All all-out hunt for the Loch Ness monster yielded - alas - nothing.
The group Loch Ness Exploration and the Loch Ness Centre invited cryptozoologists and Nessie fans all over the world to join them for a Quest Weekend of searching with drones, boats, sonar, hydrophones, cameras, and luck. Nessie, as always, remained elusive.
watched tonight's NBC coverage, which included my cryptozoologist friend Ken Gerhard, who'd crossed the Atlantic to lend a hand. Ken phrased it cautiously, but everybody HOPED this festival of monster-hunting would come up with something.
Was there anything to find? I've long since closed my own file on Nessie, but the myth is smashing good fun for all as well as a thriving tourist industry.
Anyone can go look for Nessie. People of all kinds are sure they have seen Nessie. A grad student I knew in the 80s, with a psychology degree, and whom I'd trust on anything without question, reported she'd seen something like a round orangish head pop up near her tour boat. I don't know what she saw, although I assume the color was some trick of the light. I'm not ready for orange monsters.
The Nessie business really began in the 1930s. There are only a handful of earlier reports, none of them particularly convincing. The oldest report of all, a colorful account of Saint Columba confronting a monster in the year 565 or thereabouts, is actually placed in the River Ness, which connects the loch to the sea. The existence of this river suggests the possibility of an ocean-dwelling creature either migrating in and out or trapped in the loch. Unfortunately, the river is very shallow today, and nothing larger than a seal could make such a journey undetected. The loch, for the record, is about twenty-four miles long, up to 900 feet deep, and has a substantial, though not bountiful, population of fish including eels, salmon, and char.
The major outbreak of sightings which occurred in 1933 may be linked to a road-improvement project along the north side of the loch, which provided motorists with a much better view and could conceivably have disturbed a creature living in the water. Then, as now, there was a tendency to refer to “the monster” as an individual. To explain the record of sightings over the next sixty years, however (given the aforementioned lack of access between the loch and the ocean), a breeding colony is required. Incidentally, the loch surface is some 50 feet above sea level, ruling out any connection to the sea via an underground cavern. (Claims of finding cave or tunnel entrances on sonar have been made, but never verified.)
From the beginning, some people have suggested the whole thing was a hoax. One of the first well-publicized sightings, in May 1933, was made by the couple who ran the lakeshore Drumnadrochit Hotel. The sighting was reported to the Inverness Courier by Alex Campbell, a water bailiff (an official who enforces fishing laws). Campbell later claimed to have made several sightings himself, and some skeptics believe he virtually invented the monster. A local author who wrote under the name Lester Smith said he invented Nessie to draw business for local hotels.
What were people reporting? Sometimes it was merely a hump, or two or more humps in line. Some people (such as Campbell, in his own first sighting in September 1933), reported a large hump plus a slender neck, estimated to stretch five feet long or longer, and a small head. The whole visible length, Campbell thought, was about thirty feet. According to the first on-site survey of witnesses, conducted by Rupert Gould in 1933, this plesiosaur-type configuration matched most sighting reports. The chief discrepancy between witnesses concerned the number of humps.
Eyewitness reports since then have added virtually nothing to this basic picture. Witnesses differ (as might be expected) on the presence and shape of small features such as eyes, “horns," etc. The color has been described as everything from black to reddish-brown to olive drab, only rarely with mottling or other markings.
Without good evidence for the existence of Nessies, it is not very useful to speculate on what they might be. Despite this fact, no one involved in the subject can resist such speculation. Some of the suggestions made so far include giant otters, huge thick-bodied eels, embolomers (greatly enlarged descendants of prehistoric amphibians), plesiosaurs, archaeocetes (primitive whales), other types of mammals, including hypothetical long-necked sirenians or pinnipeds, and invertebrates of various kinds. A 2019 eDNA study, though, essentially ruled out them all. Some Nessie-lovers suggested that, since it showed (as expected) eel DNA, Nessie could still be a giant eel. Maybe, but we're talking common eels, not the 10-foot ocean-going congers one can imagine might scale up.
The Loch Ness monster, though, remains a celebrity. There are countless Web sites, at least two with live cameras trained on the loch, and several organizations. At Loch Ness itself are two exhibitions and plenty of opportunities to buy stuffed monsters, vials of Loch water, photographs, and even “monster droppings” (lumps of peat). By one estimate back around 2000, the monster was worth twenty-five million pounds a year to the local economy.
Press attention has abated somewhat since the high point of the 1970s, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Neither have sightings. Yet the skeptics have had the best of the debate for a long time.
I'll admit the famous Dinsdale still bothers me. It doesn't look to me like a boat, and the various enlargements and enhancements have failed to bring out details supporting the boat hypothesis. Aside from that, though...
Despite biology, it seems there will always remain an aura of mystery around Loch Ness. This may not be very satisfying for science, but it is, I think, good for the human spirit. A world without mysteries would be a grim place indeed. May Nessie (whatever it is) live on!
He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com.
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