The Believing Sceptic

Today, the debate about the Loch Ness Monster is to be found scattered across various websites and forums, but particularly on the various discussion groups set up on Facebook over recent years. Gone are the days when books from recognised experts or occasional updates from newsletters plus some headlines on TV or newspapers shaped the debate. I use the word "shaped" as there would not have been much in the way of open debate unless newsletters published readers' letters several months later - a bit slow by any measure.

Who shapes or controls the debate is important as that can influence sufficient followers of the mystery down one path or the other. Back in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, the plesiosaur believing cadre more or less held sway with the odd side path down to invertebrates, the paranormal and scepticism. The number of believers swelled as the plesiosaur meme took hold in society and even the unconvinced thought it at least bore further study.

Then came the sceptical times and the narrative shifted the other way as those who did not think there were any exotic beasts in Loch Ness took control of the debate. I would symbolically place the start of this era with Tim Dinsdale's final edition of "Loch Ness Monster" and Ronald Binns' "The Loch Ness Mystery Solved" about 1982-83. This was kept going by the publications of people like Adrian Shine, Steuart Campbell, Tony Harmsworth and Boyd/Martin. By the turn of the century and the coming of social media, the debate became democratic as anyone could enter and have their say, thus both sides lost control.

The ensuing melee led to a certain degree of uncertainty when the difference between speculation, deduction and empirical facts could become blurred, depending on who you are reading. The well defined channels of control warp as more heat than light can be generated, the inane and ridiculous enter, repetition is indulged and anonymous trollers seek to disrupt and deceive. In the midst of all this, reasonable people ask reasonable questions and may get reasonable answers, but the innate bias in all of us to push our own agendas is never far away.

Having watched the debates ebb and flow over the years in various Facebook groups, and participated in not a few of them, there was one underlying theme which was evident to me, perhaps to others as well and it regarded the matter of purported photographs of the Loch Ness Monster. If you're going to have a debate, then you need a subject. If you wish to offer speculations and opinions, you need the raw data and nothing adds grist to the mill like a digital or silver nitrate image showing something unusual somewhere on Loch Ness.

Which brings me to the tentative title of this piece. The classic photographs of the monster turn up frequently in group discussions. In fact, they tend to turn up too frequently sometimes. One thread of debate finishes and before you know it another turns up a few weeks later asking the same questions, perhaps an FAQ archive of appropriate discussions would be appropriate. That is mainly down to the way discussions can quickly disappear from the top page and scroll out of sight once the last comment is made. Another reason is multiple groups not knowing what the other is doing. 

But whatever the reason, I wondered how the modern brand of monster believer differed from the ones that frequented the scene in the 1930s or the 1970s? One main difference for me is the fact that they have been exposed to a level of sceptical rhetoric not seen by the two previously mentioned generations. They have seen the writings of Shine, Campbell and Binns plus the various websites of other sceptics which dot the digital landscape. The general sceptical arguments and the specific arguments against cryptids are posted, read and processed on the forums, they have an effect, seen and unseen. But that is the way of it, multiple opinions on all sides are read and we all process, filter and file them in our own particular ways.

Let me get to the centre of the argument here and I am concentrating on the photographs here. Imagine for a moment that there are no cine films, videos, sonar or whatever else - only still images. This genre gets panned regularly by the sceptics on the forums, but also by various people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster. Well, that is okay you might say, we're not going to be the gullible believers of the 1930s and 1970s, we are going to be enquiring and critical believers who don't jump at the latest evidence without having a good look at it.

Now, I do not have trouble with people assessing the latest item of evidence and putting it through some stress tests (though some of the stress tests need stress testing themselves). After all, there is some rubbish out there passing for evidence of the Loch Ness Monster.  However, it is the approach to retro-analysis of evidence going all the way back to 1933 that bears thinking here. Some people are digging themselves into a hole they will not get out of.

What do I mean by that? In such debates, it is usually the case that a sceptic will turn up with their prepared arguments about why this photograph and that photograph should be rejected as evidence. Their motive here is not to apply the fine sieve of logic in the search for the best evidence. Their motive is to trash all and every piece of evidence by fair means or foul. People say we need sceptics to keep us on our toes and grounded in some kind of reality. I can see the reasoning there but I do not think they think they are there to keep you on your toes. Since day one, they have been there for one reason only and that is to turn you into one of them.

Maybe you think you are nimble enough to outwit them with a bit of ducking and diving? Perhaps like those crowds on the Pamplona bull runs of Spain, you think running alongside will sharpen your reactions and fitness - until they stick their horns in you and you become an ex-runner. But let me now list most of the photographs presented as evidence for the Loch Ness Monster since the media story began.

N. Dundas, Hugh Gray - 1933

Kenneth Wilson, Alistair Cummings, Anonymous (Daily Express), Mountain Expedition - 1934

Gordon Powell - 1936

John King (?) - 1938

Lachlan Stuart - 1951

Peter MacNab - 1955

Herman Cockrell - 1958

R. Lowrie, Peter O'Connor - 1960

Peter Hodge - 1964

Frank Searle - 1972 to 1976

Tony Shiels - 1977

Jennifer Bruce - 1982

Alex Crosbie - 1987

Anonymous (Daily Mail) - 1992

Helen Cowers, Andrew Wallace - 1993

Richard White - 1997

Alex Crosbie - 2000

James Gray - 2001

Roy Johnson - 2002

William Jobes - 2010

John Rowe, Jonathan Bright - 2011

Kate Powell - 2016

This is not a complete list of still photographs as some are not known to me such as those only seen in physical newspapers which were too late for the pro-Nessie books of the 1970s and too early for the Internet of the 2000s. Others are the masses of mobile phone pictures of distant objects which are not even worth marking as inconclusive. To be clear, I am not suggesting every photo listed here genuinely shows one of these creatures. I am saying this is the entire list as I can best create it totaling at least twenty nine pictures over eighty three years.

