1933 - King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster

This year marks the 90th anniversary of two famous monsters. The first was King Kong when that great ape appeared in his first film, released in America to critical acclaim on March 2nd 1933 in New York. Two months later, the first media report of many concerning a strange creature in a Highland loch was published by the Inverness Courier on May 2nd under the title of "Strange Spectacle at Loch Ness". After those debut days, the two monsters followed parallel paths into 1933 as more reports to intrigue the public came in from the loch about the newly named Loch Ness Monster, while anticipation of the King Kong film coming to Britain fueled excitement about monsters real or imagined.

King Kong would have its premiere at the Coliseum Cinema in London on Easter Monday, April 17th as seen in the contemporary advert below, which was around the time that Aldie Mackay, the eyewitness to the "strange spectacle" in Loch Ness, had her encounter. In scenes unfamiliar to modern cinema goers, a report from the Daily Herald the next day said that thousands gathered at Charing Cross trying to get in to see the film with police being called in to control the crowd. Those who were successful had to stand in queues hundreds of yards long wrapping round the block. By the end of the day, 15,000 were the first to see this literal blockbuster.

Such was the impression that the film had on the general public that a question has been raised in the ninety years since as to whether these two monsters did follow parallel paths or did their paths cross and influence each other in some way? To that end, it has been speculated in recent times that the prehistoric monsters depicted in the King Kong film had a subliminal effect on the eyewitness accounts that came out of Loch Ness in the months after the release of the film in the United Kingdom.

While the film was preparing to go on general UK release in the Autumn of 1933, the Loch Ness Monster story ramped up with a sensational story from the Inverness Courier of August 4th concerning the monster out of the loch on dry land crossing a road in front of two witnesses in their car. The couple were the Spicers from London and their account became one of the lead stories of the coming worldwide media interest. This interest was to be sparked by one national newspaper, The Scotsman, sending a team up to investigate local claims and publishing it to a wider audience in September.

King Kong and Nessie now had everyone's attention. And this is where King Kong first enters the Nessie domain. Lt. Cdr. Rupert T. Gould interviewed the Spicers for his book, "The Loch Ness Monster and Others" published later in June 1934. During his meeting with George Spicer, the film came up in the conversation:

While discussing his experience, I happened to refer to the diplodocus-like dinosaur in King Kong: a film which, I discovered, we had both seen. He told me that the creature he saw much resembled this, except that in his case no legs were visible, while the neck was much longer and more flexible.

It is not clear when George Spicer saw the film. Was it before or after his experience at Loch Ness in July 1933? The film had been screening in London for three months before the Spicers' encounter at Loch Ness which sounds like plenty of time to see it. But then again, maybe monster films were not his thing until he saw something monstrous up north? Nobody knows for sure, but after this no author made any mention of King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster that I could find for fifty years.

That came in 1983 with Ronald Binns' sceptical work, "The Loch Ness Mystery Solved". In his concluding argument that people need monsters and will therefore see them, he refers to the exchange between Spicer and Gould and conjectures that:

It is probably no coincidence that the Loch Ness Monster was discovered at the very moment that King Kong, the masterpiece of the genre, was released across Scotland in 1933.

This "pioneering argument" (as Binns self-describes it) was not developed further and speculation about any connection between the two monsters disappears again for another thirty years. That came with the publication of another sceptical book entitled "Abominable Science" by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero in 2013. This book was a general diatribe against cryptozoology with a large chapter on the Loch Ness Monster. I reviewed it at the time here.

Binns' initial thoughts were taken and developed by the authors who suggest that the scene in King Kong with the diplodocus-like dinosaur mentioned by Gould was transposed by George Spicer onto his story. It was not clear what was meant by this, did George Spicer take that scene and totally fabricate a similar incident at Loch Ness or did what he saw at Loch Ness go through some kind of mental diplodocus filter? So questions were left unanswered, as well as the involvement of Spicer's wife, the co-witness and as mentioned above whether one or both of them had even seen the film by that time?

A couple of years later, researcher Charles Paxton had an article published in the January 2015 edition of Fortean Times entitled "Nessie, Daughter of Kong?" in which he took a different view to the King Kong and Nessie connection. He argued that King Kong being a major influence on the Loch Ness Monster was too simplistic and failed to address various factors at play, such as a strange creature in the loch being reported at least as far back as 1930 and the issue of the film not reaching Inverness until October of 1933. However, he did not dismiss the idea of some degree of cultural influence.

This article led to a couple of letters being published in the March 2015 edition from an Ulrich Magin and a Martyn Jackson. The first focused more on the account from 1930 but also mentioned the potential influence of water horse and sea serpent necks beyond the dinosaurs of King Kong. The letter from Mr. Jackson changes tack and goes back to 1925 and the release of the silent movie, "The Lost World" which was another dinosaur movie featuring stop motion technology and was seen as the forerunner of the King Kong film. In particular he refers to another diplodocus-type creature which runs amok in London. Did this film released eight years before King Kong have any influence in the matter?

