Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Finally, there is the troublesome description in Spicer’s letter to the Inverness Courier that the monster “appeared to be carrying a small lamb or animal of some kind.”47 Later, paraphrased versions of his story suggested that the “lamb or animal” could refer to the end of the creature’s tail sticking up above its shoulder (or perhaps something riding on the monster’s back); but, at face value, this appears to be a direct description of the last shot in King Kong’s sauropod scene. Reaching into a tree, the dinosaur grabs a surviving crew member in its mouth and shakes him. In a shot that exactly matches Spicer’s sketch, the doomed man looks exactly like a “small lamb or animal of some kind” in the monster’s mouth!

  This is not the first time that a similarity between the film and the sighting has been noted. Rupert Gould discussed King Kong with Spicer just months after the sighting: “While discussing his experience, I happened to refer to the diplodocus-like dinosaur in King Kong: a film which, I discovered, we had both seen. He told me that the creature he saw much resembled this, except that in his case no legs were visible, while the neck was much larger and more flexible.”48 But despite the red flag of Spicer’s admission that he had seen King Kong and that his creature looked like the monster in the film (and even though the obscuring of the creature’s legs and feet was a striking detail that the sighting and the film version shared), Gould seems to have moved on without further comment. More recently, Shine’s always thorough research zeroed in on both the pivotal importance of Spicer’s story (being, once again, the original report of a long-necked monster at Loch Ness) and the significance of Spicer’s discussion of King Kong.49 “I believe personally that King Kong was the main influence behind the ‘Jurassic Park’ hypothesis at Loch Ness,” Shine confirmed, when asked about the likelihood of a connection. “Before Spicer’s land sighting there were no long neck reports at all and it was the long neck that was so crucial.”50 Shine does not seem to have specified the details of the similarities in print, however, and most researchers overlook this smoking gun altogether.

  What we are left with is familiar to critical researchers of other paranormal topics, such as UFOs: a feedback loop among popular entertainment, news media, and paranormal belief. The Loch Ness monster grew out of an existing genre of fictional encounters between modern humans and prehistoric creatures (plesiosaurs and sauropods, in particular). Audiences for the hit silent film The Lost World (1925) watched a Diplodocus rampage through the streets of London and those for King Kong saw another stop-motion sauropod dinosaur attack a raft full of men. These fictional stories prepared the public imagination to accept similar “true” stories that the press happily publicized. The press hype ensured further public interest, which inevitably generated more reports. Some were hoaxes, of course, but many were mistakes generated by expectant attention. In 1934, Gould gravely noted “the undoubted fact that, in proportion, as more people looked for the ‘monster,’ more people saw it.”51 Then, popular fiction stepped in to recursively capitalize on the media-based monster of Loch Ness. The first feature film version, The Secret of the Loch, hit theaters less than a year after Spicer’s sighting! (Almost inevitably, the lead character declares the Loch Ness monster to be—what else?—a Diplodocus.)

  “Horrible Great Beast”

  Triggered by the Spicer case, a wave of new sighting reports poured in. The sheer number of accounts not only seemed to show that the monster was real, but also exposed a critical flaw in the newly minted legend. “There is one vital question regarding it which must always cause warrantable doubt,” one writer nailed it in 1938. “Why have we heard of it only within the last five years or so, when there is no authenticated record of its existence in the centuries which have gone?”52

  While news coverage asserted a “traditional Loch Ness ‘monster’—a superstition which has existed for generations,”53 knowledgeable locals refuted these media claims. Scolding the Inverness Courier in 1933, steamship captain John Macdonald wrote, “It is news to me to learn, as your correspondent states, that ‘for generations the Loch has been credited with being the home of a fearsome monster.’”54

  A genuine monster should imply a history of monster sightings. Where were they? Seeking such a history, people turned to old sources—and old memories—in search of support. Newspapers carried many letters like this one from the Duke of Portland:

  Sir,—The correspondence about “the Monster” recently seen in Loch Ness reminds me that when I became the tenant in 1895, nearly forty years ago, of the fishings in the River Garry and Loch Oich, the ghillies, the head forester, and several other individuals at Invergarry often discussed a “horrible great beast,” as they termed it, which appeared from time to time in Loch Ness. None of them, however, claimed to have seen it themselves, but each one knew individuals who had actually done so.55