So, the best known of these pictures have been dismissed with various explanations. Dogs, swans, dolphins, windrows, hay bales, boat wakes, sticks, hoax models, birds and debris. Looking over the Internet discussions on such pictures over the years, it became apparent that some people who believed in the Loch Ness Monster were accepting these sceptical explanations. The appropriate description may be the oxymoronic tag of sceptical believers, a tension between two positions. Are some on the road to becoming believing sceptics?

You may have noticed I did not include the underwater photographs of 1972 and 1975 produced by the AAS team of Robert Rines in the list above. The reason for that was because I am only considering surface photographs here which leads me to the main statement here. If you do not believe any of the above photographs you know about portray the Loch Ness Monster, then you have implicitly admitted there is no Loch Ness Monster. You may well be a dead man walking, going through the motions and the hole you have dug for yourself will become a grave as you finally move into full blown scepticism.

Are these harsh words, exaggerated sentiments or something closer to the truth? This brings us to the central question. Statistically speaking, how many surface photographs would you expect to have been  taken of the Loch Ness Monster since 1933? The answer is of course not calculable since we are not in full possession of all the required facts. There are over 1000 eyewitness reports of which we can say certain things:

1. A proportion are misidentification or hoax.
2. A proportion have witnesses with a camera to hand.
3. A proportion use it and take some snaps.
4. A proportion do not come out due to distance or malfunction.
5. A proportion do not publish them.

You can play around with these numbers and come out with a varying number of photographs, but what proportions do you use to arrive at zero? Perhaps you decide 50% of these 1000 reports are real, 30% had a camera, 50% used them, 70% turned out and 80% published. That gives you forty two pictures over eighty three years. Or maybe you turn the screws and decide only 10% of sightings are viable, 20% had a camera, 50% were used, 30% turned out and 90% published. That gives you about three pictures. However, the more one turns the screws on the accounts to justify their position that no still photos have ever been taken, the more they diminish their own reasons to believe in the monster.

But then you may name the Taylor, Dinsdale, Raynor, Smith or Holmes films as your particular favourite piece of evidence. But how can that position be justified? If you think all of the pictures ever presented are inadmissible as evidence, how can you expect zero photos but any number of films? Since still cameras have been more abundant that cine cameras over this period, statistically we should expect more photographs that film or video footage. 

Finally, you may retreat to the underwater photos, the various sonar contacts or maybe just the best of the verbal eyewitness accounts which had no recording device. But again, it does not matter how good these are since the way eyewitnesses describe what they see on the surface demands that such scenes are photographable. You cannot escape the conclusion - if you cannot in good faith name some good photographs from nearly ninety years as positive evidence, you have implicitly said there is no monster.

I do not know who is or is not on the edge of this as I do not know anyone who would confess that none of those twenty nine photos are of the Loch Ness Monster - apart from sceptics of course. I know my position on that list and it is at least sixteen out of the twenty nine. Where do you stand? Shoulder to shoulder with every sceptical attempt to erase such history or on the side of the testimony of the cameras as well as the eyewitnesses?

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

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Nessie Review of 2021

It is time to look back on the year past and so let us get straight into the recorded sightings via Gary Campbell's sightings register. This records six sightings for the year which compares to eight in 2020 and thirteen in 2019. Now not every account will turn out to be the monster, let everyone judge and be persuaded in their own mind. In fact, to this day, there is no such thing as a "confirmed" sighting as there is no agreed benchmark by which to measure such accounts and who would be the judge that chooses the ruler to perform the measurement? In my mind there are sightings that are beyond my reasonable doubt, but that will not be the case for others.

I would categorize four as single humps, one as a water disturbance and the last was detected underwater on sonar. Three had photographs and one included a sketch. The quality of the photographs are not good and again exemplify the problem of photography at the loch with mobile phone cameras - assuming these were the devices in use. The image below taken by Thomas Dobinson on the 30th July drives home the point.

The witness states that the dark coloured object below the castle was about two hundred yards away and the size of a dog. One may churlishly ask what kind of dog - a great dane or a chihuahua? If we assume a typical mutt then we are talking about two to three feet across. If we triple this to represent the six to nine feet of hump that would break the surface for an eighteen to twenty seven foot monster, even that would not look great on such a photograph - and this is a distance one may expect some clarity. But, no, assuming these estimates are correct, even a close up of a large creature may not cut the mustard due to the poor lens and aperture involved.

Remember, mobile phones are for close up friends and family or huge buildings, mountains and so on. I do not think I have seen a decent defensible picture of the monster since 2016 and the Kate Powell fin-like object. Before that we may go back to Bill Jobes and Jonathan Bright around ten years ago. Have mobile phones made the situation worse as people ditch decent cameras for them? I don't know, but it is a subject for discussion.

One report that I rank higher was by Colin Veacock on the 30th July. I have read the reports in the media, but I know Colin from his previous postings as a Nessie fan on Steve Feltham's Facebook group. Colin said the newspaper reports got various things wrong, so I lifted his own account given in fragments and reproduce it here.

