Thoughts on the Torquil MacLeod Land Sighting

I have not really blogged on this well known sighting from 1960 by Torquil MacLeod. I covered it in my land sightings book, but an email question from a longtime blog member and student of the LNM phenomenon led me to update the subject. The story is familiar to fans of the beast and was first published anonymously in Tim Dinsdale's book "Loch Ness Monster". Around 3:30pm on February 28th 1960, Torquil stopped his car south of  Invermoriston to check out an object on the opposite shore on the Horseshoe Scree.

Upon turning my glasses on the moving object, I saw a large grey black mass (I am inclined to think the skin was wet and dry in patches) and at the front there was what looked like an outsize in elephant’s trunks. Paddles were visible on both sides, but only at what I presumed was the rear end, and it was this end (remote from the "trunk"), which tapered off into the water. The animal was on a steep slope, and taking its backbone as an approximate straight line, was inclined about 15-20 degrees out of my line of sight: the "trunk" being at the top and to the left, and the tail at the bottom, in the water, to the right....

For about 8 or 9 minutes the animal remained quite still, but for its "trunk" (I assume neck, although I could not recognize a head as such) which occasionally moved from side to side with a slight up and down motion—just like a snake about to strike; but quite slowly. It was, to my mind, obviously scanning the shores of the loch in each direction. In the end it made a sort of half jump - half lurch to the left, its "trunk" coming right round until it was facing me, then it flopped into the water and apparently went straight down; so it must be very deep close inshore at that point. As it turned I saw distinctly a large squarish ended flipper forward of the big rear paddles—or flippers: call them what you will, but not legs. I did not see the end of the tail at any time, but the animal looked something like this ...

One of the sketches which appeared in the same book is shown at the top of this article. It looks like a binocular's eye view with the lens graticulates visible as well. Now I agree with others who have pointed out that a creature of that size at that distance of one mile would not fill so much of the binocular field of view. However, I do not think this is something suspicious or incriminating for we see this same use of "artistic license" elsewhere in Dinsdale's book as seen in the "binocular" view of his own sighting which led to his famous film a few weeks later.

Dinsdale spotted his creature at a similar distance away as Torquil and it certainly would not have filled the view of his binoculars either. I also suspect the angle of incidence in this sketch is too large. My theory is that someone on the publisher's editorial team was taking liberties with how binocular sketches were framed. The error is repeated over ten years later when Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story" has a similar illustration. Here the artist also decides to reduce the number of graticulates from five to three. Now I am no expert on how many graticulates the various makes and models of binoculars came with, but I am sure it didn't vary with the same item.

But moving on, my esteemed colleague had emailed asking me what part of the Horseshoe Scree the monster had been seen by Torquil. Not knowing the answer myself, I read the original account again and came to the conclusion that Torquil MacLeod's monster had not been on the Horseshoe Scree at all, but somewhere else. I quote further from Torquil MacLeod's account:

I was able to pinpoint both my own and the animal's position on the 1 inch ordnance map (1 inch to the mile), the distance being approximately 1,700 yards - to within 50 yards. The animal was near a burn marked on the map, and I was only yards away from a house which was also marked - hence the accurate pinpoint.

That struck me as a curious statement. Here below is a beautiful view of the scree (or craig) from the opposite shoreline that my fellow Nessie fan pointed me to. It is one of the most distinctive natural features around the loch - yet MacLeod uses an unnamed stream as his frame of reference to pinpoint the creature's location and not the clear and unmistakable contours of the horseshoe.

Credit: geograph.org.uk

In fact, in his letter to Tim (reproduced in Dinsdale's book) and another letter he wrote to Constance Whyte quoted in Witchell's book, Torquil makes no reference to the Horseshoe Craig in either. So where exactly did MacLeod see this massive beast? Looking at my ordnance survey map of the southern part of the loch, no stream is marked on the Horseshoe, but somewhere is a stream that Torquil explicitly references.

Clearly, Nessie was not doing whatever Nessies do on the scree. I brought up Google Maps to show the streams nearest  to the scree. The burn called "Stream 1" is about 340 metres from the southernmost part of the scree, while "Stream 2" is about 750 metres away. The "Stream 3" is the furthest at 1600 metres north of the scree. Since MacLeod states he was 2.5 miles out of Invermoriston when he saw his monster, I have also measured out that distance using Google's "Directions" feature.