  It is difficult even to know what to say about this story. After the media hype started, the duke came forward to say that he remembered that forty years earlier, he had heard some hearsay about a monster? Rupert Gould rather understated the provenance problem when he said of this claim, “Although interesting, such stories are of no great value as evidence.”56 Yet, to this day, many Loch Ness monster sources include this story, without comment, as a firsthand sighting in 1895 by multiple witnesses.57 Other similarly backdated tales, about alleged but unrecorded events or hearsay from decades earlier, are interspersed with older stories of uncertain or unlikely relevance to create a fictional time line of Nessie prehistory. Some early references included on the canonical time line are invented from whole cloth. For example, one full-page article in the Atlanta Constitution is rumored to have described a modern Loch Ness monster (complete with woodcut illustration) in the 1890s. This would be important if true, but it appears that the article never existed. (All attempts to locate it have failed.)58

  Despite this fictive history, the truth is that unambiguous Nessie sightings did not exist before the release of King Kong and the subsequent media hype. Some monster proponents confront this state of affairs honestly. With the possible exception of the “three young anglers” case, writes Henry Bauer, “I can produce nothing written before 1933 that unequivocally refers to large, nonmythical animals in Loch Ness.”59

  Still, as 1933 wore on and reports of sightings of the Loch Ness monster accumulated, people found apparent corroboration in the form of supernatural folklore. To begin with, there were the kelpie traditions, notwithstanding that they are hardly exclusive to Loch Ness. But enthusiasts soon unearthed a more specific tale that appeared to establish Nessie’s antiquity.

  THE STORY OF SAINT COLUMBA

  Within an early medieval biography called The Life of Saint Columba, there is a brief but exciting description of a Catholic saint’s confrontation with a “water beast” at the River Ness. Now considered the canonical “first recorded sighting” of the Loch Ness monster, this anecdote is said to establish a provenance for Nessie that dates back 1,300 years. Unfortunately, there are good reasons to suspect that this encounter never occurred.

  Columba (ca. 521–597) was an Irish monk who in 563 traveled to Scotland as a missionary and established a monastery on the island of Iona. About a century after Columba’s death, Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona, wrote a biography of his predecessor. This fascinating work is considered one of the most important windows into early Scottish culture, so it is not surprising that monster proponents wish to claim it.

  The story goes like this: Columba and his monks encountered some locals conducting a burial at the river’s edge. When he asked what had happened, Columba was told that a terrible beast had killed a swimmer. Hearing this, Columba directed one of his companions to swim across the river and fetch a boat from the other side. The monk obediently leaped into the water:

  But the beast, not so much satiated by what had gone before as whetted for prey, was lurking at the bottom of the river. Feeling the water above it disturbed by the swimming, and suddenly coming up to the surface, it rushed with a great
roaring and with a wide-open mouth at the man swimming in the middle of the streambed. On seeing this, the blessed man, together with all who were there—the barbarians as much as the brethren being struck with terror—drew the sign of the saving cross in the empty air with his upraised holy hand. Having invoked the name of God, he commanded the ferocious beast, saying, “Go no further! Nor shall you touch the man. Turn back at once.” Then indeed the beast, hearing this command of the holy man, fled terrified in pretty swift retreat, as if it were being hauled back with ropes; though just before this it had approached the swimming [monk] so closely that, between man and beast, there had not been more than the length of a small boat-pole.60

  This does sound like a powerful endorsement for the legend of the Loch Ness monster. But this superficial resemblance between the river monster and Nessie is a coincidence and is profoundly useless as evidence. The problem is that Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba is a hearsay-based biography of a man whom Adomnán never met—a larger-than-life historical figure who was, by Adomnán’s day, already shrouded in legend. Drawing from monastic documents, local folklore, second- (and third- and fourth-) hand testimony, and travelers’ tales from faraway lands, Adomnán collected hundreds of unrelated and mostly implausible anecdotes—some as short as two unsupported sentences. He had no way even to put them in chronological order. Each story simply begins “At another time …” or “On another day….”