I was scanning up and down the loch north of the castle when on my third pass I noticed this object about two thirds of the way across the loch. It was suddenly just there. I didn't, as one site put it, see a prehistoric monster surge out of the water! At first I thought it was small but later when the Jacobite Warrior passed I got a better idea of scale. It was two feet high, ten to twelve foot long and tapered away into the water. I came to that estimate by judging it was the same size as the handrail at the rear of the Warrior. A black dinghy speedboat passed close but it never moved. An Indian couple parked on my right followed my directions and gave me a thumbs up indicating he could see it. Then the clouds broke bathing the opposite shore and hills in bright sunlight and I lost sight of it in the reflections in the water. I didn't, as one site said, see it plunge into the peaty depths, I just lost sight of it.

... I think it was an animal but not prehistoric. Got to admit though, while watching it I was hoping the classic neck and head would pop up.

... I've always thought that 'Nessie' is something completely knew. Something we haven't come across before due to it spending most of its time in the deep water. I also think its the same species of animal spotted in other bodies of water at that latitude.

... It was just too far away. It was the same size as the handrail at the rear of the Jacobite Warrior. Besides which, every time I looked away it took me a while to relocate it. I should say as well, I thought it was much smaller until the boat came along and gave me a better understanding of the scale and distance involved.

Colin provided a sketch shown here. When I saw this, I thought to myself, where have I seen this before? The high end and the tapering hump evoked a memory of another sighting separated by decades but connected by similarity. The answer came from Rupert T. Gould a mere eighty eight years before and the witness was a Mr. W. D. H. Moir near Inchnacardoch Bay on the 26th August 1933 about 9:15pm. The text from Gould is below.

Mr. Moir was walking from Fort Augustus along the road running towards Port Clair, which skirts Inchnacardoch Bay. Just after he had passed Cherry Island, he noticed a " powerful wash" in the Loch, and observed an object heading to pass close to the far side of the island. He took it at first to be a boat hurrying for the Canal lock - whose gates, at that time, were closed at 9 p.m. As to the visibility, he remarks : "At the time . . . the sun was setting behind the hills, casting bright reflecting lights high over the Loch and the tree-tops, while the water was dead calm."

The object passed "dangerously close" to the far side of Cherry Island, and headed into Inchnacardoch Bay. By this time Mr. Moir - who, having heard no sound of oars or engine, had concluded that it was not a boat - had turned round and was walking back towards the bay. When within the bay it slowed down and appeared to roll from side to side, causing a "rolling wash" which spread until it reached the shore. Suspecting that he was looking at X, he left the road and went down towards the shore for a closer view - managing to get within, as he estimates, 200 yards of it. ...

Two points chiefly surprised him - X's colour, and its size. He had gathered, from previous accounts, that X was black, or almost so - whereas it appeared to him to be brown, "with a tendency to changing colours of a lighter nature, nearer the surface of the water." And he estimated the length of the portion visible to him at 40 feet. Somewhat resembling an upturned boat, it rose moderately sharply to a height of some 5 feet above water at about the same distance from the rear end, and then sloped gently down towards the front ... As he saw neither head nor tail, he concluded that the total length could scarcely be less than 50 feet. [He had X in view for four to five minutes.] He started to walk back towards Fort Augustus; hoping to get a lift on the way, collect his camera, and return to photograph X. After he had gone some distance, he noticed that the time was 9:30, and decided that the chance of getting a photograph was remote. He therefore returned  - but discovered, on coming in sight of the bay, that X had disappeared. 

Two differences between 1933 and 2021 was that Moir's creature was more than three times longer. The other was that the Moir creature was moving whereas Colin's did not seem to budge an inch. Note that the Monster continues to surprise. If one had been asked to guess what direction the creature would move, you may have said right to left as you assumed the raised portion was the shoulders and the back receded down to the submerged tail. But, no, it heads off tapered end first. Would Colin's object have moved in a similar fashion? 

The length to height ratio of the Moir monster was 8:1. Colin estimated his as between 10:1 and 6.7:1 which averages to 8.3:1  - very close to the Moir account. As stated above, Colin was less in accord with the journalists who typed up his account:

Since this sighting the reporters have driven me to the point of madness. Only one swapped an email with me. The rest just exaggerated and right out lied about what I saw. Seems if you're a reporter and you're going to write up a piece on Loch Ness, you either exaggerate and blow it out of all proportion, or you ridicule it and belittle the sighting - but what they don't do is just honestly report the facts.

One argument of the sceptics is that journalists take mundane accounts and spice them up to monstrous levels. In other words, the original account would have been easily explicable if known. It is an attempt to tar and brush many an eyewitness story in one sweeping generalization. As we can see here, they do exaggerate, but the original account is good enough to avoid simplistic dismissal.

Indeed, Gould himself re-interviewed many a witness who were previously published and found them still to be noteable accounts. One final observation is that the Veacock and Dobinson accounts happened on the same day separated by three and a half hours and perhaps less than a mile apart (perhaps Colin could verify that). Maybe that is just coincidence or perhaps it lends mutual credibility. 

The sonar image was discussed in this blog only a few weeks ago at this link. It is a good account by Benjamin Scanlon allied with the boat captain, Mike Bell. I discussed the matter with Mike and felt it was an object of some considerable dimensions, though what exactly those were and what the actual morphology of the object was were beyond the capability of the sonar device. I assume that we will be getting a few more of these images in the year ahead of us.

The third class of account now merits its own section on Gary's sightings website and that is the genre of webcam video images. Gary numbers them at ten for the year compared to five local sightings and one sonar scan. Five were by regular webcam watcher Eoin Fagan, two by Kalynn Wangle, and one by Weiming Jiang, Matt Reddick and Roslyn Casey. Now the regular charge is that these images are just specks of not real use. I wouldn't disagree much with that, but when I checked the three photos we have of the local surface sightings, they were no better, perhaps worse!

