An Interesting Nessie Photograph from 1992

One aspect which makes blogging a fruitful pursuit is the interaction with others who take an interest in the same theme. So, as ever, I encourage comments and anything that could add to the online content. So, with this in mind, one of this blog's readers, Jack, sent me this old clipping. It is from the Daily Mail dated 12th August 1992. He had heard my audio interview with Binnall of America and was prompted to open his old copy of Nicholas Witchell's "Loch Ness Story" when an old newspaper clipping fell out! He sent a scan and through the wonder of the Internet, we can all check it out below (click on image to enlarge).

The text of the article follows:

A long brown neck pokes out of the still waters of Loch Ness. Snapped by a Daily Mail reader at the weekend, is this Nessie coming up to take the morning air - or an elaborate hoax? 

Ian Bishop, head of the zoology department at the Natural History Museum, smiled as he studied the picture and three others taken in the same sequence.

His first question - in reference to the traditional summertime lull newsmen call the 'silly season' - was anything but scientific. 'Are you aware,' he said 'that the month is August?'

Such scepticism will not dampen the enthusiasm of the 45 year old man who took the pictures, which bear a striking resemblance to the classic 1934 photograph by London surgeon Robert Wilson. 

'I believe I saw Nessie' he said yesterday. 'Let the experts pore over the pictures and deliver any alternative explanations they can. I'm a simple man, not a scientist. And I say, if that wasn't Nessie, then what was it?'

The man, who wishes to keep his identity secret, had camped overnight about two miles from Fort Augustus, armed only with a Boots 110EF pocket camera. 

'It was about 6:30 to 7am and I went to the Loch to brush my teeth and have a swill' he recalled. 'I soaked my face and looked up. I saw it and my immediate reaction was I must have water in my eyes. I rubbed them, looked again and though "Christ Almighty"'.

'There was about 6ft of a long neck and head and she was a blackish dark brown. She seemed to be looking right at me and I thought she was going to come to the shore. My camera was lying by the trees a few yards away and I made a dive for it.

I scrambled back. She was about 40 yards out, still looking in my direction. I was trembling an my heart was pounding but I managed to knock off four shots. 

At one stage, she opened her mouth. I thought she was going to make breakfast of me. Then she tipped her head back and slid under. After five minutes, he said, the head appeared again about 200 yards away. 

'I could see the shape of four or five humps. It was as if a miniature waterfall was cascading from the front hump. She swam slowly for 20 to 30 yards and then submerged. That was it. I picked up my stuff and I ran.'

The negatives have been examined at the RAF's photographic laboratory and by Kodak. Lieutenant Caroline Smith said: 'We would say the have not been tampered with or touched up.'

And Kodak scientist Roger Flint said 'It is a genuine photograph of something, though we have no comment about the image.'

Such is the account and at this stage there is no further information. The name of the photographer is unknown and the whereabouts of the other three pictures is not known either. I shall make some attempts to dig out what I can from the Daily Mail, etc. 

The picture does look as if it was taken from Borlum Bay and the distant light up the loch suggests it was indeed early in the morning. The object may well have been forty yards out which may or may not be too deep for planting a fake. I hope on my next visit to Loch Ness to take some comparison photographs to get a better idea of the background. A zoom in of the object shows us a very Nessie like profile but what it could be is a matter of conjecture. A real animal or floating fake? Jack is dubious and thinks it has that "inflatable monster" look. I will remain neutral for now.

The camera used was a simple point and click affair retailed by the chain store Boots. It used a 110 film with a 26mm/f8 lens, fixed focus and exposure. The film advance was via a slider underneath and the flash range was 4-12ft. Not really the kind of camera for an elaborate hoax but it appears the object (whatever it is) is really present in the loch waters.

Checking the Nessie literature of the time, only Rip Hepple in his Nessletter makes mention of it and it looks like he too only had the newspaper clipping to go by as he takes a sceptical approach to it but doesn't really state why.

So it is a bit of a mystery who took it and what the other pictures showed. As I said, I will dig further but if anyone has further information, post a comment or email me at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Strange Skeleton in Lake Labynkyr?

Something is afoot in the remote Siberian lake called Labynkyr as a diver has claimed to have found the skeletal remains of a large creature. We covered this monster lake back in September and so await with interest any further developments.

From the original article:

A Russian scientist has made the first deep plunge in the waters of Yakutia’s Lake Labynkyr which claims to be home to a 'Siberian Loch Ness monster'. The fact has a real chance to be registered in the Guinness Book of Records, a statement of the Russian Geografical Society (RGO) has said.

Head of the RGO underwater research team Dmitry Shiller went down to the bottom of one of the world’s coldest lakes located in the remote Yakutia region of Russia’s Siberia. This was the first time a man plunged to the depths of the lake.

In winter the air temperature here drops down to minus 89 degree Celsius.

