Loch Ness

The Great Glenn is an enormous gash in the earth that splits the Scottish Highlands in two. It forms a chain of rivers, canals and lakes, or lochs, that connect the North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. One of these lakes, Loch Ness, is the home of perhaps the most famous cryptozoological riddles of our time.

Loch Ness, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, is twenty four miles long and, at one point, one and a half miles wide. It has an average depth of four hundred and fifty feet and at times plunges close to a thousand. It is cold and murky, with dangerous currents. In short, it is the perfect place to hide a monster from even the most prying eyes of science.

Many lakes of Northern Scotland had ancient legends about monsters and the like. The most famous of these is Loch Ness in Scotland with it's legendary creature, affectionately nicknamed "Nessie". In 565 A.D., though, Loch Ness's story was written down. The encounter happened in the early 5th century, when, according to a written account, the creature grasped one of the boat's crew in its mouth, and was about to tear the man to pieces. At that time, the leader of the missionaries, St. Colomba, prayed until the serpent gently brought back the crewman onto the boat's deck and silently returned to the water's depths.

"Think not to go further, touch not thou that man. Quick! Go back!"

The account tells of Saint Columba who saved a swimmer from the hungry lake monster. From then on rumors about the creature were repeated from time to time.

In 1933, after a new road was build along the edge of the Loch, the number of reports soared. The first of this period came on April 14 when the owners of an Inn in Drumnadrochit, the Mackay's, observed an "enormous animal" "rolling and plunging" in the Loch. They reported it to Alex Campbel, the man in charge of regulating salmon fishing in the Loch. Campbel spent a lot of time at the lake and observed the monster himself several times after being told of the Mackay sighting.

Campbel described the creature as having "a long, tapering neck, about 6 feet long, and a smallish head with a serpentine look about it, and a huge hump behind..." Campbel estimated the length of the "monster" at about thirty feet.

The first photograph of the thing was taken in 1933 by Hugh Gray. Gray reported, "I immediately got my camera ready and snapped the object which was then two to three feet above the surface of the water. I did not see any head, for what I took to be the front parts were under the water, but there was considerable movement from what seemed to be the tail."

Probably the most famous picture of the Loch Ness monster was the "surgeon's photo" supposedly taken by Colonel Robert Wilson. This photo was acknowledged as a fake, though, by Christain Spurling, who helped build the model monster that was photographed. He admitted the hoax shortly before he died in at age 90, in 1993.

Early in 1934 there was a land sighting of the beast. Arthur Grant, a young veterinary student, was out on his motorcycle one evening when he almost ran into the monster as it crossed the road. Grant's description of the thing, small head, long tapering neck and tail with a bulky body and flippers, seemed to match the appearance of the Plesiosaurus. The Plesiosaurus, an aquatic, reptilian contemporary of the dinosaurs, has been extinct for 65 million years.

In April of 1960 Tim Dinsdale, while visiting the lake, captured the first moving picture of the monster. Though the film shows little, a group of Royal Air Force photographic experts pronounced that the object was "probably" animate and as long as ninety feet. Skeptics argued that the thing was probably a motorboat. Dinsdale was convinced enough by his own pictures to give up his career as an aeronautical engineer and devote the next twenty years of his life to finding the monster. Though Dinsdale was rewarded with two more sightings of the creature, he was never able to gather incontrovertible proof of it's existence.

The next major event for Nessie was a study of the Loch Monster started in 1970 by the American Academy of Applied Science. The group, headed by Dr. Robert Rines, used automatic cameras and sonar to monitor the Loch. In 1972 one of the underwater cameras got four frames of what appeared to be flipper six to eight feet long.

One night Peter Davies, a member of Rines team, was out in a small boat in the Loch when he had a close encounter with the beast. He detected it under his boat with sonar. "I don't mind telling you it was a rather strange feeling, rowing across that pitch black water knowing that there was a very large animal just thirty feet below. It was the sheer size of the echo trace that was frightening."

In 1975 one of the team's cameras captured a vague and fuzzy image that could be interpreted as the face of the beast. "I thought that would clinch it," remarked Rines," but as you know, it didn't at all."

Efforts have continued to find the monster. A small submarine was even used to explore the depths of the lake, but no convincing evidence was found.

There is certainly not a Loch Ness monster. If there truly is something strange living in the lake there must be a breeding population. Perhaps anywhere from a dozen to a hundred individuals. There are a few photographs which seem to show more than one of the creatures together.

Sometimes supposed to be members of the dinosauria, order Saurischia, suborder Sauropoda, species brontosaurus ('thunder lizard') and/or brachiosaurus. It has not been possible, however, to explain why either of these lifeforms should have survived in two Scottish lochs, and nowhere else in the world, during the 200 million years since the Mesozoic Age in which dinosauria stalked the earth. Nor many one know how each of the brontosauri or brachiosauri obtains its daily ration of a tonne or so of soft tropical vegetation, which would be its usual diet. But it is of course possible that, during the two Ice Ages which have elapsed since the Mesozoic Age, the monsters have adapted to a different diet.

Description of the monsters vary so widely as to render scientific identification difficult, if not impossible. A nine-year-old girl, who saw one of the monsters land at Inchnacardoch Bay in 1912, described an elephant-coloured monster with great stumpy legs. This might fit a brontosaurus or brachiosarurus, but later sightings of the creatures indicate that they have long necks, calf-like heads, and 'three humps' following behind. This would not fit the dinosauria, which had bodies curved into a single hump, but might apply to sea serpents. The sea serpent, however, like sea snakes, would travel by a lateral writhing of its body in the same way that a snake does on shore, and not with a caterpillar-like 'humping' action. Furthermore, recent submarine photographs have pictured a great fin or paddle, believed to belong to the monster. Neither dinosauria nor sea serpents possess such appendages.

Some of the evidence, like the vet student's sighting, point to the Plesiosaur, great sea creatures of the Mesozoic Age, which did possess 'paddles'. Perhaps they were trapped in the loch 200 million years ago, and they or their descendants have lived there ever since. Dr. Roy Mackal, a Loch Ness researcher, has suggested a large mammal like a manatee or a zeuglodon (primitive whale). Others suggest a long necked seal or giant otter. Earlier Mackal considered it might be a giant sea slug. A few suggest an over-grown eel.

Skeptics argue that the water in the Loch is too cold for a reptile like the Plesiosaur. (Though recent dinosaur studies suggest the dinosaurs, and perhaps the Plesiosaur, were warm-blooded.) They also argue an air breathing animal, like a whale or seal, would spend much more time on the surface than the creature seems to and would be spotted more often.

Whatever the monster is, if it exists, it is extremely elusive. No bones or bodies have ever been found and, short of draining the Loch, it seems impossible to disprove the existence of the creature. We can only wait and see if time and patience, with a little luck, solves this most mysterious riddle.

The monsters have been seen by so many monster-watchers, and they have tipped so many people out of their boats or astouneded them by appearances on the lochside, that there can be little doubt as to their experience. In recent decades an immense amount of scientific or semi-scientific effort, using the latest oceanographic technology, has been devoted to the monsters. It is unfortunate that reputable zoologists and biologists remain unconvinced about this phenomenon.

In being large and cold and deep Loch Ness seems to share some interesting physical characteristics with other lakes that also have legendary monsters. In North America Lake Champlain, on the New York-Vermont border, sports a monster with the nickname "Champ." Further west, in Montana, there have been reports of a beast in Flathead Lake. Up in Canada Ogopogo and Manipogo, the monsters of Okanagan Lake and Manitoba Lake, have been the source of rumors since Indian times. Despite sightings and even some photographs, the existence of none of these creatures has ever been proven.