The debate then comes full circle in 2023 as the Fortean Times published another article by the aforementioned Ulrich Magin to mark the 90th anniversary of Nessie. This was a sceptical article and the focus was again on the Spicer land sighting with the statement that he may have been influenced by the movie. That more or less sums up the debate on the connection between the King Kong movie and early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster in 1933.

With all that history behind us, now seemed a good time to review all this with a fresh look. That required new information and so I turned to the British Newspaper Archive to harvest data on what the media were reporting on the two monsters back in 1933 and 1934. It has over 67 million pages of British newspapers digitised and online since the 1700s and is the most complete archive available. It will not have every newspaper for every year, but the amount of pages available should give us a representative view of what journalists were writing on certain subjects back then.

Firstly, all references to the phrase "King Kong", "Loch Ness Monster" and "Loch Ness" were collected for the years 1933 to 1939. The phrase "Loch Ness" was chosen as not all references to the monster used the phrase "Loch Ness Monster". When plotted on a chart, the two phrases had pretty much the same shape and so I will stick to matches for "Loch Ness Monster" although references to "Loch Ness" were almost 50% greater. The chart of newspaper hits for "King Kong" and "Loch Ness Monster" is shown below. The Loch Ness Monster line is the darker one.

Looking at King Kong first, the line rises into May 1933 as the film finally arrives in London and the reviews and chatter begins. There is then a dip awaiting the later nationwide release and then by the end of September, we have a peak in King Kong interest as most parts of the country would have seen the film (though Inverness did not see it until October). Another peak happens in November as the sequel film "Son of Kong" came out at the end of the year to stir further interest. That film was a flop and depicted a lot smaller ape. After that King Kong fever effectively ends and it drops rapidly into a flatter pattern.

For the Loch Ness Monster, things started quietly as news of a monster stayed with the local newspapers in early 1933. It was when The Scotsman took up the story in September that it began to acquire UK interest and launched like a rocket to peak in January 1934 with various key events being reported such as the Wetherell expedition, the first photograph from Hugh Gray and the Arthur Grant land account. Then the reporting likewise dropped off with a small peak in the summer of 1934.

What can be gleaned about any potential relationship here? The King Kong phenomenon had peaked in September with its peak in cinema goers, but the Loch Ness Monster peaked four months later and for its own different reasons. King Kong had peaked just as the Loch Ness Monster was taking off. Both had gathered a similar number of hits up to their respective peaks, but the Nessie one was more of a spike hitting a peak twice as high as anything for King Kong.

As to actual content, most of the King Kong matches would be cinema adverts, reviews and local talk about the film. There would be an overspill into the mainstream where columnists would use the phrase in different ways and the beast would "appear" at local events such as carnivals. The Loch Ness Monster was different as it focused on eyewitness accounts, theories as to what it was, what the experts thought about it and what people were going to do about it. To that can be added the humorous articles, letters and the use of the phrase in a more generic way as well as how it fed into the local cultures in a similar way to King Kong.

How correlated are the two data sets as in how closely do they relate to each other? By using the Excel correlation function, a numerical value can be assigned to this question. This is a number which lies between -1 and +1 and the closer it is to +1, the more positively correlated they are. A value closer to zero indicates there is no correlation between the two and a value tending to -1 indicates they are oppositely correlated (i.e. one rises as the other falls and vice versa). For the two years of 1933 and 1934, taking in the significant highs and lows of the two beasts, the correlation came out at +0.19 which would be regarded as a weak correlation. 

That does not mean that the two phenomena went their own ways throughout those years, it is more suggestive of a degree of influence but not a strong one. The next set may give us a better indication of how one may have influenced the other and that is the number of times both phenomena were mentioned in the same article  Since the accuracy of the newspaper archive search facility gave matches for both on the same page but not necessarily the same article, each hit had to be examined and judged accordingly. 

The search was run from January 1933 to October 1935, which by then both were out of the "mania" phase. The total number of hits for articles mentioning both the King Kong and the Loch Ness Monster was a mere forty three. The total number of newspaper occurrences of King Kong or the Loch Ness Monster on their own or together was 8999 in the same period. That means the media linked the two, for whatever reasons, about 0.5% of the time. In terms of hits for the two just being on the same page, the best total was 73 or 0.8% of the total. The chart below shows the hits for both as a dotted line. Since the number is so small compared to the overall total, it is numbered on the right hand side.

However, the dotted line hits a maximum of just over 1% of the total in January 1934 as Nessie media articles hit a peak. So, the dual mention phenomenon is more linked to coverage of the Loch Ness Monster than coverage of the King Kong movie, which would make sense. But it looks like a very small number compared to what it is covering, so that does not look like an indicator of the King Kong movie influencing the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon. This is further seen in what these dual hits actually talk about, which is tabulated into general categories below.