According to members of the team, the expedition’s aim was to take video footage of the lakes’ bottom and collect samples of water, flora and fauna.

Moreover, according to the scientists, with the help of an underwater scanner they discovered jaws and skeletal remains of a large animal.

Lake Labynkyr is known for its geographical characteristics, the depth of its cracks reaches 80 meters. Evenk and Yakut people, Yakutia natives, claim an underwater creature, a "Siberian Loch Ness monster", lurks in there.

UPDATE: Another article came out from a Russian news outlet, but it makes no mention of any bones!

Nessie Symposium and Edinburgh Science Festival

The 2013 Edinburgh International Science Festival has just published its brochure and the Symposium on the 80th Anniversary of the first modern sighting of the Loch Ness Monster gets a slot on page 42. Further details can be had at the official "Nessie 80" website and I add some words of my own here.

I am beginning to gather my thoughts for my own talk on the pre-Nessie era prior to 1933. There is a spot of "limbering up" as I currently engage Dick Raynor in a little exchange on Richard Franck's  "floating island" at Loch Ness. But that will expand into other areas such as Ulrich Magin's sceptical study on pre-1933 sightings written for volume seven of "Fortean Studies" (published by Fortean Times). What doesn't get used at the lecture will still be used on this blog for your interest.

One of those Damned Logs

Ever mistaken a piece of floating wood for a prehistoric monster? No, nor have I, but apparently some do. This kind of faux pas has been touted as an explanation for Nessies for decades as this picture from the Daily Express of the 15th December 1933 demonstrates.

The text reads:

It bobbed up and down travelling at a fair pace - a tree trunk carried by strong currents at Foyers, Loch Ness. France has now heard of the "monster" - "It has the body of a diplodocus and the head of a horse" one Paris newspaper told its readers.

Clearly the Loch Ness Monster in its two humped aspect!

What Is Nessie? The Long Neck Problem

Steve Plambeck has updated his "The Loch Ness Giant Salamander" blog with further thoughts on how a salamander of suitable size can be harmonised with the sightings record. The article is here. 

One major block to a salamander interpretation is the traditional long neck of the creature. Salamanders do not have long necks. Steve however suggests that the long tail of the salamander can account for this apparent problem. I can see merit in that idea and have no problem believing that a long tail can be mistaken for a long neck by eyewitnesses. The main question is whether this theory can account for all (or a persuadable majority) of such sightings and so we await his next instalment.

Having pointed out the eel-like head in the Hugh Gray photograph over a year ago, I have to admit I have presented myself with a problem as the picture does not seem to offer the possibility of a long neck. The part of the body where the neck is presumed to be is actually obscured by a water cascade shooting upwards. However, the obscured region between head and main body is not wide enough to accommodate a long neck anyway.

So how does that reconcile with long neck sightings and how often are long necks reported by eyewitnesses? Tim Dinsdale in his 1961 book "Loch Ness Monster" conducted a study of 100 reports of which 45% had head-neck descriptions. However, 15 years later, Roy Mackal conducted a more extensive study of sightings for his book "The Monster of Loch Ness". He analysed 233 sightings from 1933 to 1969 and I estimate 70 or 30% were classic head-neck.

The problem here is cherry-picking and I believe there may be a tendency for long neck sightings to be placed ahead of other types of sightings. Over Mackal's sample period of 1933-1969 there is at least 600 documented sightings across the literature. A simple calculation suggests that at worst head-neck sightings would be about 12% of all sightings but it is probably more.

But on the short neck versus long neck issue, one speculation I had was that the neck is somehow extensible. Some vertebrates can extend their necks (or give the impression of it) but it is pretty limited. There are exceptions such as turtles which can extend their necks out to a good proportion of their main body length. Check out this Jeremy Wade clip where the turtle's neck goes out an amazing length!

A truly extensible neck or equivalent is more to be found with invertebrates due to the obvious lack of impeding vertebrae. So can the Loch Ness Monster retract its neck into its body? The answer is "yes" if some eyewitness reports are to be believed. Going back to the invertebrate theory as espoused by F. W. Holiday,he wrote an article for "The Field" magazine of February 1976 entitled "The case for a spineless monster". It's a fascinating read and you can find it in our Rip Hepple archive in the June 1976 issue (No.16).

Holiday mentions two cases thus:

"It's neck went up and down as if on elastic" someone told Commander R T Gould. The head changed shape while you watched. Two Scottish visitors who had binoculars on the monster near Dores told me "From the end of the neck sprouted a head. One second it had no head; then it did have a head".

An intriguing and virtually unknown aspect of monster lore you may well say. I investigated further. The Gould sighting that Holiday refers to is taken from page 96 of the 1934 first edition and recounts the sighting of a Miss K. MacDonald between Lochend and Abriachan on the 1st May 1934. The actual quote is:

The head was quite small. Head and neck undulated up and down "as if by elastic".