That's not the fault of any person, they can only work with the tools they have. But perhaps some hope is at hand as Steve Feltham is looking into installing a webcam from his home on Dores Bay or perhaps somewhere close by. Obviously as close to the loch as possible is high on the list, but I would also suggest a bit of elevation as well and a good HD resolution. Other higher cost questions may be infra red night vision, slow panning to cover more loch and zoom. I have no idea how feasible all of that is.

So much for the sightings log, what about research on this blog? The main breakthrough was finding the Sidney Wignall aerial film of something in Loch Morar. It took a bit of digging and luck but I got some images out there and the object itself (below). However, I concluded I was as ambiguous as Sidney was as to the object's identity. For now, I will say tree log, and hope to investigate it on site in the year ahead.

The other area of investigation this year was the location of the famous 1934 Surgeon's Photograph. I take the view it is a fake, but where from? In my article, I hesitated an educated guess that clues in the story and picture suggest it may have been taken at a quiet spot in Foyers Bay. That opened a slight possibility that something of the model may still be recoverable under ideal circumstances. To that end, I headed there in July with my metal detector. You can see me in action below trawling the shallows.

The trouble was I picked up so much metal thrown in over the decades, any trace of the Christian Spurling submarine may be lost in the noise - if there at all! It was a speculative punt and a bit of fun to boot. At the loch in general, I published two trip reports which are here and here. I also did a couple of interviews for crypto-oriented podcasts and you can see what else I wrote by clicking through the 2021 article history to the bottom right of the blog. The other event of note was an unwanted one in the death of water cryptid researcher, Scott Mardis, who died too young this year and all I can say again is rest in peace, mate. You will be missed.

In summary, I wrote 34 articles this year which is actually an all time low of one every 11 days. The best was 104 posts in 2012 or twice every week. You may well ask if I am getting bored with the subject or am finding less to write about. Well, I am actually concentrating more on other subjects non-Nessie related which has had an effect. But there is a bit of truth in the less to write about category. As I enter the thirteen year of this blog and 787 articles on, the majority of the major photos, films, sightings and hoaxes have been covered.

But some have been revisited this year, as mentioned above for the Surgeon's Photograph and also the AAA sighting by John McLean from 1938 as new information bolstered that account. In fact, I hope to start 2022 with an article on one of the classic sightings yet to be covered here. New sightings will obviously continue to come in and personal research will continue as it looks into things old and new.

With that I will wish all readers  prosperous 2022.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Nessie Review of 2014

Recollecting the events of 2014, let us look back on the Loch Ness Monster and those who claimed to have seen or represented Scotland's most famous inhabitant.

As the Referendum on whether Scotland should be an independent nation approached, it was less than seriously suggested that there would be no Nessie to spot as various cartoons were published showing Nessie heading south for more stable waters.

Not that I would blame her for making that decision, but as it turned out, there was no need to panic as Scotland remained in the Union. Below is one example of the Loch Ness Monster cartoons that amused us during some tiresome and heated campaigning. Shades of Godzilla!

Nessie, as a major Scottish icon, also made an appearance at the successful Commonwealth Games in Glasgow during the August Opening Ceremony. You can't keep a good monster down! However, I think the hybrid tyre form is a reminder that not all things we see are necessarily the Loch Ness Monster.

But what of the creature itself? Back in April, the newspapers got a bit heated about an object that had appeared on Apple's satellite images of Loch Ness. I actually covered this image at the tail end of 2013, but it took a few months for it to be picked up by the wider media. The consensus definitely moved towards this being one of the Jacobite cruise ships, albeit it looked a bit odder than previous images.

Following hot on the heels of this satellite image was a sonar image that raised eyebrows only days later. It was recorded in Urquhart Bay by one of the aforementioned Jacobite cruise ships. The object was about 30 feet below and registered a signal stronger than that the similar crescent shape we would see for the swim bladders of fish. Was it the monster, a seal, a sonar recording anomaly or something else? No seal was reported in Loch Ness and one is left in an inconclusive state as to what was registered that day.

Consulting Gary Campbell's web log of sightings, two other stories come to the fore. The first was an object seen on Google Earth by Bjarne Sjöstrand, once again in April. You can see the vertical filament object at coordinates 57°10'25.30"N, 4°36'53.53"W just off the Horseshoe Scree. It is just above the centre point on the image below.

Now, we have seen similar objects on Google Earth before back in 2011 and were non-committal on them, mainly because they were un-Nessie like in their shapes. This one looks no different. However, we did have two more traditional sightings from people who spotted strange objects from their vantage points on the loch shore.

Referring to Gary Campbell again, nine people watched an object and its wake from Brackla on the 20th May about 10am. They watched it for 15 minutes before it submerged. Photographs were taken, but at over a kilometre away, these are inconclusive.

Eighteen days previously (May 2nd), a local gamekeeper is said to have watched an object at the head of a 50 foot wake progress southwards from Dores. He is stated as saying it was

 .. an amazing sight. I travel this road to Whitebridge daily and have never seen anything like it.

However, neither of these accounts made it into the newspapers. The bottom line these days appears to be, "No Picture, No Story", and by that we mean a semi-decent image. Thankfully, we have people that still collect these verbal accounts for the record.

This year was also the year that Jonathan Bright's hump photograph went viral at the time of the Scottish Paranormal Festival in October. And, no, I don't think it is a wave.