1. The idea of unclassified or extinct animals surviving - 3
2. Loch Ness Monster compared to diplodocus in King Kong film - 2
3. Humorous references to both (metaphors, poems, story) - 9
4. Appearances in public events (fancy dress, pantomime, carnivals) - 10
5. Nessie themed films compared to King Kong film (Movietone, Secret of the Loch, Irvine film) - 8
6. King Kong a better story than Loch Ness Monster - 2
7. Publicity for King Kong film mentioning Loch Ness Monster - 4

Most of the references are of a trivial nature and do not address the question of how dinosaurs in the King Kong film could have influenced eyewitnesses to objects in Loch Ness. In fact, there was no reference in any of the above to an eyewitness describing what they saw as looking like something from the King Kong movie. The most important references are the two which state that the Loch Ness Monster resembles the diplodocus in the Kong movie. One is explicit and the other is implicit when it only says you can see Nessie in the film, but there is only one scene that fits that statement.

That is two quotes from nearly nine thousand newspaper pieces over two years, not exactly a ringing endorsement of what is called a "pioneering argument". That argument is rather indirectly inferred from the coincidental appearances of the two monsters in 1933 and not anything that could be called direct evidence. This is further demonstrated when the newspaper pieces which mention both the Loch Ness Monster and King Kong are charted against the actual eyewitness reports from 1933 to 1934 as shown below (Nessie reports are the orange line).

The Loch Ness Monster reports just kept coming in long after any media stories linking the two was finished and peaked in July 1934. The correlation for these two data sets is 0.31 which is borderline weak to moderate, or in other words, not strong or compelling in any way. One can only go so far with these statistics, but they present a more quantitative approach to the subject than psychological theories which are notorious for being untestable.

But going back to the history of this King Kong debate, there was one quantitative analysis offered in defense of the theory and that was proposed in "Abominable Science". The claim was that the object described by the Spicers bears a more than passing resemblance to our not so friendly brontosaurus/diplodocus/ataposaur/etc from King Kong. I reproduce below two pictures relevant to that theory.

Now "Abominable Science" claims four similarities between George Spicer's sketch and their snapshot from the brontosaurus scene:

1. Both had a long neck.
2. Both had no feet visible.
3. Both had tail curved round side of body.
4. Both had victim in mouth.

Now if you watch the complete scene from the film (YouTube), that scenario is not so convincing. Depending on what frame you pick, you could only have two of the list true - long neck and something in mouth. What was claimed as a lamb or some other small animal in the mouth of the Loch Ness Monster by George Spicer equates to our unfortunate crew member in the Kong film. I don't think I have seen a meaner man munching brontosaurus. So much for giant cows with long necks.

So perhaps not the most unbiased choice of the "Abominable Science" authors. If they can do that, well, I choose a still which bears only a slight resemblance to the Spicer sketch. So, the case has not been made and I see no evidence that seeing dinosaurs like the one below from the King Kong movie can make people looking at floating logs or birds in Loch Ness turn them into prehistoric creatures. 

That there may have been cultural influences between the two monsters cannot be denied, people did make connections, but it is a big leap to conceive how this alters peoples' perceptions looking across a loch. Indeed, no serious scientific paper to this day has been published on the subject with convincing experimentation and reasoning.

Finally, I move onto "The Lost World" references. Actually, I watched this silent movie for the first time when I was researching this article. It was available to rent on Amazon Prime and I took some photos. It was a good watch considering its age, although obviously dated in more ways than one. Professor Challenger's captured brontosaurus also features in that movie and does some serious damage to London as the designers of Tower Bridge failed to take into account the weight of a brontosaurus on it and it drops into the Thames. The scene ends with a very Loch Ness Monster like scene but again, the links between this and the later Loch Ness Monster are even more tenuous.

After all that, what can one say but here's to another ninety years of Nessie.

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sss

Now ninety years on we might say the special effects are primitive compared to today while we look over the latest Nessie photograph with no idea what that old critter is. Ninety years from now, I wonder what they will think of our CGI King Kongs? I don't know, but the latest Nessie pictures will be something we can't quite conceive and they still won't know what that old critter is.

Enigma Documentary: DNA, Giant Eels and an Unseen Film

A new documentary aired on Channel 5 some weeks ago looking into the enigma known as the Loch Ness Monster (link). This was one of the better programs on the subject as it focused on the search for the creature in the matter of the DNA samples taken from the loch in 2018 and the results released to the world in September 2019 which was covered at the time on this blog. A documentary was televised on the UK Discovery Channel devoted to the subject which I reviewed here.

The program opened with the well known faces of Willie Cameron and Steve Feltham and the story beginning all the way back in 565AD with Saint Columba and his water beast in what the original Latin text called the Lake of the River Ness. The tales of old flashed back to the modern day as drone technology was employed to take some excellent shots of the loch from on high. What would Columba have made of all this? Or would he yet have found the monster of the loch a more fabulous sight to behold?