That left me slightly confused as Holiday may have somewhat misquoted the text. Was the elastic movement of the neck an illusion brought on by the up and down movement in the water or an actual physical change? The interpretation is ambiguous to me. I could not find the source for the Dores sighting so it may be there in the literature or The Field magazine was its public debut. Perhaps a reader could help here.

However, the saga of the elastic neck does not end there as I stumbled upon another sighting of this genre elsewhere. It comes from the book "The Great Monster Hunt" by David and Yvonne Cooke written in 1969. On page 61 a previously undisclosed sighting is unveiled as Mr. Cooke interviews a man by the name of Kenneth Ross who recounted a strange experience on his boat opposite Invermoriston in 1936.

As they were motoring in their boat they presumed to see a boat nearby but as it approached to within 200 yards a head and neck of several feet was noticed. Taking up his story:

Then all of a sudden this huge glistening body came out of the water and the neck disappeared into the shoulders or into the body of the creature. Then the monster struck the water with one of its floppers and there was a whirlpool and it disappeared.

So in Holiday's account, a head sprouted from the neck and in this account the opposite happens as the head-neck retracts into the body. What are we to make of these two extraordinary and unique reports? Is this a display of retractibilty akin to our turtle above or something completely different? I say that because there does not seem to be much of a head to speak of. If we had more details on the two sightings, a better picture may emerge but two models present themselves. The head-neck retracts like a turtle or this is not a head-neck at all.

The first model appeals but if it is not a head-neck then what is it? I see no reason why this should be a retractable tail unless someone can point to a known precedent in nature? Neither do I think it is a phallus and paranormal advocates could have a field day with subconscious archetypes here (I think of Tom Bearden's work here)!

Could it be a retractable appendage such as a flipper? The Ross sighting above describes a separate flipper but it is possible though I cannot quite think what the advantage of such an ability is apart from protection. The problem here is that the witnesses are presumably correct in placing the "neck" where the neck would normally be in the creature morphology.

So a mystery within a mystery presents itself. Add to this curious feature of humps changing appearance before witnesses' eyes and one wonders how malleable and flexible this creature is (but such wondrous "floating islands" are for another day and another article).

Comments are welcome and if any can find similar instances of retractable appendages send me a comment.

Review of a Recent Nessie Article

Articles on the Loch Ness Monster come and go, some support the idea of a large creature in the loch whilst others dismiss the very notion. In the interest of the human fascination with mystery, others leave the door slightly ajar for future enquiry.

The latest one comes from Benjamin Radford who is a contributor to the LiveScience website. You can find his article at this link. The aim of this article is to critique his article.

Firstly, in reference to St. Columba's well known encounter with the monster in the River Ness, Mr. Radford says that the story is merely:

One of many church myths about righteous saints vanquishing Satan in the form of serpents and dragons.

In fact, the creature in the story is not referred to in any supernatural way and is merely called a "water beast". Doubtless, it is in the interests of Mr. Radford's argument to mythologise the story via the expediency of demonising the animal mentioned but the story offers no such latitude. The suggestion being that this animal is no more mystical than the other animals such as a boar and whale that are mentioned in the same hagiography of Columba. Do we doubt these were animals because something miraculous was associated with them? Of course not. Doubtless the story has embellishments but the animal referred to is presented as real enough and how curious that it appears connected to a loch destined for bestial greatness.

Thus dismissing this story, Radford continues:

In fact, there are no reports of the beast until less than a century ago.

This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Apart from Columba, a "floating island" was stated by Richard Franck to frequent the loch in 1658. A "great fish" was reported in Loch Ness in 1868 by the Inverness Courier and various references to water bulls which should not be presumed to be mythical. After the beast became international news in 1933, various people came forward with their stories of strange sightings going back into the 19th century. Clearly, something strange was believed to inhabit Loch Ness going back over 140 years and beyond. Meantime, Mr. Radford's statement is simplistic to say the least.

Moving onto the Nessie era, Radford talks about the first modern sighting by the Mackays and says this:

The Loch Ness monster first achieved notoriety in 1933 after a story was published in "The Inverness Courier," a local newspaper, describing not a monstrous head or hump but instead a splashing in the water that was described as appearing to be caused "by two ducks fighting."

This is not a true statement. I quote the original article from the Inverness Courier of the 2nd May 1933:

There the creature disported itself, rolling & plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale ..

No head? I suppose. A hump? Sounds like one to me. Mr. Radford may wish the reader to draw a "quack" solution, but this blog won't "duck" the issue. Namely, hump like object and big. You know, this article is beginning to annoy me.