But how do we determine which of these three streams the creature was near? I noted that Tim Dinsdale in his book reproduced a survey map to accompany his week of watching around the loch between the 18th and 23rd of April 1960. His diary mentioned him hearing of a man who had seen the monster partly out of the water "near a place called the 'horse shoe' ...". On his map Tim marks the location of some notable land sightings without naming them. There is one dot beside the annotation "Horse Shoe" which could only be that of Torquil Macleod but since the map is about six miles to the inch, it lacks the required accuracy to pinpoint the location.

In fact, I am not sure Tim knew the exact location himself if he relied solely on Torquil's letter, who would become seriously ill with cancer and sadly died just before the book was published in May 1961. Thus more detailed information on the subject may have passed away with him. So we must return to MacLeod's direct testimony and some number crunching where he stated:

I was able to pinpoint both my own and the animal's position on the 1 inch ordnance map (1 inch to the mile), the distance being approximately 1,700 yards - to within 50 yards. The animal was near a burn marked on the map, and I was only yards away from a house which was also marked - hence the accurate pinpoint.

Torquil on his map had the house near him marked as well as the stream beside the creature. Given that, it is no surprise that he confidently states a distance with an accuracy of less than 3% and that should be our main guidance in this matter. A distance of 1700 +/- 50 yards equates to 1554 +/- 46 metres. If we take the end of the 2.5 miles distance as our location for Torquil, which of the three streams is the closest to his estimated distance?

So "Stream 3" is closest at 1620 metres followed by "Stream 1" at 1720 metres and "Stream 2" at 2120 metres. Of course, it partly depends on how accurate the 2.5 miles statement is. I double checked the numbers using a good old fashioned inches ruler on a 1.25 miles to the inch paper ordnance survey map. Curiously, that gave me 1600, 1770 and 2170 metres respectively, which I think I would trust more than Google. 

The only way to make this work for the stream nearest to the Horseshoe (stream 1) is to draw out 1700 yards onto the nearest point on Torquil's road and measure that distance to Invermoriston. That comes to 2.8 miles instead of 2.5 miles. If MacLeod knew exactly where he was, I would think he figured out the miles from Invermoriston. Now the Google Street View places us about 180m south of the entrance to the Loch Ness Highland Cottages. The view of the loch is quite good here especially if one also expects less foliage in February 1960.

The other point to note is that the angle of viewing for our favoured stream is as good as the other streams. If viewing directly opposite is an angle of zero degrees and ninety degrees is basically looking down the same shoreline then our stream is just over 40 degrees as is stream 1 but stream 2 is 55 degrees, so it is at no disadvantage there. So what does the area around this stream look like? Over to Google's Loch Ness boat view.

The stream is just slightly left of centre here and with a steep slope and paucity of foliage, it fits with MacLeod's description of the creature lying on the slope. You could pick left or right of the stream, but the left of the stream looks a barer patch to me for a monster to lie on. Of course, who knows what it looked like in 1960. But does this conclusion change anything else about the story? Various people including myself have written previously on this and made our deductions and speculations.

For myself as I looked over the relevant chapter in my book "When Monsters come Ashore", I saw some minor errors but nothing substantial. Others such as Ronald Binns and Dick Raynor had expressed their opinions on what MacLeod saw. Binns' "man in a boat" theory did not seem affected but I was uncertain about Raynor's "herd of feral goats" theory.

He postulated that a group of such animals had congregated up the side of the slope to form a clump looking Nessie-like from a mile away. Aside from existing counter-arguments, it seemed to me that this new proposed location was set on a less steep slope than the Horseshoe. I reckoned the Horseshoe had a gradient of up to 60 degrees while the new location was more like 40 degrees. This would flatten the appearance of a clump of goats to an observer on the other side - assuming goats are ever seen there.

There are some unanswered questions such as what map Torquil used as I do not see the proposed stream on some contemporary OS maps. When I am next at the loch, I will conduct a further investigation at the location. To finish, I overlaid Torquil's monster onto the location with a guesstimate of relative size!

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Marmaduke Wetherell's Monster Tracks

 

It was before Christmas 1933, that big game hunter, Marmaduke Wetherell, announced through his sponsors, the Daily Mail, that he had found tracks of a large animal on the shores of Loch Ness. By the first week of January 1934, the Natural History Museum declared them to belong to a hippopotamus and the whole expedition suffered some reputational damage, shall we say.

