway across the loch or further, clarity is unlikely to be available without the aid of binoculars or some known frame of reference like a nearby structure. People may indeed imagine certain features are visible based on a needless extrapolation of the little visual data they have. So, some will err on the side of caution but others will believe it could be the famous inhabitant of the loch. But it has usually been the case that such long distance accounts are not presented as the best evidence anyway unless some other factors come into play.
The person who posted these original texts did so anonymously, and little wonder as I wouldn't be publicly admitting that I owned them either. So I will end here and let other Nessie fans swallow this Jonah than wade through further objections myself but also as I'm on admin alert this week checking out game cameras to set up soon for the winter!
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