But, in keeping with the Loch Ness Monster, we did have our false alarms. In November, a local by the name of Richard Collis filmed an object looking like a long neck sticking out of the water. Not committing to anything until the witness was spoken to, our own man on the spot, Jonathan Bright, was on the case within hours, and revealed it was no more than a lifeless object, perhaps a branch or something else.

In fact, I was told recently that the object is still there and is probably not a branch but a human artifact, such as a boat part. The main thing is, it lingered, and real Nessies tend not to hang around!

We also had a blast from the past in October as archive research by David Clarke revealed that there was a monster battle in 1934 when Nessie fever was high. An academic tussle arose between the Natural History Museum in England and the Royal Scottish Museum for the rights to the carcass of the Loch Ness Monster. Was Nessie a British monster or a Scottish monster? An appropriate topic in this year when Scotland decided its national fate.

Back in 1934, they never had the opportunity to put it to the test. Let's see what 2015 brings!

New Nessie Video

Monster fever mounts that little bit more as a new video purporting to be of Nessie appears in the Scottish Daily Record. It was taken by Richard Collis on Thursday, 6th November as he was motoring about a mile north of Fort Augustus. He caught sight of an unusual object 150-200 metres out in the loch and got out to take the mobile phone footage which you can see on the Record website. I post an image from that clip above.

I have not had much time to look at it at all, but it has the classic head-neck pose beloved of monster researchers. The object appears to rise and fall in the water. How much of that is due to increased wave action or the object itself, I am not sure, but it looks to me like part of it is due to the object moving and not the water. Whether the object itself is moving across the loch is hard to tell, but there is a branch in the foreground which can help further analysis. Certainly, at that distance out, the depth is easily 200 feet, so we would expect the object to be at the mercy of the rough waves - unless it had it own form of propulsion.

But what is it? Branch, bird, debris or monster. You decide!

POSTSCRIPT: I got an email from Jonathan Bright who was on site that week who took the image below while he was there.

He adds the following:

I have seen this during my investigation of the Loch the previous week -on 6th afteroon to be exact, as I was coming back from a cruise from Fort Augustus- and as I have also said to the editor of the article, I can assure you that it's not the Loch Ness 'monster'. It looks like a tree log or branch, most possibly put there deliberately (it's just across the road from a lodge), either as a reference to the Surgeon photo, or, just a prank. (it would be interesting if it was not 'man caused' though)

We stopped and filmed this for sometime as an example of potential misidentifications...

It seems really strange that the photographer did not realize this, since the object was clearly fixed at this position and was not getting carried away by the waves and current but only moving up and down...

Steve Feltham also sent me this photo of the stick from the other side. It was taken by Marcus Atkinson from one of his cruise boats which comes out of Fort Augustus. You can see it to the right.

I would also note, against the backdrop of recent discussions about mobile phone evidence, how poor the quality of the image is. In fact, too poor to make informed judgements. The photographs are better but a video with the crispness of such pictures is always better.

From the Daily Record:

TREE planter Richard Collis captured this amazing video on his iPhone after he spotted something unusual while driving alongside the loch last week.

AN Astonishing new video claiming to show the Loch Ness Monster has surfaced.

Tree planter Richard Collis captured this amazing video on his iPhone after he spotted something unusual while driving alongside the loch last week.

He said: " I was travelling along the side of Loch Ness, saw something out the corner of my eye, pulled over and went down to the Loch and took some photographs.            

“As I was watching, I was thinking what the hell is that!    

         

“The loch was quite rough and I wanted to get as best a picture that I could possibly get because I knew it wasn’t going to last forever.

“It was about roughly 150-200 metres out in the water on a stretch about a mile from Fort Augustus heading towards Invermoriston.          

  

“It’s quite difficult to know how long it lasted but it felt like a couple of minutes.”

The footage Richard shot was filmed last Thursday and appears to show a creature swimming through the choppy water.

The photographs taken last week look eerily similar to the famous Surgeons photograph of Nessie which was later exposed as a hoax in 1993.

Richard, 58, was so shocked by what he saw he immediately called his wife Vibeke.

He said: "She thought I was having a joke and I said ‘No no, I’ve got mobile phone footage of it’ then when she saw it she said that’s strange.

“It’s similar to the Surgeons photo, that’s what I thought was weird. To me it looks like a long neck and a small head. Like a serpent - the old highland name of it was sea serpent or water horse.            

“What do I make of it? I just think it’s an anomaly that I can’t really explain. I’m a bit of a doubter of a lot of things until I see it myself and I wouldn’t have believed what I saw if someone else was telling me.            

“I’ve fished the loch man and boy and I haven’t ever seen anything like that. As I say I don’t really believe in anything like that until I see it but what I saw was obviously what the Loch Ness Monster is - I’m not saying it was a fire breathing dragon and I never saw teeth or anything like that, but I must have thought there was something there if I stopped to take pictures.

“It’s like seeing a UFO or something like that. I’ve seen what potentially could be the Loch Ness Monster. I’m excited about seeing it and I’d like to see it again.”       

     

Richard’s wife Vibeke, 60, added: “I’ve been here 37 years and my husband has been here his whole life, so we are completely aware of how unique this is.    

“I couldn’t believe it and laughed when he showed me because I knew he could never set that up. He’s not very technical or not very computer wise either.           

“I couldn’t believe it because when you live here everyone wants a shot, even if it’s a log, but the thing is it does not look like a log.            

“It’s definitely not a seal because it’s got a really long neck and it’s too round and smooth to be a log and why would it bob the way it does and then just go away.”      