Years later, Alastair Boyd tracked the origins of the tracks to a hippo foot ashtray now in the possession of Wetherell's grandson. The only question remaining of real interest was where this hoax had been perpetrated? The answer would seem to be anywhere on the south side of the loch, but there are some indicators which can help locate the spot.

Various newspaper reports of the time talk about a spot "between Dores and Foyers" (Highland News, 23rd December 1933) but others are more specific in placing it in the "vicinity of Foyers" (Scotsman, same date). While one outlier states it was found on a "beach near Glen Doe" (Northern Chronicle, 8th August 1934). Prior to "finding" the tracks, Wetherell had spent three days on the road by car and then patrolling the shores by boat in pursuit of monster evidence. The Aberdeen Press and Journal for 26th December 1933 clipping below summarized events leading up to the tracks.

Now having considered the various contemporary accounts, I would conclude the term "between Dores and Foyers" refers to the main search area and references to Foyers are the location of the spoors. But that is not enough to identify the precise location. For that we need photographs and we start with the one published at the time and show at the top of this article. Here we see Wetherell right of centre examining one of the spoors. 

The scene actually looks reminiscent of the rocky and sloped surface of the Horseshoe Scree, which is only accessible by boat and would be consistent with the one newspaper which mentioned Glendoe as the location. However, the beach below him looks too wide to me for that location. But if we consider the area below Foyers, one would conclude that Wetherell wanted a location away from human activity which would preclude the area near the now former Aluminium Works adjacent to the current modern hydro-electric power station.

However, the aforementioned Aberdeen Press and Journal furnishes further evidence by printing a photo of the shoreline where the tracks occurred. It carries the title "The beach of Loch Ness near Foyers where the spoor of the 'monster' is alleged to have been found". 

Now is this enough to locate the beach today? I would say "probably" and would start by saying that some of the largest boulders in this picture likely haven't moved an inch in the last ninety-two years. The lone, bare Winter tree is likely a massive item now and the contours of the shore line may have altered, but not significantly, though the rising and falling of the loch levels throughout the year needs to be taken into account.

Potential candidates, based on my own walks around that area could be the shoreline immediately below the Loch Ness Shores campsite, although the slope from there down to the beach is less pronounced than that seen in the picture at the top. The better candidate may be the beach further south, on the other side of the cemetery backing the camp site. It has a high gradient slope to it and has a big rocky beach. 

It would also not be accessible from the road, hence being consistent with being found on the latter day from a boat. I would add that I have held the opinion for some time now that Wetherell took the Surgeon's Photograph near that spot. That article can be found here. So, does the criminal return to the scene of the crime? In this case, it would seem so!

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The Diver and the Unseen Eyes

It was a story that had always stuck in my mind back in the 1970s when I read it as a kid in Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story". At the end of chapter five, it is briefly stated that:

Beppo, a famous circus clown went for a dive in the loch and was dragged out delirious, mumbling about "unseen eyes" looking at him from slimy black depths ...

Without further information, I jokingly assumed that this person had jumped into the loch for some clownish publicity, getting some good propulsion from those long clown shoes only to see something which was far from humorous looking straight back at him before he scrambled back to the surface. It turned out to be more complex than that as I attempt to do it more justice today.

Witchell had been summing up the hunt for the Monster up to the end of the 1950s, when this incident occurred. It was an in-between decade as wartime austerity drew to a close by 1954 and prosperity and hence tourism grew into 1959. The first book for twenty three years on the subject was published in 1957 by Constance Whyte which stoked new interest in the creature. The following year, the BBC came to the loch to produce the first serious documentary on the subject and a Herman Cockrell took some pictures of the beast during a kayak expedition. This prompted a Peter MacNab to come forward with his own mysterious photo from 1955.

Participation was on the rise again which leads us to August 1959 when the famous Bertram Mills circus came to Inverness. After a week of performances there, it was decided to mount a diving operation to look for the monster. The Inverness Courier from the 18th August 1959 sets the scene for the events of Friday the 14th:

John Newbold, a 31-year-old circus clown from Staffordshire, had a narrow escape from death when wearing a frogman's suit and aqua-lungs, he dived into Loch Ness on Friday morning to see if he could find some evidence of the existence of the famous Monster. Newbold, known professionally as Beppo, had been appearing at the Bertram Mills Circus at Inverness last week, and on Friday he went with Mr Bernard Mills on the latter's 35-ton motor yacht Centaurus, to Dores Bay. An experienced high-diver and swimmer, he had made several practice dives in the previous few days before Friday's attempt. As a precaution, the skipper of the yacht, Mr John Bruce (48), of Campbeltown. took up position in a motor boat, not far from the place where Newbold made his dive, and a member of the crew, Mr George Nicholson (34), of Southampton. was nearby in a rowing boat.

