06. The author with Nessie at Drumnadrochit.Next-door to the “original” Nessie exhibition, attached to the Drumnadrochit Hotel, stands the “official” Loch Ness Exhibition Centre, launched by British adventurer Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes in the 1970s and run today by Loch Ness & Morar Project leader Adrian Shine. More sophisticated and elaborate than its neighbour—and slightly more expensive at £6.50 per adult, £4.50, £18 per family—Shine’s exhibit presents a relentlessly sceptical view of Nessie. In Shine’s view every photo taken of aquatic cryptids is a hoax; each of the several thousand sightings on record is either fraudulent or a result of mistaken identity.
But what is mistaken for Nessie?
Common candidates include boat wakes and wind-driven waves, floating logs, aquatic birds swimming in tandem, and the odd dog-paddling deer, but Shine himself suggests large fish. Sturgeon might fit the bill—and Shine, coincidentally, has tried his hand at rearing them in a pond near his own exhibition. “This is a bit embarrassing,” Shine said in January 2000, “and I would rather that there is not too much publicity about the fish. It is all part of an experiment I am conducting. The fish occasionally breaks the surface in the summer and is spotted by visitors and we are recording their description of what they see.” (12)
Nessie fan club spokesman Gary Campbell looked askance at Shine’s experiment, declaring, “It’s no wonder that he doesn't want any publicity. This experiment has the worst overtones of pseudo-science that have been seen at Loch Ness for years. What happens when the fish grows too big for the pond? It might be unfair to suggest that the fish may end up in the loch, be spotted and then be caught, thus proving Mr Shine correct all along, but the coincidences are a bit much to take.” Waxing conspiratorial, Campbell added, “It may be that he is raising a sturgeon because he didn’t like goldfish, or he may be moving into the production of Loch Ness caviar, but given the contempt with which he treats any theory other than his own, I think that something slightly more sinister may be going on.” (13)
* * *
Next stop: Urquhart Castle, where Scottish history and mystery collide. As with the first reports of Nessie, Urquhart Castle dates from Saint Columba’s time, when King Brude built an outpost for his northern Picts. The castle’s legacy of blood and fire spans four long centuries, from its capture in 1296 by England’s Edward I—“Longshanks,” of Braveheart infamy—to 1692, when supporters of William III frustrated Jacobite invaders by blasting the keep to smithereens.
Only photogenic ruins remain, maintained as a tourist attraction by Historic Scotland, but Urquhart has produced more than its share of modern Nessie sightings—nearly two dozen on record since the 1930s when a group of school children saw the monster on land, waddling over swampy ground to enter Urquhart Bay. Lachlan Stuart faked his hay-bale photograph at Urquhart Castle in 1951 and Doc Shiels snapped his “muppet” photo there, a quarter-century later.
Hoaxes aside, researchers still puzzle over Lorna Taylor’s photo of a rising head and neck, taken near Urquhart Castle in September 1995; a group sighting from the cruise boat Jacobite Queen on 19 June 1998; another from the Nessie Hunter on 5 September 1998; and a seven-witness sighting near the castle on 30 March 1999.
On 20 June 2000 Canadian monster enthusiast Gavin Joth spent his lunch break watching a Loch Ness webcam at work and captured several frames of an unknown object crossing Urquhart Bay. Analysts from the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club discounted fakery, along with the “usual suspects,” and Joth subsequently banked a £500 prize offered by William Hill bookmakers for the year’s best photo of Nessie.
On 23 May 2003 local auxiliary coastguard skipper George Edwards watched a six-foot creature paddling offshore from Urquhart Castle for two or three minutes in bright sunshine. Nine months later, on 5 February 2004, another webcam witness snapped Nessie at Urquhart Bay. Most recently, on 27 March 2007, tourist Sidney Wilson photographed two passing vessels from the rear deck of his own cruise boat, later noting the head and fin of an unidentified creature when the photos were developed.
As on prior excursions, Nessie declined to surface during my latest visit to Urquhart Castle, but I nurture no hard feelings. Hope springs eternal. The dark waters beckon, ripe with mystery and promise.
* * *
One local who harbours no doubts about Nessie’s continued survival is Richard Macdonald, captain of the Royal Scot tour boat based at Fort Augustus since 1983. Sailing hourly from April through November—£11 per adult, £6.50 per child, £33 pounds per family of four—the Royal Scot features sophisticated depth-ranging gear and boasts multiple sonar contacts with large unknown objects in transit, but Captain Macdonald’s personal accounts enter another realm entirely.
Despite repeated sorties on the Royal Scot, I saw Macdonald in action for the first time on 16 April 2010. Commanding the attention of an unruly crowd below decks, he reeled off details of personal sightings—the most recent occurring at 6:01 p.m. on 28 June 2007—and described a population of seventeen specific cryptids dwelling in the loch, identifiable by size and behavioural traits. The proof was on his mobile phone, in the form of multiple photographs, all but one reportedly snapped by Macdonald himself during years of research conducted, he says, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA.
