The Loch Ness monster hoaxes

Tim

Creative Writer
I'm guessing everyones seen the pictures. How many of you knew that the owners of said photographs in the main had admitted they were hoaxes of some sort? Here is the story of the photographs and which ones were faked.


Nessie mystery turns 75

More than 1,000 people claim to have seen the Loch Ness monster since a mysterious shape was first photographed 75 years ago.



References to a monster in Loch Ness date back to St Columba's biography in 565 AD.
But the myth only took its modern form when reports of a strange object and then a series of mysterious photographs appeared in press during the 1930s.
Adrian Shine, from the Loch Ness and Morar Project, has led many scientific studies into the depths of Loch Ness but has not found any evidence of a monster.
Below are his pointers to understanding the iconic images of the Loch Ness monster.

THE FIRST

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It was this picture, snapped by Hugh Grey on 12 November 1933, that is credited as being the first photographic evidence of the Loch Ness monster. It appeared on the front cover of the Scottish Daily Record on 8 December that year, under the headline "Monster photograph of the mysterious Loch Ness object".
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It is the first picture and bears that distinction, but it is also the least easy to interpret.
It has been suggested that it is a double negative, perhaps of a Labrador dog with a stick in its mouth, but it could be anything.
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THE NECK
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The "surgeon's photographs," of the Loch Ness monster have come to define the image of Nessie, and for many years no conclusive proof could be found that they were fakes. The photographs were supposed to have been taken by gynaecologist Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson and were published in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934.
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This is the image in most people's minds, but it is a fake.
Firstly, if you look at the water texture you can tell the waves are very small, not to scale with the size of the monster.
Secondly, it was owned up to by Christian Spurling, one of the hoaxers, in 1994. He was asked to make a model to go on top of a toy submarine by Marmaduke Wetherell, who with a small group of collaborators planned the hoax to get back at the Daily Mail, who had fired and publicly humiliated him for a previous hoax.
It is such a beautiful picture and may well have found its inspiration in the Brontosaurus in King Kong. It led to the expectation that the Loch Ness monster would have a long neck.
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THE HUMPS
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Lachlan Stuart's photograph taken on 14 July 1951 was of a different kind of Loch Ness monster, with a long thin body arching out of the water.
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The remnants of this hoax were witnessed by local author Richard Faire. He spoke to Lachlan Stuart the next day, who confessed that he had constructed the image from hay bails and tarpaulin. Researchers later recreated the image and found the water where the monster was seen was in reality very shallow.
This didn't stop people from speculating as to how the creature could contort its back in such a way.
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THE CASTLE
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Respectable bank manager Peter MacNab took this Nessie photograph on 29 July 1955.
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This is a huge object. If it were an animal it would be more than 60ft (18m) long, which is colossal. If you think of the amount that would be under the water, it would be a creature of the most improbable proportions.
It could possibly be a portion of a boat wake and if you look behind it you may see a faint line in the water. There may have been some retouching, but the photographer never admitted to a hoax.
Given the improbability of an object of that size, you have to seek alternative hypotheses, but there is no definitive proof that the image is a fake.
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THE END
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Picture of The Loch Ness monster's flipper taken underwater in 1975

With the advent of colour photography and a total lack of definitive proof, classic photographs like these stopped appearing after the 1950s.
A rigorous 10-year project to watch the surface of the loch in the 1960s turned up no evidence whatsoever of the mysterious monster.
Instead, the search went underwater, with sonar sounds and submarine exploration of the loch's dark depths.
"In hindsight, you can see that the classic pictures are different to each other, hence unlikely to be real pictures of one animal," says Adrian Shine.
"You may not believe that Loch Ness is Jurassic Park, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something in Loch Ness that is yet to be explained."
 
I feel that the elephant story is a total non starter. Try to find pictures of elephants swimming. They inevitably have far more of their heads and body exposed.

I am in two minds about what Nessie actually is/could be. I would love to believe that she/he/it is a modern day dinosaur. Its possible I suppose. I tend to think that it is either a very large eel not freshwater they simply do not grow that big even though they are long lived or perhaps a sturgeon which do grow very, very large or perhaps it is some other unknown sea creature. I say sea creature because I do firmly believe that somewhere in Loch Ness there is an underwater tunnel leading out to the sea. It has to be something like this because the Loch itself simply could not sustain aliving creature that is the supposed size of Nessie. Being an angler I know that the food supply in the Loch is actually not up to much. The tunnel would also explain why Nessie can go for long periods of time without being spotted.


End of the day I do believe there is something there.
 
Hi Kevan,

I just wanted to let you know that i subscribe to your underwater tunnel theory, Scientists have scanned with radar, sonar, submersables and god knows what else and have never come up with anything worth looking at.

Whatever or whoever is living in loch ness is not likely to come up say cheese and give them an interview, It would scarper back out to sea where they cant find it, the loch is that deep that it could very well hide a multitude of tunnels.

When you look at it, The crocodilian species are all living dinosaurs, then you have things like monitor lizards and anacondas, all of them reach gargantuan proportions with the right conditions, One anaconda was recorded at twenty five feet long.