But every story has a beginning which brought us to monster researcher Gary Campbell who took us through the early days of the 1930s, the first photograph of the creature taken by Hugh Gray, then the one taken by a certain Kenneth Wilson and a peek at what looked like an impressive collection of old newspaper clippings. This switched to various scenes such as water bailiff Alex Campbell being interviewed in the 1950s, the Loch Ness Investigation of the 1960s right up a young Steve Feltham arriving at the loch in 1992.

Eyewitness Richard White told us about his pole like neck sighting from 1996 (below) and Gary Campbell's own sighting which ensnared him around that time. Such seemed to be the summary of the last ninety years of the hunt. At this point I noted there was a near zero acknowledgement of evidence from the 1930s to the 1990s. No classic photos apart from the two above, no Dinsdale film or any of the like. Was this down to brevity of time or making it all seem more relevant to the modern viewer?

This moved us seamlessly on in a chronological manner to the environmental DNA quest of Professor Neil Gemmell four years ago. While his team were seen on their boat collecting water samples, the talk turned to what the mysterious animal could be, because the hunt was now on for a sample of its DNA. Familiar theories abounded such as deer, sturgeon, catfish, eels and the venerable plesiosaur. So just how would one recognise the DNA of a plesiosaur? The professor suggested something between bird and crocodile DNA. That sounded reasonable though the implication was that if you did have plesiosaur DNA, there was no way to verify that was the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

This brought us to the contrast between this new brand of "monster hunter" and the old brand which we were told is dying out. To be fair to Professor Gemmell, he was not presenting himself as any kind of monster hunter - that would be professional suicide. He was at Loch Ness to promote the science of environmental DNA, but if some unexpected strands turned up, they would then be firmly in the domain of science and some serious analysis could begin.

Adrian Shine chipped in and said nothing had been found in fifty years of searching. It was a failure which to him meant they were all either useless at looking or there was no monster. But there was those three sonar contacts he saw during Operation Deepscan in 1987. He again admitted that he did not know what they were although that did not mean to him that they were monsters.

I do not agree that the traditional monster hunter is dying out. Their numbers are certainly down on the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, but dying suggests a process that ends in death rather than a process which may have bottomed out. Who knows? We look to a newer generation to continue that particular form of the hunt. But the documentary then moved back to the theories.

Steve Feltham talked about the front runner theory which ticked the most boxes for him - the Wels Catfish. He suggested a dozen or so juveniles may have been released into the loch decades before the whole Nessie media circus exploded in the 1930s. It is entirely reasonable that those fish could have grown to large proportions in time for 1933 onwards but I am not convinced the Loch Ness environment was suitable for breeding and so they are all long gone. As others have said, this does not explain long neck sightings or land sightings. I suspect one solution there is to discount these other genres as explicable by known phenomena around the loch. In which case, why not just explain the remainder in the same manner?

Gary Campbell was more attracted to the giant eel theory and recounted a tale from fifteen years ago when an eyewitness saw something evidently large and eel-like swim past and under them and was longer than their fifteen foot boat. It was appropriate at this point that Gordon Holmes' 2007 video of something long and slender was displayed, though the man himself did not make an appearance.

All these large but known creatures were discussed by Adrian Shine and Neil Gemmell as they assembled some seriously long ropes to gather those important water samples from the lowest possible depths at about 200 metres down. As the program approached the point where the DNA results would be revealed, various points of view were expressed on topics such as what DNA may or may not be found, what if it wasn't recognised and the urgency in getting samples into a protected environment as they can degrade quickly.

It was then that we were treated to the Bobby Pollock film of August 2000. This is one of those films which tantalizes but getting a close look at it in terms of the whole film or a decent number of frames has proven elusive. We got about fifteen seconds of it in the documentary out of a total of three and a half minutes filmed by him. This is a film which would greatly benefit from some video stabilization due to the shakiness of the filming and perhaps after that some further image enhancement to clarify the object of interest.

The creature or whatever it may have been, was hundreds of yards away from Mr. Pollock, but there is something there to dig deeper into. For those unfamiliar with this film, the Glasgow Herald of 12th March 2002 gives the account:

The three-and-a-half minute video was filmed by Mr Pollock, 45, from Crookston, as he walked at Invermoriston Bay with his wife, Catherine, 41, and three-year-old son Robert. Mr Pollock claims he saw the creature rise around five feet out of the loch and that it was jet black in colour. The video has won him (pounds) 500 from bookmaker William Hill for the best recent Nessie ''sighting''. The Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club administers the annual award on behalf of the bookmaker.

Mr Pollock said: ''We stopped at a place called the stone seat overlooking Invermoriston Bay for our lunch and I saw an object floating on top of the water, and it started moving off towards Fort Augustus at quite a pace. You could say that it was a seal or a deer in the water, but I've seen things like that in the water and it definitely wasn't one of them. I've never seen anything like this in 12 years. It's very strange."

