Table of Contents

• Birth of the Legend
• The Spray Photograph
• The Surgeon’s Photo
• The Stuart Photograph
• The MacNab Photograph
• Frank Searle
• The Flipper Photo
• Nessiteras Rhombopteryx
• The Loch Ness Muppet
• Conger Eels
• The Loch Ness Fossil
• The Loch Ness Tooth

Birth of the Legend

Ancient Scottish legend told of a “beast” that lived in the waters of Loch Ness. St. Columba, for instance, was supposed to have encountered a large serpent in the River Ness over 1400 years ago. But the modern history of Nessie began in 1933 when a new road was completed along the northern shore of the Loch, providing easy access to unobstructed views of the water. Soon after this, a couple spotted an “enormous animal” in the Loch. The Inverness Courier wrote up their sighting, describing what they saw as a “monster;” intense media interest followed; and thus was born the modern Loch Ness Monster.

Since 1933 Nessie sightings have been reported quite regularly. There are three possible explanations for these reports: 1) Nessie really does exist, and the sightings are evidence of this; 2) People overly eager to believe the legend are interpreting any unusual movement or shape in the water as Nessie; and 3) people are lying about what they’ve seen.

The first explanation (Nessie’s real) is extremely unlikely, but I have a soft spot for Nessie, so I’m unwilling to completely rule this out. But common sense would dictate that the second explanation (misinterpretation) probably accounts for the majority of the sightings, and the third explanation (deliberate lying) accounts for the rest. Collected below are some of the most notorious Nessie hoaxes (suspected and known).

The Spray Photograph

November 12, 1933: Hugh Gray was walking back from church when he saw an “object of considerable dimensions—making a big splash with spray on the surface” of the Loch. Luckily he had his camera with him, so he began snapping pictures. Only one of the pictures showed anything. Nessie believers hailed it as the first photographic evidence of the monster. Skeptics, however, dismissed it as a blurry mess that doesn’t show anything at all. Many have suggested that it looks like a distorted image of a dog (perhaps Mr. Gray’s own) carrying a stick in its mouth as it swims through water.

The Surgeon’s Photo

April 19, 1934: Colonel Robert Wilson, a surgeon, was driving along the north shore of the Loch early in the morning when he noticed something large moving in the water, so he stopped and took a picture of it. At least, that was his story. For the next sixty years this picture was regarded as one of the best pieces of evidence of Nessie’s existence. It wasn’t until 1994 that the full truth came out. What Wilson had taken a picture of was not the Loch Ness Monster. It was a toy submarine outfitted with a sea-serpent head. Moreover, Wilson himself hadn’t even taken the picture. He had simply been the frontman for an elaborate hoax. Read more about the Surgeon’s Photo hoax.

The Stuart Photograph

July 14, 1951: Forestry Commission employee Lachlan Stuart took a picture of mysterious humps rising from the loch. Over twenty years later researchers visited the spot where he had taken the picture and realized the humps would have been in extremely shallow water close to the shore, meaning that Stuart’s monster must have been awfully flat. Confirming their suspicions, author Richard Frere later revealed that Stuart had confessed to him the humps were nothing more than bales of hay covered with tarpaulins.

The MacNab Photograph

July 29, 1955: Bank manager Peter MacNab snapped a photo of something large moving through the water of the loch near Urquhart Castle. But when researcher Roy Mackal studied the photo, he discovered differences between the negative of the image and the print that MacNab had originally shown to the media. Specifically, there was more of the image in the print than there was in the negative (the tree at the bottom left is missing from the negative). This led him to conclude that the “negative” had been created by re-photographing a print. In other words, it was clear that the image had been doctored.

Frank Searle

Frank Searle, a former army captain, arrived in Loch Ness to search for the monster during the early 1970s and soon established a reputation as a definite character. He was like a colonial-style adventurer, assisted by a succession of attractive young “monster huntresses.” He took an enormous number of photos of Nessie, many of which were published by the media, but all of which have been dismissed by experts as fakes. His early photos, such as the one to the right (taken in October 1972) have been identified as pictures of floating tree trunks. In later photos he progressed to cutting-and-pasting dinosaurs from postcards into his images. Searle left the loch in 1985 and died in 2005.

The Flipper Photo

August 7, 1972: An expedition to find Nessie led by Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Science struck gold when its underwater camera took a picture of what appeared to be the flipper of a large aquatic animal resembling a plesiosaur. However, the relatively clear image of a flipper shown to the public was not quite what the camera had initially recorded. The initial image was far less distinct. (It basically looked like a shot of a bunch of bubbles or sediment in the water.) This initial picture was then computer enhanced by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, and apparently the computer-enhanced image was further artistically enhanced by the Academy of Applied Science team (i.e. it was retouched), thereby producing the final flipper photo. Modern image-enhancement software has not been able to conjure anything resembling a flipper from the original image.

Nessiteras Rhombopteryx

1975: Sir Peter Scott of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau participated in the 1972 expedition that produced the flipper photo. Feeling that the photo provided proof that some kind of large creature existed in the loch, he decided to give the animal a scientific name: Nessiteras Rhombopteryx (which meant “the Ness wonder with a diamond fin"). But London newspapers soon pointed out that if you juggled around the letters in this name, you got the phrase “monster hoax by Sir Peter S.” Was this evidence that the flipper photo had been a deliberate hoax? Scott denied it. Dr. Rines came to his rescue by pointing out that if you juggled the letters around a bit more, you could spell “Yes, both pix are monsters. R.”

The Loch Ness Muppet

May 21, 1977: Anthony ‘Doc’ Shiels claimed that he took this picture while camping beside Urquhart Castle. Its startling clarity (it’s probably the clearest picture of Nessie ever taken) has made it popular with the public. But it’s hard to find any expert willing to take it seriously, simply because the creature depicted in it looks so obviously fake. (And it’s odd that there are no ripples in the water around the neck.) Skeptics refer to Shiels’s monster as “The Loch Ness Muppet.” The fact that Shiels was a showman, “wizard,” and psychic entertainer who was developing a side business as a professional monster hunter didn’t help his credibility. Shiels himself commented that while he definitely took photos of lake monsters, he didn’t believe in them.

Conger Eels

May 2, 2001: Two large, serpent-like conger eels were found on the shore of the loch. Since the eels were saltwater creatures and the loch is freshwater, they evidently had been placed there. The leading theory was that a hoaxer, hoping the eels would be mistaken for mini-Nessies, had dumped them there.

The Loch Ness Fossil

July 2, 2003: Gerald McSorley, a Scottish pensioner, found a fossilized section of a plesiosaur vertebrae when he accidentally tripped and fell into the loch. Nessie enthusiasts speculated the fossil might have come from an ancestor of the monster. But subsequent examination revealed the vertebrae were embedded in limestone not found near Loch Ness, and the fossil showed signs of having recently been in a marine environment. In other words, it was clear the fossil had been planted at the loch.

The Loch Ness Tooth

March 2005: Two American students visiting Scotland claimed to have found an enormous tooth (possibly belonging to Nessie) lodged in the carcass of a deer along the shore of the loch. However, (so they said) a game warden who happened to be passing by almost immediately confiscated the tooth from them, though not before they got a few pictures of it. The students subsequently created a website to publicize their find and lobby for the return of the tooth. But animal experts identified the “tooth” from its picture as the antler of a roe muntjac deer. The website and accompanying story then turned out to be a publicity stunt for a horror novel by Steve Alten titled The Loch.

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