The picture at the top shows Newbold in his frogman equipment prior to the dive. This was printed in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on the 15th August, which relates what happened next:

Johnnie ... had plunged into the eerie, dark waters of the "hoodoo" loch in his frogman's outfit. When he surfaced, he collapsed unconscious. He is detained in the Royal Northern Infirmary, Inverness, for observation after having received a sedative. His condition last night was "satisfactory". It was a chance in a thousand that saved Johnnie's life. As he went unconscious after making a desperate attempt to grab the side of a small rescue boat, he was caught by the little finger as his limp body was slipping back into the water.

The Press and Journal photographer who accompanied the dive took this picture as Newbold attempted to get out of the water. The Courier article added its own words as shown below.

Newbold, whose breathing apparatus permitted a 13 minute dive, was submerged for about ten minutes, and when he surfaced Bruce saw that something had gone wrong. He brought his boat to Newbold, and managed to get a hold of him. Nicholson moved over, but their attempts to bring Newbold aboard were hampered by the aqua-lung equipment. Eventually a rope was put round him, and he was brought aboard the yacht. He was semi-conscious and delirious, and the yacht put about, and went back to Dochgarroch Pier. Newbold was rushed by car to the Royal Northern Infirmary, where he received treatment and was detained overnight, leaving hospital on Saturday afternoon.

The drama of the situation was further captured as Newbold lay on the deck and was heard to mutter the words "The water, the water. I'll make it. I'll make it" amongst other incoherent words. As the crew watched, the Journal states that he then "threw out his arms as if trying to get to his feet". As he "shivered violently" he was wrapped in blankets and put in the bunk as they raced to shore.

So what had happened down below in the murky depths? Months later, in late March 1960, the popular Australian magazine "Weekend" published an article entitled "He Fought the Horror of Loch Ness" accompanied by a dramatic illustration of Newbold tackling a tentacled beast in something reminiscent of a giant octopus attack from "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas". I have not seen the illustration, but if anyone can find it, I will include it with thanks!

The Press and Journal article did not go down that path as it related how the men on the surface tracked the air bubbles, counting the minutes towards the thirteen minute limit. It was not until about the eleventh or twelfth minute that Newbold "shot to the surface". The newspaper speculated that he dived too deep, for too long and had ascended too quickly. Given the seriousness of the situation, light-hearted speculation about monsters would seem out of place.

On his discharge from hospital, the Inverness Courier correspondent got some information from a now more lucid Newbold:

Newbold stated on Saturday that he had had a frightening experience. He had dived to a depth of about 30 feet, and then went down a further 30 or 40 feet. It was very dark below, but he noticed something which appeared to be a thick ribbon of white-coloured slime, and he went to investigate it. It was very eerie and forbidding, he said, and looking up he could see no light at all. He had the impression that eyes were watching him, and he went straight to the surface, and remembered nothing more until he recovered consciousness in hospital. Newbold added that he doubted if he would ever again make another attempt to dive into Loch Ness, and he certainly would not do it alone. 

At a depth of about seventy feet, one is pretty much surrounded by darkness. In fact, disorientation may set in without a frame of reference such as the touch of the bed or sides of the loch. Quite what made him think he was being watched may be the paradoxical psychology of utter blackness - who can see who in darkness? Having said that, one presumes John had some kind of torch with him, though it is not stated as far as I know. Finally, a newspaper local to Newbold, the Staffordshire Sentinel, spoke to him for its 17th August edition:

He went down to 30ft., levelled out, and then plunged another 30ft. to look for his prey. Suddenly he noticed the water all around him was black and the only thing he could distinguish in the gloom was a patch of whitish coloured slime ahead of him. He swam towards it, and as he was about to start investigating it he suddenly had "a queer and most frightening feeling." He looked up, but could see no shadow on the water. That decided him to get out of the water quickly, and experts now believe that his state of semi-collapse was brought about by surfacing too quickly. 