      

She added: “I can’t believe that my husband managed to get this. It is amazing.”

Jonathan Bright Photo goes Mainstream

I am glad to see that Jonathan Bright's photo of Nessie has gone live on the mainstream media. The major papers are running it now as you can see below.

Daily Express

Daily Mirror

Scotsman

My original article on Jonathan's picture was top google hit for this picture, but that won't last long as people visit these sites for the latest evidence of Nessie. Well done, Jonathan, on raising Nessie awareness. And, no, I do not think it is a wave.

P.S. We have had innumerable comments by sceptics that this is a wave. More than enough in fact, so let this picture bask in its temporary glory ... so no comments for this article.

A Day At The Scottish Paranormal Festival

It was off to Stirling this Friday as I made the short trip from Edinburgh for a day of paranormal lectures with Nessie surfacing somewhere along the line. The event was into its second of four days at the Albert Halls just outside the town centre.

I bought a whole day pass which gained me entrance to the day's five lectures, starting with our very own cryptid at 10am. The speaker was Jonathan Bright, who will be familiar to regulars here as the taker of an alleged photograph of Nessie back in 2011. I say alleged because not all agree on the identity of the object in the picture. This blog takes the view that it is Nessie, others interpret it as a wave.

Jonathan gave some background on his own general, paranormal investigations at home (in Greece) and beyond. But his photo took pride of place in the presentation as Jonathan discussed how he saw a horse like head in the picture which followed in the tradition of the good old water horse of old. He then went through the various ways in which the Loch Ness Monster could be interpreted as a paranormal phenomenon. I'll develop that more as I describe the day.

The second talk by Jonathan Downes on the Chupacabra was cancelled. I don't know why and I was disappointed not to hear and meet Jon for the first time. As a result of this gap, the Q&A session for the Loch Ness Monster talked was extended.

After this, the third scheduled talk was by the "Paranormal Contractor", Stephen Mera. This concerned his various call outs to investigate strange goings on across Britain.There was no theory here but a series of tales of his adventures as he came across phenomena which were explicable and inexplicable. Swinging lights were explained by a kid with a yo-yo, but water which was observed to travel across a ceiling like a snake and drop down like rain was beyond his powers of deduction.

Equally, if not more compelling was the talk by Nick Kyle of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. Ironically, he was a replacement for another call-off, Hayley Stevens, who is a ghost-hunting sceptic. I say ironic because Nck is the opposite of Hayley in his conclusions. Some fascinating tales, pictures and audios made for an interesting case for phenomena which require an explanation beyond what the sceptics normally offer. Then again, I have not read their explanations for these events and so will say no more.

The final talk of the day was by Peter McCue and entitled "Orchestrations of the Trickster". This took me back to the musings of Charles Fort, from whom we derive the word "Fortean". Fort speculated on whether the odd stories he had compiled over the years were evidence of a Cosmic Trickster playing tricks on mankind. 

How much Fort believed this I don't know, but Peter McCue brought it up to date by suggesting phenomena such as UFOs, Bigfoot and Poltergeist activity had the same origin in a higher intelligence. By implication, this would extend to other cryptids. This is not a new theory, but it still baffles me as to the motives of such a "Trickster" who persists in this apparently puerile behaviour for millenia. Suggestions are welcome.

So ended an interesting day, but how applicable was all this to the Loch Ness Monster? Firstly, I would say that Nessie hunters of the past such as Tim Dinsdale and Ted Holiday would have been quite at home with these proceedings and would happily have taken their seats here. Indeed, seeing one or both of them presenting a talk would not have been out of the question.

There are a plurality of readers of this blog who subscribe to a paranormal Loch Ness Monster. Again, they would have no problem turning up at such a conference. But quite how this all hangs together is vague (to me at least).

I, myself, believe in paranormal phenomena and have even subscribed to a paranormal Nessie in the past. From what I discerned this Friday past, it is not clear whether that theory has developed much. To take a paranormal position will get rid of supposed problems such as food supply and the lack of a carcass. However, to say Nessie is a solidified thought form looks as easy to say as the sceptics saying Greta Finlay only saw a deer. Easy to say, but how do you convince those outside your "camp" of this?

Perhaps a more solid theory explaining this will be forthcoming, in which case I will pay more attention. In the meantime, you are free to post your musings and theories.

On a final note, I talked to Malcolm Robinson, who has written various books on strange phenomena. He tells me that he hopes to publish a new book on the Loch Ness Monster entitled "The Monsters of Loch Ness" by the end of the year. I look forward to that, though note this is the same title as the late Roy Mackal's book. Can you do that?

And to finally bring this article back to the blog's position, Malcolm agrees with me that Nessie is a water breathing animal!

Two Forthcoming Lectures on the Loch Ness Monster

I would like to publicise two talks on Nessie which are coming over the next two months. 

The first is part of the Scottish Paranormal Festival which runs in Stirling, Scotland from the 30th October to the 2nd of November. The talk is by our old associate Jonathan Bright who took that controversial picture of what may be the Loch Ness Monster which was analysed on this blog. My own take is that this is the creature. Other have differed and think it is a wave, but I beg to differ.

Jonathan will be giving his views on how the Loch Ness Monster could be viewed as a paranormal phenomenon as well as looking back at his photo and some other items. The talk is at 10am on the 31st October and you can find further details here. Click through to the other talks at the Festival, you may find other things of interest to you.