Mark Stewart, curator of marine mammals at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban, Argyll, studied the video 30 times. He said: ''Sometimes it looked like a seal, sometimes it did not look anything like a seal. It was moving quickly - it was pretty quick - I felt too quick for a seal.''. Mr. Stewart said he showed the video to experts and staff at the sanctuary, but no-one knew what it was.

Though Mr. Pollock captured the images in August 2000, he held off for more than a year before bringing them to the attention of Gary Campbell, president of Inverness-based Loch Ness Monster Fan Club. Mr. Campbell said Mr. Pollock did not release the video because he ''feared ridicule''. He added: ''But when I saw it, I realised that what he had was probably one of the best pieces of footage ever. We have spent a long time analysing this video. After careful analysis, we concluded that whatever was in the water was definitely animate.''

I include a still taken from the documentary, it's the dot in the centre. It doesn't look much from here, but it looked better as a film sequence, yet still in need of enhancement. Single frames from video do not translate as well as a still image taken with a camera and then there is the problem with recording images of objects in Loch Ness from the shore as one could already be hundreds of metres away from the object of interest. Even the claimed five feet of neck or whatever it was would be a challenge at such distances.

After some wrap up comments on the monster legend, including the assertion that people who want to believe in monsters will see monsters and how King Kong may have influenced people, it was on to the DNA results. Professor Gemmell had spent a year analysing the sequences with the help of various labs and it was time for the news conference at the Loch Ness Centre to tell the world what the 250 samples had revealed.

First off, nearly 3000 species had been found and most of those would be of the microscopic variety. No reptile DNA was detected nor anything that was catfish, sturgeon or seal. To that could be added the absence of cormorants, mergansers, ducks and otters. I could quite understand why seal DNA was not found as they are not indigenous to the loch and are rare visitors. The other reason for absence of DNA was the low density of it in the water. I can see that as the land based creatures are not always in or on the water. 

However, the emphasis of the results was on the eels of Loch Ness. Large amounts of eel DNA were found in almost every sample taken from the loch which led the professor to speculate about the possibility of giant eels. The DNA samples did not prove the eels were gigantic, but neither did it disprove their presence in the loch. All this assumed giant eel DNA does not differ significantly from normal eel DNA. The other result that people took note of was that about 20% of the DNA remained unidentified due to errors in sequencing, samples being too short or temporal. I was not sure what temporal meant.

Various people then gave their opinions on these results. Steve Feltham said lots of eel DNA was a given, so what was there to say? Willie Cameron suggested the small amount of water sampled compared to the loch size plus the admitted absence of DNA for otters and so on left the mystery open. Gary Campbell focused on the amount of DNA samples which gave inconclusive results as another possible avenue.

As the programme closed, Professor Gemmell hailed the survey a success as it provided a platform to popularize science and I do not doubt that this was achieved. Despite the absence of what people had desired to be found, disproving a negative was not what he had set out to achieve. Environmental DNA surveys can only talk about what was found and not about what was not found. The absence of otter DNA did not imply that otters had disappeared from Loch Ness prior to 2018. Or then again maybe it did, but people were not accepting that implication.

So the documentary ended and watching it cover those events of 2019 again gave me an opportunity to revise what my own thoughts were on the eDNA survey now compared to back then. The first point was that there were no catfish or sturgeon in Loch Ness for the same reason there were no seals in the loch. That is, there were zero catfish, sturgeon and seals in the loch and in the months prior to when sampling began.

That was the position I took, but on reflection one should not discount the other reason and that was due to an inadequate supply of their DNA floating in the water. If there was a solitary seal in the loch in the weeks up to the sampling survey, would it have been detected? My guess it it was more unlikely than likely unless the boat luckily sampled in the area it was most active over about 26 square miles. That is all a theoretical possibility, though I regard it as the second choice explanation.

Which brought me to the second point regarding DNA samples from animals which are indigenous but for which samples were not found. I refer to the otters, cormorants and ducks, etc. In that case, one can be pretty sure their DNA was in the water but it never meaningfully got into the sample bottles. That suggested to me that DNA shed by an animal does not travel very far from its point of origin. There are exceptions, such as if the animal in question was located at the mouth of a river, then the flow into the loch may spread its genetic code further.

But otherwise it seemed to me that if an animal or small group were fairly localized in their activity over a certain time period, their DNA would be harder to find. Does that mean the Loch Ness Monster(s) exhibit this behaviour? Well, as said above, one can only really talk about what was found rather than what was not found. As an aside, I read that no salmon DNA was detected from the fish farms near Dores. I found that a bit hard to believe and it was not stated in the documentary, but I would like to see a confirmation of that from another source. If that were true, then DNA really does not travel far and maybe tends to go down than across - probably because it is held within faeces.