But what about that lurid Australian article? It was discussed in "The People" newspaper for 28th March 1960 which quoted this account from down under:

He suddenly realised there was a certain slimy something between himself and the surface. When he pushed against it the object turned with the motion of a fish. The magazine went on:

"It was then that something like the tentacle of an octopus gripped his right leg. The object was long and slimy and about the circumference of a man's leg. The armlike object was twisted twice around his leg and the leg was growing dead from lack of circulation. Newbold could not move it, and terror began to grip him as he felt himself being taken into deep water."

The article goes on to describe how, eventually, Newbold, gasping for breath as his air supply failed, managed to free himself from the monster's grip and shoot to the surface. It also describes how doctors who examined Newbold's right leg found "a vicious red circle from the ankle to just below the knee."

And how he was given treatment in a decompression chamber to prevent an attack of "bends", the dangerous condition suffered by divers when they surface too rapidly. 

Douglas Jack, the author of The People article, tracked down John Newbold in Stafford, who told him:

I don't know where the Australians got their story from. Apart from the fact that I saw dense layers of slime about 70 feet below the surface, nothing else happened. There was no tentacle around my leg and no injury. The only struggle I had was getting myself to the surface before my last gasp came. As I may one day go on tour in Australia, I can only hope that people who have read this nonsense about my dive won't think that I am the hoaxer.

Jack confesses that he does not know how that version of the story reached Australia. No one seemed to know, either in Australia where the article was inspired, or in London. So ends the story of John Newbold and what do I personally make of this account? It is perfectly reasonable to see how the foreboding darkness and diminishing supply of oxygen is enough to explain what happened that day. If there was a large creature lurking nearby, we and he are none the wiser.

But the one objective thing that requires an explanation is what is called "slime" floating seventy foot down in the darkness. The various accounts describe it as "a thick ribbon of white-coloured slime", "a patch of whitish coloured slime" and "dense layers of slime". What we normally understand by slime is the mucus that coats animals such as eels, frogs and snails which offers various advantages in locomotion, protection and so on.

That outer layer of slime, like the skin underneath can be shed by certain animals at certain times. How that relates to John Newbold's account is not certain as the size and extent of the slime is not described. Bigger animals leave bigger slime trails or sheddings but there should not be much floating around in that dark area of water seventy feet near the thermocline. Small amounts of detritus from small fish may float around but ribbons of slime is a different matter and dense layers of slime sounds off the scale. Moreover, fish tend not to shed slime unless in a stressful situation.

So this is perhaps a bit of a puzzler in and of itself unless it is not slime but looked like it from a distance. Was it entanglements of decaying vegetable or organic material, fecal matter or some garbage dumped from a boat? Explanations such as masses of algae bloom do not count in such an oligotrophic lake. We weren't there and so if John Newbold said it was slime, I'll accept that. There was some news a while back of some whitish organic material found in the loch, but I could not find details. If anyone has information on that, I will add it here.

Tentacles may not have gripped our terrified diver but Newbold saw something which still needs explaining.

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The Loch Ness Monster in Italian

I have a few illustrations depicting aquatic cryptids from the Italian magazine "La Domenica Del Corriere" which translates to "The Sunday Courier". According to Wikipedia it "was an Italian weekly newspaper which ran from 1899 to 1989. It came out every Sunday free with Corriere Della Sera, but was also sold separately. It was famous for its cover drawings ...". The picture above was published on the 25th July 1954 and was produced by the artist G. De Gaspari. The text below the picture translated into English is:

Summer returns. Coinciding with the resumption of the tourist season, it was announced again this year that the famous "monster", first sighted 20 years ago, has emerged from the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland. Here's what it looks like, according to the somewhat fanciful account of a waitress at a small hotel on the lakeshore. A natural wonder? Or simply a publicity stunt?

The depiction of the Loch Ness Monster can at best be described as imaginative and looks more like the Godzilla that was to debut in Japanese cinemas a few months later. We have a woman in a waitress uniform apparently picking flowers by the loch shore only to be terrorized by the appearance of a gigantic beast. Though it is not gigantic as the large dead tree dominating the centre of the picture. What was the artist trying to say with this intrusion?

Maybe waitresses at Loch Ness have a penchant for wearing their work clothes when going out for floral walks? Who knows, but I thought I would look for any contemporary newspaper reports on the incident suspecting what they published would be somewhat different to the Italian rendition. Sure enough, ten or so newspapers ran the story across Britain and I show the clipping from the Inverness Courier dated the 13th July 1954.