Why MIT? Perhaps because Boston native Robert Rines spent years on the university’s faculty, conducted underwater searches at Loch Ness with MIT’s professor of electrical engineering Harold “Doc” Edgerton, and had an MIT distance learning center named in his honour during 1997.
Why NASA? That requires more of a stretch, for a federal agency whose mission is simplicity itself: “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” (14) How does that goal, pursued since NASA’s creation in 1958, mesh with studying Nessie? Does the strange overlap explain NASA’s eagerness to contradict the BBC in 2003?
In any case, Macdonald says his research is classified, with copies of his photos—one portraying an apparent severed tail—held exclusively by MIT, at NASA headquarters, and in his personal archive.
One of the photos on display this afternoon, however, is familiar. It depicts a rotting carcass dangling from a shipboard crane. Macdonald says that it was snapped off New Zealand in 1994, scientifically dismissed as a giant squid’s remains in an apparent effort to conceal “the truth” about sea monsters. He’s right about the venue but mistaken on the year and final diagnosis. In fact, the photograph depicts remains of a creature hooked by the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiyo Maru on 25 April 1977, subsequently identified as a decomposed basking shark from traces of the protein elastodin found in its rotting tissue. Objections to that finding continue in some quarters, particularly among fundamentalist Christians who seek proof of “young Earth” creationism in the possible survival of prehistoric reptiles. (15)
The Royal Scot’s captain offers no such religious trappings for his endorsement of Nessie. Macdonald, in his own words, has devoted his life “to study of these creatures,” and withholds opinions on their similarity to other cryptids seen around the world, including “Champ” at Lake Champlain and “Ogopogo” in British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake. To him the presence of a breeding cryptic population in the loch appears as certain as the bloom of heather during spring.
Is there, in fact, some covert study group in place? A classified project linking MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Royal Scot’s wheelhouse at Fort Augustus? For now, at least, the answers to those questions lie beyond our grasp.
* * *
Three days before my scheduled departure for the States, Mother Nature pulled another trick out of her hat, unleashing Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. I never glimpsed a speck of ash as it disrupted flights throughout the bulk of Western Europe, but I found my working holiday extended for the best part of another week.
There are, in fact, worse fates than being “stuck” in Scotland. Listening to crazed “tea party” loons at home, for instance, as they try to stop the clock on efforts to place U.S. health care on par with powerhouse states such as Singapore, South Korea, Cuba, and Brunei.
While waiting I was moved to wonder: how will any cryptids lurking in Loch Ness respond to Iceland’s drifting plumes of ash? Will those new deposits hasten extinction of a species still unrecognised, as Robert Rines suspected global warming had, years earlier?
Perhaps.
10. Nessie and friend follow the Royal Scot.
11. The Zuiyo Maru “sea serpent.” [Feel free to crop as desired]And yet, as my flight belatedly lifted off from Glasgow International Airport, I could imagine Roger Allam as Lewis Prospero in V for Vendetta, bellowing a slightly altered version of his trademark battle cry across the Scottish landscape. It echoes from the Highlands, through the pass at Glencoe, to the world at large.
“Goddamn it, Nessie prevails!”
1 Billy Paterson, “Is Nessie Dead?” Sunday Mail (Glasgow), 30 September 2007.
2 Bob Dow, “Veteran Loch Ness Monster Hunter Gives Up.” Daily Record (Glasgow), 13 February 2008.
3 Michael Newton, Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology (McFarland, 2005), p. 447.
4 Karl Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (Blandford, 1995), p. 87.
5 “BBC ‘proves’ Nessie does not exist.” BBC News, 27 July 2003.
6 Ibid.
7 Newton, Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology, p. 330.
8 Ibid.
9 Lindsay Selby, “Is Nessie Dead?” Still on the Track, http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/12/lindsay-selby-is-nessie-dead.html.
10 Diane Maclean, “Nessie is dead, long live Morag, Lizzie, etc., etc.” Caledonian Mercury , 11 January 2010. 11 Linda Engels, “The end of Nessie: Researchers fear Loch Ness monster may be dead.” Daily Record (Glasgow), 6 January 2010.
12 “Formally unqualified monster man grows his own Nessie,” Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club Nessie News, http://www.lochness.co.uk/fan_club/news.html.
13 Ibid.
14 “About NASA,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/what_does_nasa_do.html.
15 Malcolm Bowden, “The Japanese carcass: a plesiosaur-type animal!” http://www.mbowden.surf3.net/plsfin13.htm; John Goertzen, “New Zuiyo Maru Cryptid Observations,” Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal 38 (19-29 June 2001): 19-29; Pierre Jerlström, “Live plesiosaurs: weighing the evidence,” Journal of Creation 12 (December 1998): 339-346.
ILLUSTRATIONS: Note: With the obvious exceptions—Nos. 01, 02, and 10—I own all rights to the photos submitted. They should be credited to Heather Newton as the photographer.
Five years ago today I had a doctor's appointment at 2:00pm and once that was over, Graham, my brother Richard and I got into my trusty olf blue Jaguar, and drove from my little house in Exeter to my father's house in Woolsery, North Devon.
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