The article then mentions the staple diet of debunkers - The Surgeon's Photograph. It get a couple of sentences but a big reprint of the Daily Mail article outlining the hoax. In terms of word count, it's the main feature of the article. I'll concede that one but a pattern is emerging, debunk the most well known pre-Nessie story, debunk the very first modern Nessie sighting and then debunk the most famous photograph. I guess if you shatter the symbols, you hope everything else will follow in the reader's mind. That might work with those who don't seek a second opinion, but not here.

The article ends with the implication that we should have found this creature by now. Sonar searches, photographs, overwater and underwater surveillance have yielded nothing that would satisfy the author of the article. Reading this gives the impression that science has satisfactorily "scoured the lake". A 2003 sonar survey of Loch Ness is made much of, but when I contacted the manufacturers of the sonar equipment, Kongsberg, about the survey, they said only sections of the loch were surveyed and

what should be noted is that we did not get to survey the entire loch ... there is no system which could survey the loch in one pass ...

In other words, if Nessie is sensitive to sonar (we know dolphins and whales are), it is no problem to step aside from it. As for the non-appearance of Nessie bits and pieces, I'll address that in another article.

After eighty years of continued sightings, a small article like that is not going to end the story (even if it got the facts right). However, another small article like this is more than sufficient to counter it.

Some Thoughts on The Surgeon's Photograph

Another cryptozoological blogger, Dale Drinnon, has put up a post recently on the Surgeon's Photograph which can be found here. As readers may know, this photograph was exposed as a hoax by Alastair Boyd and David Martin in their expose book some twenty years ago as a model neck attached to a toy submarine.

Though most accept this (including myself), others continue to raise questions about the book's theory. Loch Ness researchers such as Henry Bauer and Richard Carter have questioned the theory and Dale is the latest to offer his thoughts and claims that the model would be unstable if fashioned in such a way.

Now I admit that I have my own questions against the theory, but accept that the pros for the case significantly outweigh the cons. But let us look first at Dale's claim that the model would simply tilt over. The picture below (not from the Boyd and Martin book) is a suggestion as to how the model may have looked.

The first thing to note is that the neck is made from a substance called "plastic wood". It was initially suggested that such a substance did not exist in 1934 but this advert from page 103 of the March 1928  "Popular Science" shows it was around and popular as a DIY substance. Looking at the page, it reminds me of the modern "Polyfilla" as an aid for filling in cracks and holes but I am sure it had properties which also made it useful as a modelling substance. In fact, the advert below states that it was useful on model boats "for moulding figure-heads".

Dale describes the head-neck construct as "solid wood" but this is where things get confused. If it was a solid mass then I too would wonder whether the model could remain stable. My own take is that the model was more likely to be hollow in some fashion. In other words, a head-neck was moulded from a handful of this substance which we are told in the above advert "handles like putty" before it "hardens into wood".

But if the model is hollowed too much then (assuming it is a watertight attachment) buoyancy becomes an issue and the submarine would not be able to drag the head-neck underwater. It seems that some trial and error would be involved in finding the right density and the lead ballast strip mentioned in the picture would have been part of the solution.

Was this actually achievable? The problem is no one to my knowledge has tried to reproduce the original construct of plastic wood neck and toy submarine. In fact, modern reconstructions use modern technology in the form of very lightweight Styrofoam to float the object but clearly would not be able to mimic the submerging toy submarine.

However, I don't think such a modern model was intended to mimic such a scenario but rather used to reproduce the original "as you see it" photograph. Could a more 1930s reconstruction act as Christian Spurling said? Nobody knows for sure as I am not aware of any such experiment. I doubt plastic wood is available today but a substitute of similar properties should not be difficult to source. Finding a metallic submarine that submerges underwater may be more difficult. Until then, the door of doubt is left slightly open.

Others have raised questions such as why Wetherell did not expose the Daily Mail after publication and extract his revenge. 

The other open question is the mysterious second photograph. The head in that picture is clearly different to the famous first pose. I speculated whether the hoaxer may have remoulded the head into a "diving position" but since our advert says it hardens into wood on setting, that does not seem possible without snapping off the head. It is pointed out that the wave patterns on the surface are very different to the one in the first picture. This is conceded, but it is also conceivable that a sudden gust of wind can rewrite the surface of the water. The argument peters out to the conclusion that it was just another hoax picture.

Who knows, but to this day I have seen no satisfactory explanation of how this second picture came to be and the expose book offers no clues. The arguments are more to disassociate from the first photograph and then ignore it. It seems we have a mystery within a mystery.

Now I am not suggesting the first picture is a fake but somehow the second is genuine. That would be silly. But there is a "crack" in our knowledge here that need some "plastic wood" to fill it in. It is a given that Alastair Boyd would have asked Spurling about the second photograph. The absence of quotes from Spurling on this subject suggests he knew nothing about it (In Spurling's defence, this suggests he is being truthful about the first picture. After all, if you are going to lie about the first photo, you will keep on lying about the second one.).

So what is the story behind this second photograph? Comments are welcome!