The third point was on that 20% of DNA that was unclassifiable. Was Nessie hidden in that pool of data, once again hidden from our eyes? That was an argument that I never found convincing. If 20% of some  hypothetical Nessie DNA was too degraded to identify then I could accept that statistic but for 100% of an entire class of DNA to disappear down this black hole looked improbable. One animal's DNA was surely no more prone to degradation than any other animal?

Well, I still take that view but I thought it over and the only reason for a whole class of DNA being corrupted would be due to the animal in question moving in an environment that accelerated DNA loss. Nothing came to my mind that would allow this. What about the abyssal deep near the bottom of the loch? Was there a difference in acidity, water pressure, oxygen levels, silt density, temperature or light levels that could affect DNA? I was not persuaded either way and am no expert on DNA stability to take it further. But I will keep an open mind on that question.

Which brings us to those eels. Okay, so eel DNA was found in Loch Ness. No surprise there you might say as people have said there are millions of them in the loch. But Professor Gemmell expressed surprise that so much of their DNA was found almost everywhere. Now thinking again about it, he has a point. The eel in question is the European Eel or Anguilla anguilla and according to Wikipedia:

The European eel is a critically endangered species. Since the 1970s, the numbers of eels reaching Europe is thought to have declined by around 90% (possibly even 98%). Contributing factors include overfishing, parasites such as Anguillicola crassus, barriers to migration such as hydroelectric dams, and natural changes in the North Atlantic oscillation, Gulf Stream, and North Atlantic drift.

This would seem to be the reason for his surprise, was Professor Gemmell expecting samples consistent with a critically endangered species? If the number of migratory eels into Loch Ness has been dropping for decades, is there an unaccounted for surplus of non-migratory eel biomass in Loch Ness? Maybe, but the question is difficult to answer. I made an enquiry as to whether the amount of eel DNA collected gave an indication of the total eel biomass, but I was told it could not, which was a disappointment.

Moreover, I am not aware of any attempts to estimate that value from any survey in past decades. All I have found is statements that there are or were millions of eels in Loch Ness. Based on that 90%-98% drop, does that means there are now hundreds or only tens of thousands there now? There is nothing quantitative apart from past small samplings with nets and the latest eDNA results. There may indeed be a surprising amount of eel in Loch Ness and the excess could be found in the proverbial two tonne creature or two thousand equivalent normal eels.

I read that the eel population in Europe is now recovering after various conservation measures, but still well short of historical norms. That is good news for large animals eating the various fish of Loch Ness and if they are gigantic eels, there is still no way of telling if that DNA collected a few years back belongs to them or the kind pulled up by a rod,

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Fortean Times on Nessie at 90

 

It continues to be "Nessie at 90" and I knew the magazine Fortean Times would be doing a piece on the monster. What form that would take was up in the air for me, but that became clear when I got a view of it today. The article is authored by Ulrich Magin whom I already knew as a sceptic and I immediately concluded this was going to be a piece that would attempt to explain away the whole phenomenon in very mundane terms.

 

This is not a review (yet) but rather a warning that if you're expecting at best an argument for a large creature in the loch or at worst a balanced article then you can forget it, don't bother buying it. Ulrich cannot even get basic facts right such as when he states that there is no evidence that seals have ever entered Loch Ness. Really?

Fortean Times has slipped a long way from the days when I bought it as a school kid in the 1970s. It resembles more the sceptical magazines of those days. I would encourage the editor to publish a counter-article in the interests of balance rather give its readers this skewed view of the subject.

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The latest Photo from Loch Ness

The Mirror newspaper ran this story today on a series of pictures taken by a John Payne from Newport, Wales, up on holiday at Loch Ness. The original story is at this link. Here is the account taken from the paper.

Loch Ness Monster 'captured in new pic' after tourist spots 'long neck' in water

A tourist claims to have captured proof of the Loch Ness Monster on camera, with photos showing 'a long neck'. John Payne, 55, was admiring the scenery from a window when he noticed strange movement on the nearby water. The dad-of-three grabbed his camera and managed to grab several pictures which seem to show a shape on the surface. John, a retail worker from Newport, Wales, said:

“I was looking out at the scenery from the window and this huge thing just appeared out of nowhere. I tried to get a picture but it was gone and then it popped up again further down the loch. I took another picture and then zoomed in on my camera and waited to see if it would appear again and it did. It must have been something very large because we were about a mile away from the loch and I could see it clearly. You wouldn’t have been able to see a bird or anything from that far away – it had to be something large. It was like a huge neck."

He went down to the loch later the same day but said the creature was nowhere to be seen. John added:

“I showed some people at the hotel and they were all really shocked. It all happened so quickly, it was only there for maybe two minutes. I looked at other Nessie pictures and these do look similar to it. At first I thought it was a giant fin, but I know there are no dolphins or porpoises in the loch so I was thinking what the hell is this thing. It wasn’t like it was tied to anything, like a buoy, because it kept moving further away.”

John was at guest house Foyers Roost on April 9th when he spotted movement on the lake.