The second talk is on the 11th November at 7:30pm in which Charles Paxton gives the Edinburgh Fortean Society an update on his statistical analysis of Loch Ness Monster reports. Charles has been working on a project to perform an in-depth analysis of all the monster reports he could find going back to centuries past.

I have had access to this database and it is quite comprehensive and Charles has some results to share from it (though not all of them). I suspect there may be something for both the pro- and anti-monster groups, but we shall see. Charles hopes to publish some more detailed papers in the months ahead. Check out the website of the EFS for updates.

I hope to be at both meetings, so it would be nice to meet up with any regulars (even sceptical ones!) who make it to these events.

 

Loch Ness Trip Report (April 2014)

I was over at Loch Ness for a long weekend back in April and so I thought I would report the highlights here. I begin with the photograph above which was taken near the campsite I was based at. If you had walked along this beach about 45 years ago, you would likely have come across a man watching the loch with his tent nearby. That man was Frank Searle and though he is long gone, his story forms part of the often quirky mosaic that makes the Loch Ness Story so fascinating and attracts multitudes of visitors every year.

For me, there are usually four aspects to any trip to Loch Ness. The first is to try and get a glimpse and perhaps some footage of the creature itself. That, we could say, is the least likely objective to be fulfilled, whether one believes in the Loch Ness Monster or not.

With that in mind, the second objective is to try out new equipment and ideas whilst there. The third objective is to look into old cases to see what new information can be gleaned and the last objective is simply to relax and enjoy the beautiful area that is Loch Ness.

As regards the first objective, nothing was seen which would make me think there was a monster in close proximity. I guess I will have to try and be more gullible when I am next looking at birds,  passing pieces of wood or boat wakes!

There was one experiment I wanted to finish off and that was whether objects are just visible just below the loch's surface. My contention is that they are, but only to a small depth. There are some cases (but not many) where a large, dark shape has been reported as being visible just below the surface. The late monster hunter, Ted Holiday, had such an experience in the 1960s and this continues up to the present day with such cases as Jon Rowe. 

I had previously and conclusively tried this with a silver-grey tray, but now it was the turn of a matt black tray I acquired at the local Fort Augustus stores. The video below shows the tray visible in over a foot of shallow waters. The stones below provide a lighter backdrop to increase the tray's visibility. This contrast would tail off as one moved such a dark object into deeper waters.

This experiment was conducted at the site of the famous Lachlan Stuart photograph taken in 1951. I include a clip of that scene below. I visited this area a few times when writing a series of articles on that picture. The contention is that his three humps were merely hay bales but I have my doubts about the source of that story. But come rayn or shine, I will continue to defend that doubt. :)

Now there was one ongoing experiment I have to speak of, and that is trap cameras. I consider them a valuable tool in Loch Ness research and the more of them around the loch the better. I had previously given one to Steve Feltham but the other I placed a year ago on the other side of the loch road to see what was happening on the land rather than the loch. In other words, it was not looking at the loch. I was just curious to see what passed before its lenses.

I placed the camera in a good location in April 2013, but when I went back to get it in August 2013, I could not find it! The reason being that the hillside had become like a jungle  over the summer months and had become unrecognisable. Despite taking a picture of the location, I looked around for a good while to no avail. I concluded it had either been nicked or it was hidden under some vegetation.

So I let this previous winter have its way and reduce the undergrowth, but this return visit still turned up nothing. It may yet be there, but I do not intend to waste any more time on it. Some you win, some you lose. I'll buy a new set of trap cameras for deployment over the winter when I go up again in August. As I said, the more the merrier.

As readers may recall, I posted an article some weeks back on Nessie as land predator. I kept that thought in my mind as I walked along the shores of the loch, testing it against what I saw at Loch Ness. Interestingly, this field at Borlum Bay had a good supply of sheep for an adventurous Nessie!

On the subject of sheep, I did stumble across a sheep carcass near the Lachlan Stuart location and it presented a bit of a minor mystery. Perhaps not a monster class mystery, but more like a "how did it get there" mystery. The carcass was readily identified but the skeleton was about ten feet from the shore where there was wool tufts caught on branches.

So, what accounted for the distance between wool tufts and main body? Did the sheep somehow stumble from the shore line, catching its wool in the branches before expiring further in? Or did it die on the shoreline only to be dragged further in by a predator?

Quite how the sheep got there was a question itself. I was not aware of any areas of sheep grazing nearby. Perhaps the sheep died further up the shore in the shallows and floated to that point, later to be dragged in shore by a predator. If so, what animal can drag a full sheep carcass ten feet? Well, that is one for further speculation.

Talking about the dead, I was over the other side of the loch later on the trip and came across this curious sight by another part of the loch's shoreline. It was a rectangular arrangement of stones on three sides with the contours of the beach forming the fourth side. A cross made from branches was placed at the head of this "grave" at the far end of the photograph.

Was it a grave of some description or some area designated as "sacred" by somebody? I would hardly think anyone was buried there, but neither was I prepared to start digging! If anyone has an idea as to the possible purpose of this site, I would appreciate a comment.

Sadly, there are sights around the loch that are not mysterious and one would prefer were not visible. I refer to the garbage dumping that surreptitiously goes on annually around the loch. Some people regard Loch Ness as a gigantic waste bin. The photograph below was taken near Urquhart Castle.

I paid a visit to Steve Feltham after this and took in the lovely view from his home at Dores Bay. Note the lenticular cloud formation making its way over Loch Ness. Or should that be a fleet of flying saucers? After all, did not Frank Searle claimed to have once photographed a UFO flying over Nessie?!