Our waitress turns out to be twenty-one year old Margaret MacDonald who worked at the Lewiston Arms Hotel. However, she was in a rowing boat with a young man and not picking flowers in her work clothes. The distance of several hundred yards is a bit far though the several minutes in view allows for a decent amount of time to assess what one is looking at - three humps and a head on a long neck (checking other newspaper reports). Though it was an evening sighting, the sun sets after 10pm in mid-July. 

However, we can be fairly sure it wasn't green, scaly, bearing rows of teeth with strange head protrusions as the Italian publication claimed "it looks like". Sceptics will often try and portray newspaper reporters as exaggerating what eyewitnesses reported. Maybe they should focus their attention on publications like La Domenica Del Corriere!

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A Recent Trip to Loch Ness

Early on Friday 29th May, it was a three hour drive from Edinburgh up to Loch Ness. After picking up a couple of cameras left at the loch over the Summer, I made my way over to "base camp". Since the first organised "Quest" by the Loch Ness Centre just over two years ago, a small band of like minded people had been growing and meeting together to do a bit of "monster hunting".

The camp was a knot of three tents north of Invermoriston occupied by four fellow Glaswegians (Chris, Paul, William and Alastair) and local man Jared with his daughter. We were later joined by Dave from Birmingham and LNE (Loch Ness Exploration) leader, Alan MacKenna. Matty and Aga would later join us along with two Australian Nessie fans, Callum and Kyra. So, a good little group to get some Nessie work done.

Having ascertained respective Glasgow football team allegiances with Paul, Chris and William with the ensuing chat and banter, we went down to the shore from the encampment to check out the shoreline. Now this beach differed somewhat from other shorelines I had explored at the loch as it had this older protrusion of rock jutting out from the usual shingle.

This is where some qualified geologist would explain what kind of rock this is and its possible origins. I must do an introductory course on geology. Anyway, we resolved to come back during the night hours and do some thermal camera work. Before this, YouTuber Ellie Whitby had arrived with her filming assistant, Anna. They were going to record some of our research and shenanigans over the weekend for a future video presentation.

Now I have to say that Alan has a thing about standing waves and has been looking to get some decent video footage of one making its way down the loch. Some eyewitnesses have been fooled by this phenomenon, the debate is over how much they have. While we awaited Alan's arrival at the camp, we saw one such wave forming and travelling. It required the presence of two RIB speed boats making their way down the loch in parallel at a good pace. You can see it to the centre left in the frame capture below.

Note also the lattice pattern of the water between the wave and trees indicating a classic area of constructive and destructive wave patterns from two vessels (below). As the boats passed us and they were neck and neck, the standing wave actually formed between them and for a short time proceeded with them before going into reverse and heading in the opposite direction to the boats. Once the boats were out of sight and sound, it persisted for a short time and one could imagine that a person who just turned up at that point would be puzzled by it.

The giveaway was obviously the boats, but in their absence it would have been the lattice wave patterns which betrayed a prior confluence of boat wakes as well as the lesser waves that accompanied the main standing wave. A standing wave is not a standalone wave, it moves in the midst of clues to indicate its true nature. The height to length ratio of this wave also falls far short of the higher Nessie humps reported by eyewitnesses.

Alan did turn up just as the standing wave died out - that is almost as bad as turning up just to see Nessie submerge in a mass of disturbed water! Well, we know when and where the speed boats passed and since they are daily commercial boats, Alan may yet see a second show. Now, after heading into Drumnadrochit to check into my accommodation and dinner, it was back to the shoreline at night time.

Heading through the torchlit undergrowth to the shore, it was pitch dark out on the loch without the help of the FLIR thermal camera. Nothing was stirring in the loch but the darkness allowed magnificent views of the Milky Way straddling the sky above as well as some shooting stars. There was also some strange effects of the clouds over to the south lighting up in the direction of Whitebridge, but it wasn't lightning and was more like someone had briefly flashed a big searchlight from somewhere beyond the hills.

There was also some flashing lights on the opposite shoreline, but that was deduced to be some equipment left at a construction site. Before then, I had recalled Paul Devereux's "Earth Lights" for those that remember him. All told, it was an interesting night of observations but no monster appeared in the sight of any thermal device. 