My point is this, The loch ness monster theory has not developed for no reason, people have been sighting something for centuries, Whats to hinder it being an as yet unkown species or leftover dinosaur.

best,

Jane
 
The Loch Ness Monster: Cryptozoological


ABOVE: Possible remains of the Mysterious Loch Ness Beast? And a new species of animal discovered living in Loch Ness by accident. It is quite an unearthly looking creature, but it's a natural living animal, I think it's cool to just observe it.





BELOW: Rod Serling narrates a classic documentary (segment only) about the Loch Ness Monster.


 
The problem with any story which involves some kind of prehistoric survival is that Loch Ness was frozen solid during the last Ice Age (it had a glacier grinding down its length), and only thawed out about 10,000 years ago. Everything living in the loch has entered since then.

Rather than assuming that the absence of any convincing evidence indicates that there's a tunnel leading to the open sea, it would be more reasonable to conclude that the reason there's no evidence is that there's nothing there to find....after all, no-one has ever found any indication that such a tunnel might exist. Or, indeed, that any large unidentified beasts live in the oceans nearby.
 
I remain convinced that the answer to the Loch Ness monster fable has a far simpler explanation...

Somewhere in Scotland there is a group of old guys who still gather at their local pub for a few pints and talk about how many fools come around with hi-tech gear to look for a monster as a result of a prank that the now-old guys had some fun with years ago. After all these years, they don't even bother trying to tell anybody any more that it was all in jest because their explanation is dismissed by those who are convinced that there is something down there.
 
Argh, people will believe anything these days...

Personally, I won't believe it until I see it--REAL and IN PERSON.

I remain convinced that the answer to the Loch Ness monster fable has a far simpler explanation...

Somewhere in Scotland there is a group of old guys who still gather at their local pub for a few pints and talk about how many fools come around with hi-tech gear to look for a monster as a result of a prank that the now-old guys had some fun with years ago. After all these years, they don't even bother trying to tell anybody any more that it was all in jest because their explanation is dismissed by those who are convinced that there is something down there.

Good theory, dude; I wouldn't be surprised if that were actually how it went.
 
Everybody likes a mystery.

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I always felt that unknown creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are long gone, Earth has had many giant beasts that roamed the lands, but alas...they're gone. With the exception of a few very rare discoveries of other strange new and unchanged animals that people are still finding today. And of course there have been hoaxes though-out the centuries, but everybody likes a mystery.
 
Well, looks like a new generation has come up with their own theory on Loch Ness. Of all things, their is an eel. Yep, that's right, an eel. Never mind that it'd have to be an eel the size of a small truck, that's their theory.

The came up with this answer by sampling the waters and doing DNA tests. They found DNA evidence of a lot of creatures but apparently eel DNA was in the highest concentration, ergo, the loch ness monster might be an eel. A really, really, really big eel.
"We can't find any evidence of a creature that's remotely related to that in our environmental-DNA sequence data. So, sorry, I don't think the plesiosaur idea holds up based on the data that we have obtained."

He added: "So there's no shark DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. There is also no catfish DNA in Loch Ness based on our sampling. We can't find any evidence of sturgeon either,

"There is a very significant amount of eel DNA. Eels are very plentiful in Loch Ness, with eel DNA found at pretty much every location sampled - there are a lot of them. So - are they giant eels?

"Well, our data doesn't reveal their size, but the sheer quantity of the material says that we can't discount the possibility that there may be giant eels in Loch Ness. Therefore we can't discount the possibility that what people see and believe is the Loch Ness Monster might be a giant eel."


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Well, looks like a new generation has come up with their own theory on Loch Ness. Of all things, their is an eel. Yep, that's right, an eel. Never mind that it'd have to be an eel the size of a small truck, that's their theory.

Hey, don't blame "a new generation," Roy P. Mackal suggested this in his 1976 book The Monsters of Loch Ness, which includes an artistic rendering of "a hypothetical thick-bodied eel" along with other hypothetical, plesiosaur-like amphibians as possible candidates, and even a "hypothetical (but unlikely) serenian," which looks like a manatee with a long neck! But yeah...somewhere in there he suggested the eel.

*Roy P. Mackal, wherever he is*
"Dibs!"
 
Plesiosaur, any of a group of long-necked marine reptiles found as fossils from the Late Triassic Period into the Late Cretaceous Period (215 million to 80 million years ago). Plesiosaurs had a wide distribution in European seas and around the Pacific Ocean, including Australia, North America, and Asia.
80 million years is a long time!

66 million years is also a long time.
Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.

Its possible a creature might survive in some form over 80 million years, IN THE OCEAN.
Loch Ness is a large, deep, freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands extending for approximately 37 kilometres southwest of Inverness. Its surface is 16 metres above sea level.

Evolution might have caused a group of plesiosaurs to morph from salt water to fresh water.
I do not know the geologic changes that occurred in the loch over the last 80 million years.
Perhaps it is possible some form of plesiosaur has survived. Thing is, a predator of that size and ferocity would not be a mystery. There would be irrefutable evidence of it in and around the loch including fossil beds teaming with their bones.
 
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