Steve was busy putting up a wind turbine which powers his home and as we chatted a local friend of his turned up. Steve said his friend's mother lived just over the other side of Dores Bay and had a sighting back around 1992. She had looked out over the familiar sight of the bay one morning to see an object just under the surface swimming past. It was described as having a crocodile-like back and was estimated as being six feet long (the visible portion I presume). It was reported at the time, but the journalist seemed to have turned it into a crocodile sighting! Not quite the same thing.

After this, I dropped in on the local salmon farm and finally made contact with Jon Rowe, who took that interesting picture back in 2011. My presumption that the picture had been taken from the shore jetty was wrong. He was on the platform further out and closer to the cages. My one regret was that they did not have security cameras trained on the cages. My own feeling is that this place is a draw for Loch Ness Monsters who like a salmon or two. However, a short lesson on the structure of the cages suggested they would not be penetrable by our large denizen. It looks like Nessie is limited to window shopping when it comes to farm salmon.

EQUIPMENT

I was out again at night time with the infra red recording equipment to see if Nessie would pop up in the hours of darkness. However, I have to point out that even if she was ten times more likely to surface at night than at daytime, then the odds would still be around 2000 to 1 against a sighting for the duration and field of view in question. I ran the equipment at two sites for a few hours but I was beginning to like the idea of leaving it running longer term. How one achieves that without getting the equipment stolen or ruined by the weather will require some thought.

I bought two new pieces of equipment to try out for this year. The first was a Toshiba Camileo Clip recorder which was modified to record in the infra red for night use. Apparently, some ghost hunters like these devices. You clip it on to your jacket lapel, set it to record and it logs your activities as you move around the area putting your hands to other uses.

They are quite nifty devices which record at 1080p HD, 5x digital zoom, microSD card support and a resolution of 5MP. I suppose I would regard it as a human equivalent of a car dashcam; hook it up, start recording and get on with other tasks hands free.

The other item was a Trifield 100 XE electro magnetic field detector. This device detects and measures magnetic, electric and radio/microwave fields in three axes for more precise measurements. Now I am not exactly sure why I need this from a Loch Ness Monster point of view. If one was a paranormal investigator, it may be a required tool, but at Loch Ness, it was more a case of being curious as to how energy readings registered locally. 

Normally, one should not expect the needle to move much at all.  At home, it rose in the presence of an active microwave oven and close up to the house's fuse box. It would also rise slightly near electricity power lines. At Loch Ness, the needle barely moved (as expected), but in future, I intend to see how it performs at various selected areas.

OTHER THINGS

I popped over to Loch Ness Cruises based at Fort Augustus and boarded their well equipped Royal Scot boat. Some readers may recall that one of their crew, Marcus Atkinson, had an intriguing sonar hit back in September 2011, which I consider one of the best pieces of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster in recent years.

Apart from enjoying the trip up the loch, I was intrigued to have a look at their sonar-based seabed mapping Olex software, of which I show a shot below. One of the crew members, Ricky, explained more about it to me. The way it works is that it takes a continuous stream of readings from their Simrad sonar device. It is only interested in the depth readings, anything else is not important.

The computer software then translates that to a map location and adds that micro-contour detail to the overall map. Indeed, the map is a work in progress. The more sonar pings it processes, the more detailed the map becomes. We chatted about carcasses on the loch bed and he reckoned it could pick up such detail.

Ricky himself seems a bit of a character and has a few Nessie tales to tell. The most interesting was the time he was out kayaking when he looked at the water below him and saw a long neck, then a body and flippers and then a tail passed right under his vessel. I forgot to ask whether he subsequently broke all kayak speed records. Sceptics are free at this point to submit enraged comments about why he did not have a helmet video attached to his head!

Meanwhile, I waited in vain for a Jonathan Bright type water hump to appear on this cruise and another cruise I took in Urquhart Bay ...

At the Clansman Hotel, I also saw this old promotional poster for a Nessie comedy film made back in 1961. I reckon "What A Whopper!" cashed in on the Dinsdale film taken the year before. I bought this DVD some time back and I love those old Ealing type British comedies, so I enjoyed watching that genre include my other favourite subject matter. Nessie is depicted as green again. Why green?

So a busy enough time at the loch, but also time to relax. I hope to be back up later in the Summer and I wish all monster hunters at the loch success in the months ahead.

Jonathan Bright on his Loch Ness Monster Photograph

I have already covered Jonathan's picture taken in 2012 in a previous post. But Jonathan now brings his own story and thoughts to the table in this blog posting. He has also put up an accompanying YouTube video (below). Jonathan delves into the paranormal aspects of Nessie theorising, of which I am sure there are plenty of advocates. I used to believe in this theory (since I believe in paranormal phenomena in general), but have since decided to pursue the biological side of things. 

Of course, we hear of strange things going on around Loch Ness which are suggestive of such things. We read of the strange events that Tim Dinsdale recorded which were not Nessie related (I would love to see that journal). Also, Ted Holiday's strange goings on surrounding the 1973 exorcism of Loch Ness also raises the eyebrow.

Though Jonathan brings in the magician, Aleister Crowley, it is a fact that monster reports and legends preceded his arrival at Loch Ness in Edwardian times by a long stretch. But paranormalists may argue that what ever "portal" attracted Crowley there, was the same progenitor of Nessie. Indeed, it is a bit unclear why Crowley selected Boleskine House at Loch Ness. The house configuration he demanded could have been fulfilled in any number of areas, but why this particular area?

Interesting questions, but again, just at the edge of reality's peripheral vision. The hunt continues, I hope to be at Loch Ness in about a month's time!