Come Saturday morning, Adrian Shine was around and some of the group wanted to meet him for the first time. I can't remember how many times Adrian and I had met for a chat, but there is always something new to discuss, so I made my way over to the Drumnadrochit Hotel. We had a good chat and a few copies of his recent Sea Serpent book were visible for signing by him. We had a discussion about the earliest Nessie publications as Adrian was doing some research into the people of that period.

That primarily involved publications from the now defunct Fort Augustus Abbey and a man called James Carruth and his 1938 booklet on the creature. To Adrian's surprise I mentioned an earlier Abbey booklet called "The Mysterious Monster of Loch Ness" from 1934 by a different author. The one Abbey book that we both would have loved to have seen was the one that another monk by the name of Cyril Dieckhoff would have published if not for his untimely death. A proportion of that work subsequently appeared in Constance Whyte's book, "More Than A Legend". What is not clear is how much of that work appeared in her book.

A discussion on sonar ensued as Adrian is the local expert on that and monster aspirations for its use. He emphasised the need for calibrating sonar devices used at the loch to better estimate what a contact may be showing. That I had realised, but the question I had for him was to confirm that anything below a boat and its sonar to a depth of up to ten metres is effectively invisible to the sonar. He confirmed this but thought up to a depth of five metres was more accurate. Can the monster swim just below the surface with impunity to blinded sonar devices? Now there is something to think about!

However, the news from the campsite was that the Glasgow boys had had an unusual experience after we had all left for bed the night before. About 2AM, they were chatting away with a drink or two in hand when a huge splashing noise startled them from the shoreline down below. Not surprisingly, they were not too keen to go down and investigate the matter. Before anyone begins to think about the hallucinatory properties of alcohol, one of the chaps is teetotal.

This required some investigation and later we were back at the shoreline. There was nothing around that could be connected with the noise but if it had occurred further out in the loch, nothing probably should have been expected. Either way, we had our alcohol-averse colleague sit where they had been at night while we tossed various rocks into the water down below. We would then get his response from above as to how that sounded compared to the "big splash".

The first moderately sized rock we tossed in, he did not hear it from the tents. A larger one of about 10kg he did hear but it was a lot quieter than the 2AM noise. We stopped there realizing we needed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to throw something larger a sufficient distance into the loch to take this experiment further.

So what caused the noise? If one was of a sceptical disposition, then a nearby illegal fly tipper getting rid of commercial rubbish would probably be suggested. Now people throwing rubbish down the slopes of the loch is a problem, but this is more of a simplistic solution than a simple one. The first issue is the location as the loch shoreline is a fair distance from the road which suggests getting heavy duty items like a fridge from a van to the "tipping point" is a bit of an arduous task.

Secondly, anything tipped over would not hit the loch due to the presence of the beach below to arrest its fall. Indeed, the loch tends to gradually begin as shallow before it hits the underwater ledge a fair distance out. In other words, any fridge being tipped over is much more likely to greet unsuspecting people with a rocky crash than a mighty splash.

Now there are spots where it is more or less a sheer drop into the depths such as by the Horseshoe Scree. But that spot would be over 3 miles away to the south of the camp. A boulder rolling down into such a spot cannot be totally discounted, it is just that big boulders generally have not moved from their spot for thousands of years and it would take a major earthquake to shift them! So maybe it was our monster, but we shall never know for sure.

After this, it was time for some more experimentation of a more complex variety as Alan had put together an underwater camera device to try out near the castle. So as darkness once again descended, we drove north to that area. The waters found were sufficiently deep and accessible to lower the contraption into the water. It was baited with some fish innards to entice anything over to the vicinity of the camera. 

This wasn't just a matter of trying to photograph the whites of Nessie's eyes. It was to prove the technology and see how it could be improved. Also, with the filming of a pike nearby in May, the recording of these relatively large creatures would have also been a good outcome. However, nothing of note was recorded in the short time it was submerged. A further attempt will be made in a future visit to the loch. The thermal cams were out again but nothing significant was recorded there either (below).

That is how the night ended and the next morning we all met at the campsite again for breakfast and to say our goodbyes. I finished the day exploring some well known monster spots and leaving some trail cams, but I will leave a discussion on that for another post.