The article has three photographs which were taken at different times, going by the relation between the object and the foreground trees which are shown below to see some more detail. The object is definitely moving if we compare its position to the trees in the foreground across the three images. I would say it has moved at least 100 metres in the time between snapshots. Mr. Payne said it disappeared twice and I would say that coincides with two of the treetops in the images which would obscure the object as it moved from left to right.

But by what means is it moving? Now the initial impression of what we are looking at does give the impression of a long neck and what looks like a back behind it. I zoomed in as far as I could on the three pictures for a further comparison below which is in chronological order from left to right. The appearance of the object does slightly change in each image, though it was hard to say if this was due to seeing a different aspect of it or something else.

Certainly one thing that stood out was the apparent "backwards looking" appearance of the presumed neck. Animals do not tend to swim forwards whilst continually looking backwards at the same time. However, the central image above does look a bit more upright which made me wonder about rotation. In fact, what looks like a kink in the first image began to make me think this was a log being blown up the loch by the prevailing south westerlies.

There was a log doing the rounds in Urquhart Bay a few years back which fooled or rather incentivized a few people with distant dubious photos. I took a picture of it at the time when I visited the area in 2017. However, the object here is on the other side of the loch, but I wouldn't discount this being another piece of tree debris.

Another theory I have now seen on the Internet is that this was a kayaker with a sail attached to the front and the person sitting down to the left. That is also probable and better than the log theory. Either way, the characteristics of the object point away from what the witness claimed it looked like.

In fact, when Mr. Payne said it was a mile away, but he could see it clearly, that came across as a contradictory statement. Not much is clear at a mile away I would suggest. But I do not doubt him when he said it had to be larger than a bird and looked like a neck. More could be gleaned if I had the original larger images, so in their absence I will leave it at that.

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Bus Trip to Loch Ness

It was off to Loch Ness again for a quick one day trip to pick up the trap cameras and carry out any other investigations that were appropriate. This time things were done differently in that I took the bus up to Loch Ness rather than jump in the car as is my usual plan. The reasons for that were a bit experimental being a matter of time and money. Perhaps this was a "cost of living crisis" experiment as people come to terms with prices which exceed any increase in their wages or any other income.

The advantage of the car is that you get there quicker and can go any time you wish and go anywhere within reason. The disadvantage is the cost, depending on where you are starting your journey. In my case, I calculate the cost for the 330 mile round trip at over £100. There is also the fact that when driving, you have less options to do other things. On a bus, you can do more things and it is cheaper. In fact, in my case it cost nothing. The downside is you are bound to their timetables and it takes longer to get there. In my case it took an hour and a half longer to get there than by car.

So with those things in mind, the trip to Inverfarigaig on the south side of the loch on Saturday involved getting the 8:00am M80 Citylink bus from Edinburgh to Inverness and then the 302 bus at 12:30pm from Inverness to Inverfarigaig. On the way back, it was the 14D bus at 6:17pm from Dores and the 7:25pm M90 bus back to Edinburgh, getting home about midnight. The thing here was that miss any of these buses and you were either not getting to Inverfarigaig or may be stranded in Inverness. There were no alternatives bus times that made the trip viable.

The other thing was that once you were at Inverfarigaig at 1pm, you had to walk from there to Dores to get the bus back and that was a nine mile walk. The local bus service was far too infrequent to allow anything else. However, that was the itinerary, walk back to the top of the loch, doing what had been planned beforehand. I had five hours to cover that distance which was more than achievable.

The bus trip from Edinburgh to Inverness was comfortable enough. The bus left the city half full but was near enough full by the time extra people had been picked up in Dunfermline and Perth. But I had two seats to myself to stretch out for about 90% of the trip. The facilities on the Citylink bus at both ends was something less than desirable. The toilet was out of order on one trip, neither of the USB power ports worked on both trips and the facility to put your cup of coffee somewhere stable required some lateral thinking.

Well, at zero pence a trip, who was I to complain? The one big unknown was what the weather was going to be like as a nine mile walk in the rain would be a miserable experience. Fortunately, it was a dry day and the sun popped out towards the end of the hike. So onto the Nessie specifics as cameras were collected as the walk progressed across that nine mile stretch and I can confidently say this was the worst year for cameras stolen over the ten years of doing this. Quite simply, some were not there when I got to their particular spot and it was not down to them falling off. They had been knicked.

Such risks go with the territory, they are relatively cheap to replace but it is the missing potential pictures that may have been snapped that irritates more. Moreover, those who stole them and try to profit from any publishable pictures would fail as I could prove they came from my cameras. Why this year was the worst left me speculating. Perhaps that cost of living crisis brought more people to the loch as staycations came back into fashion again or perhaps this "crisis" makes people think they are more entitled to other people's property?

Anyway, if these people want to right their wrong, drop them off at the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit please. As for the images on the cameras I retrieved, I haven't looked at them yet but will post anything of interest later. The other matter as I walked along the shoreline was the George Spicer land sighting of 1933. A discussion had appeared on Facebook about where it could have occurred and the matter of deer tracks.

