The Inverness Courier yesterday published an image from Google Maps which had been spotted by a Julie Fraser which caught my attention. The text of the article is as follows:
Loch Ness Monster spotted from space? Possible Nessie sighting made in Google Earth and Google Maps satellite images
Has Nessie been spotted from space? One eagle-eyed future tourist looking to research a visit to Inverness certainly thinks so. For, in what has already been a busy year for potential Nessie sightings, the latest possible snapshot has been made on Google Earth. And not only is there one mysterious object in the water, but three - a “little family of Nessies”, said Julie Fraser after making the discovery.
She has now reported the images to The Official Loch Ness Sightings Register and is waiting back to hear back to find out if they will be recorded as the 17th potential sighting of the legendary beast made this year. At the time of writing, 14 in-person encounters have been officially recorded in 2026, with two further sightings made digitally through webcams of the iconic loch. If accepted, Julie’s sighting will be the third one made digitally since January. Speaking to The Inverness Courier, Julie, who is from the north-east of England, said:
“Last weekend I opened Google Earth to look around the Clan Fraser cemetery on the east shore of the loch - I'm planning a visit to Inverness later in the year and was just playing when I spotted the three objects. Taking a closer look and enlarging the images they really do look like a pod of whales. Obviously there's no specific date but there's a Google 2026 and the trees are in full leaf so it's recent. There's an image of a pleasure boat with a wake but no wake from the three things. They don't like like boats and look like whales or something similar with an arc to their back. I'm not a crank. I'm not as familiar as probably local people but it definitely looks like something significant to me.”
She continued:
"The Loch Ness Sightings got in touch yesterday and said they're going to have a look. I had a look yesterday and they're still there. The thought of a little family of Nessies is so exciting."
When I last checked the Loch Ness Sightings webpage, it was not listed but when I looked at the image, my first impression was "kayakers" but I decided to look further into the image which was still available on Google Maps. The location of the three objects is off the shoreline at a point almost exactly halfway between Whitefield and Dores on the south side of the loch.
The entire loch area is actually a patchwork of different satellite images stitched together over some time period and so the particular sub-image in which the objects appears is of a different shade and water texture to areas elsewhere. No other objects are seen on the loch in that particular sub-image and one cannot be sure whether the nearest boat to the objects in the next sub-image was there days, weeks before or after them. However, what is the same is the scale of the whole picture.
First, an estimate of the sizes of the objects was required. I did a max zoom into the objects which provided a 10 metres "ruler" on Google Maps. I first measured the total length of each object knowing that some of that might be water disturbance. From left to right the lengths were rounded up to 7.1m, 6.8m and 6.8m which were pretty similar results.
However, each object did not look the same and indeed each of them had a kind of broken and segmented look to them. So an estimate of the longest unbroken segment for each came out as 5.2m, 5.9m and 3.5m. As a double check, I looked for an object on the loch which was of a known length. That turned out to be the "Spirit of Loch Ness" cruise boat docked at Fort Augustus. It's length is 21m which gave size estimates for the three objects of 6.0m to 7.5m or 19.7ft to 24.6ft.
An estimate of the distance of the rightmost object from the south shore was made and this came out to about 185m while the distance between the objects was about 12m. So the first thing to ask is if the objects are actually on the surface of the loch? Since there is no indication of any wakes to signify this, one has to consider whether they are above the loch? I consider them too small to be clouds when comparing them against what are obviously clouds in the overall image. If they were birds, one would expect to see wings and the same goes for airplanes. So we will take them to be at the surface of the loch.
Did they look like anything else on the loch? Here is a compilation of what else was in the complete image of Loch Ness. They are all boats of varying sizes and I had a pretty good look but did not see anything else that was unusual. The three objects look nothing like these boats and so I considered logs and birds. It seemed unlikely that three long logs would be floating parallel to the shoreline at almost the same distance apart.
Could they be three lines of birds? Well that was more plausible than logs and better explained the segmented look to the objects. That is, each "node" of the segment could be a bird. However, even the smallest node came out at 80cm long. Or perhaps they are a very isolated set of wave effects? What that could be and whether one could find a prior image example to prove it, I don't know.
Then I came back to the kayakers. A typical kayak on the loch would be about 3m to 4m long and would generally have the thin long shapes we see on the image. Unfortunately, I scanned the Google Maps image of the loch for any sign of kayakers and found nothing that I could compare against the three objects. Undeterred I swept the map southwards towards the popular boating resort of Loch Lomond looking for the telltale torpedo shape of a kayaker. I found some candidate images though one could not be definitive that it truly was a kayak. Be that as it may, one image at the same scale is below.
We see two kayaks of the same length progressing towards the shore and they both come in at about 4.5m each or up to 3m short of the longest object. The other difference lies in their relative appearances. As expected, the two kayaks have a more solid appearance to them in contrast to the broken appearance of the three objects. I would finally add that 185m from the shore seems a long distance on Loch Ness for kayakers. The trail cameras I run by the loch have shown many kayakers passing by over the years and they are all close to the shore for safety purposes. I do not recall seeing any out this far.
Having looked at the "normal" explanations, if there were three large animals in Loch Ness (which I obviously believe), what would they look like? The estimated lengths are in keeping with was has been reported over the decades. Indeed, a length of 6m to 7m is at the lower end of what cryptozoologists estimate for the animal. However, one would expect a more solid appearance like the kayaks and perhaps of a darker hue.
One could speculate the segmented appearance from above could consist of the tip of the tail, two or more humps and finally the head. But then again, there is no indication of a bulbous body or the long neck so beloved of Nessie theorists. However, the absence of wakes is consistent with reported behaviour. Unlike the boats, which tend to keep moving, these animals are at perfect liberty to slow to a stop. But overall the images are a bit of a conundrum whatever angle they are looked at and further comments are invited to suggest other possible explanations.
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com