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Some Recent Comments on the Munro Land Sighting

 

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

Ted Holiday's Last Unpublished Book

 

For me personally, this story goes back to 2018 trying to access this manuscript with a view to the cryptozoological world reading this work by one of the most notable researchers on the Loch Ness Monster. Ted Holiday died in 1979, but before then he had at least two unpublished works which ended up in the hands of the well-known paranormal author, Colin Wilson.

The two men were friends and corresponded on matters related to UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and so on over the years. Indeed, Holiday had been involved in the investigation of UFO reports in Wales and had co-published a book on the subject called "The Dyfed Enigma" with Randall Jones Pugh just months before his fatal heart attack. 

Colin Wilson considered the two manuscripts, and with the permission of Ted's mother, published one manuscript in 1990 entitled "The Goblin Universe". This could be said to be the logical conclusion to his prior book, "The Dragon and the Disc" where Holiday began to explore what he saw as the paranormal aspects of the creature in Loch Ness.

But Colin did not take the other manuscript any further. In his introduction to "The Goblin Universe", he says that Ted had sent the "Goblin" manuscript to him in 1977 but had written back some months later saying he was dissatisfied with it and was scrapping it in favour of another book. After his death, Wilson wrote to Holiday's mother asking if he had left any other manuscripts and he received one in the post some days later. He continues:

I tore it open eagerly - and discovered, to my disappointment, that it was the typescript of a book about lake monsters. It contained much important and fascinating material, but simply lacked the daring range and sweep of The Goblin Universe.

Colin thought the underwater photos taken by Robert Rines and the Academy of Applied Science in 1975 had cast doubt in Holiday's mind about an intangible creature and hence the two differing manuscripts. Back in the 1970s, the intense interest in the Loch Ness Monster had spun off publications on other aquatic cryptids. Holiday would have been following in the steps of Peter Costello and his 1974 book, "In Search of Lake Monsters" and Tim Dinsdale's 1966 work, "The Leviathans".

But it never reached the publishers and one can but speculate that Ted Holiday would have had much to say on the matter of lake monsters in that document. Apart from the obligatory sections on the main cryptid of Loch Ness, we know that Holiday also spent time amongst the small lakes of Ireland. Beyond that, could more be found out?

By the time I began to look into the matter, it turned out that Colin Wilson had sadly died some years before in 2013. That may have been enough to call it a day, but on further investigation I managed to contact a friend of Colin who had been involved in sorting out his estate. He got back to me in April 2018 informing me that there was a box full of material from Ted Holiday which included letters, slides, diagrams and photographs.

It also contained three manuscripts entitled "Goblin Universe", "The Dyfed Enigma" and "The Paradox of Monsters". The last title must have been the work on lake monsters which never saw the light of day. I asked how I may be able to view the items and offered to help them deposit the materials in an appropriate and respected archive house where researchers could access the items. 

The initial problem was that the materials were hundreds of miles away in the South of England and could only be viewed there. Progress then became slow at this point. The correspondent, on behalf of Colin Wilson's surviving relations, had contacted one archive to enquire about deposition but had got no reply. By the end of July, another archive had expressed an interest and it was left in the hands of the relatives.

By September, I was told the items were boxed and ready for transportation and my hopes of seeing Ted Holiday's unpublished research heightened. But by January 2019, the archive in question told me nothing had been received. The correspondent said it was now down to Colin's relatives to finish the job.

By August 2019, I took a different tack and managed to make contact with one of Colin's relatives. She replied and confirmed the box was ready for posting and would check it out. Once we got to March 2020, there was no progress and the Covid-19 lockdowns were now in effect and I decided to step back and let more important events run their course.

Sadly, no further contact was established after that. A recent attempt to try again did not succeed so I am left wondering if the cryptid community will ever get their chance to see what is effectively Ted Holiday's last words on these mysterious creatures? 

Where does one go from here? I can think of various reasons why things have stalled but in the end I do not think this is something I can progress on my own. Hence this posting and as some may know of me, I have sometimes expressed regret that so many archives of leading researchers just disappear when they die. Sure, almost all the important stuff will be in their published works, but not all as "The Paradox of Monsters" will demonstrate. Moreover, this would not have been Ted Holiday's main archive.

I had expressed a desire to put that manuscript into a PDF and make it freely available to all but I now realise that is not my decision to make as it potentially belongs to Ted Holiday's nearest living relatives. I don't know if Ted had siblings or whether this expands out to his wider family. How to find these people is another challenge.

So there you have it. Opinions and advice are welcome.

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com