On the first point of location, the issue was raised in a sceptical manner as if to imply there was little opportunity for such a point of entry to the loch and therefore is dubious. Now I have been up and down the road between Dores and Foyers countless times and seen various locations but on this day when I was hiking from Inverfarigaig to Dores, there was an opportunity to scrutinize various points more carefully.

The two factors here are distance from road to loch and height from road down to loch. The distance is of some importance as the time from when the Spicers saw the beast to the time they reached the location where the creature entered the undergrowth has to allow sufficient time for the creature to cover that distance and disappear under the waters. That required distance from road to loch is unknown as we do not know how long it took for the Spicers to reach the location or how fast the creature was moving.

Educated guesses can be made, but a definitive conclusion cannot be reached. However, when I performed a range of calculations for various scenarios in my main article on the Spicer sighting, it was eminently possible for the creature to reach the loch and submerge. It depends on your tolerance of value ranges and that tolerance may depend not on science, but your own personal tolerance for accepting land sightings.

George Spicer had told a young Ted Holiday that the shoreline was "only twenty foot down on the right". One presumes this does not mean a twenty foot drop, but a distance of twenty feet with an unknown gradient descending towards it. A survey of various points of the shoreline ensued as I walked along the nine mile stretch. I was pretty confident there was no such point further south between Foyers and Inverfarigaig. The road is a long distance from the shore along that stretch.

A lot of the road was clearly unsuitable, the drop was too precipitous for the kind of creature I had in mind and indeed even for nimbler creatures such as deer. The photograph above is close to the shore, but there is a sharp drop of perhaps seven feet before it. On other parts of the road, such as below, there was quite a long distance between road and loch which also presented a bit of an obstacle course for large, lumbering creatures. Undergrowth is one thing, but thick solid trees are another proposition altogether.

The two prime spots for me was the stretch of road about half a mile north of Inverfarigaig which runs very close to the loch but begins to rise thereafter. Perhaps more of a candidate is further up in the area near Whitefield which is where the Lachlan Stuart photo of 1951 was taken. The road ran close to the loch at these points and the gradient did not look difficult at various points such as in the picture below.

But picking the actual spot would not be possible. Indeed, we are talking about an event that happened nearly ninety years ago and the road and vegetation alongside it today are not the same as they were back then. However, one would expect the rising and falling contours of the loch side to be roughly the same. All that being said, Rupert Gould reckoned the event happened halfway between Dores and Foyers, which puts us in the Whitefield area.

Moving on, but related to this account is the matter of deer and their habits. It has been suggested that the gap in the undergrowth witnessed by the Spicers and later by one of the locals, was nothing more than a well worn deer trail and therefore what he saw was no more than a group of deer crossing the road. With that theory in mind, I continued walking and looking for anything that looked like a trail not made by humans. A couple of photos of what may be trails are below.

Having said this and looking at photographs of deer trails from across the world, I saw very little at the loch as pronounced as others where the vegetation underfoot is almost stamped away. Perhaps the middle picture was the best one. The bottom picture actually stops just before the tree ahead of it and it was interesting to note that the loch side part of the road was dotted with various of these little depressions. I was wondering if they were the remnants of rain overflow which comes down from the hillside finding paths of least resistance or were some man made? 

I think the point though from what I observed is that there is no need for deer to waste energy by continuously pushing out and maintaining gaps in bushes and trees. Though the middle picture above was taken in April and not in late summer when growth will be at its greatest, it did not look like it was going to get much denser and such a more sparse trail would make more sense to deer. I may well be back in late summer to do the same hike again and see how things have changed.

Of course, throughout all of this walking trip, an eye was kept on the loch over to my left just in case the Monster of Loch Ness put in an appearance for yours truly. That did not happen, but as I reached the beach just south of Dores (above), I met one of the many anglers who frequent the loch and got into a conversation with him. I asked him how it was going and he had caught some brown trout. Inevitably, I asked him if he had seen anything a lot bigger than the trout in the water. 

He confessed he had not, but he did say that when he was a youngster years back, he was watching a flat calm surface of the loch as his family drove over on the other side of the loch. It was the kind of surface where the hills were perfectly mirrored on the water. Suddenly, he saw a large V-wake appear out of nowhere and progress up the loch. Nothing was visible and to this day he wondered if it was something like a seal or even bigger? 

I didn't offer an explanation for what he saw, but I do like to engage anglers in these conversations when possible. As you can see from the above picture, the sun was now setting on another day at the loch and it was time to catch the bus back to Inverness. At the bus station for the bus to Edinburgh, I had a pleasant chat with the lady behind the cafe counter, recklessly fed a flying rat some of my chips and met a farmer who regularly arrives from Aviemore sober as a judge in the morning and arrives back there at night legless.

You meet all types on a bus trip to Loch Ness. I hope to do it again some time.

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