  Like other early medieval hagiographic literature, The Life of Saint Columba is packed with magic, monsters, and spine-tingling supernatural forces. In addition to making prophecies and performing healing miracles, Columba is said to have calmed storms, turned water into wine, summoned water from a stone, driven out “a Demon that Lurked in a Milk-pail,” raised the dead, enchanted a stick so that wild animals would impale themselves on it every night, comforted a weeping horse as it “shed copious tears”—and so on. The water beast story is but one of several animal-related anecdotes, each showing the saint’s holy power over wild beasts (a boar, a water beast, poisonous snakes). In this context, concluded historian Charles Thomas, the monster tale emerges as just “one minor literary trope within a deliberate and overt piece of religious propaganda.”61 Worse, the story was a cliché. As Thomas points out, medieval hagiographies very often include saintly adventures “in which snakes, or serpents, or dragons—terrestrial or aquatic, with or without wings, silent or bellowing—figured as stock properties in every variety of resuscitation or repulsion miracle.”62

  The bottom line is that no one knows what Columba saw. Indeed, there is no reason to think that this encounter happened. No one knows where the story came from, and it cannot be used as evidence of anything.

  Unfortunately, Thomas was right when he wrote that it was “too much to hope that future writers on the topic of the Loch Ness Monster will abandon this reference as irrelevant and misleading.”63 Today, more than twenty years later, virtually all Loch Ness monster sources continue to showcase Saint Columba’s as the “first recorded Nessie sighting”—the centerpiece of a revisionist time line cobbled together from “sightings” that entered the record (as decades-old or even millennia-old hearsay) only after the start of the Nessie media circus.

  THE EMERGENCE OF THE “PLESIOSAUR HYPOTHESIS”

  Inspired by the sauropod dinosaur in King Kong, George Spicer created the legend of a long-necked monster at Loch Ness. In turn, his yarn gave rise to many other dinosaur-like and plesiosaur-like sightings. Promoted in news reports and supported by photographs of alleged monsters, these eyewitness accounts made the “plesiosaur hypothesis” a favorite explanation for Nessie throughout the twentieth century.

  The groundwork for this notion had been laid as early as 1833, when naturalists began to suggest that a surviving population of prehistoric marine reptiles (known from newly discovered fossils) could be the best explanation for sea serpent sightings.64 The idea received a big boost from an immensely popular science writer named Philip Henry Gosse in 1861.65 The concept of surviving plesiosaurs was further popularized in widely read science-fiction stories, such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Science-fiction writers even relocated the marine reptiles to freshwater lakes. One short story, “The Monster of Lake LaMetrie” (1899) by Wardon Allan Curtis, features a violent encounter between a scientist and an Elasmosaurus that has been cast up from the hollow center of Earth (figure 4.6).66 Familiar as we are with the conceit of a Loch Ness plesiosaur, these stories now read as clear foreshadowing of the Nessie narrative and the cryptozoological hopes that it embodies. Consider this passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s runaway hit The Lost World:

  Figure 4.6 The skull of an elasmosaur at the Courtenay and District Museum and Palaeontology Centre, Courtenay, British Columbia. (Image by Daniel Loxton)

  Here and there high serpent heads projected out of the water, cutting swiftly through it with a little collar of foam in front, and a long swirling wake behind, rising and falling in graceful, swan-like undulations as they went. It was not until one of these creatures wriggled on to a sand-bank within a few hundred yards of us, and exposed a barrel-shaped body and huge flippers behind the long serpent neck, that Challenger, and Summerlee, who had joined us, broke out into their duet of wonder and admiration.

  “Plesiosaurus! A fresh-water plesiosaurus!” cried Summerlee. “That I should have lived to see such a sight! We are blessed, my dear Challenger, above all zoologists since the world began!”67

  Perhaps not coincidentally, the speculation that a population of plesiosaurs could have survived in the oceans was advocated in 1930 by Rupert Gould,68 who went on to write the first and most influential book about the Loch Ness monster! The notion that Loch Ness, in particular, might shelter plesiosaurs was raised as early as August 9, 1933, immediately following Spicer’s sighting of a long-necked monster. Linking Nessie to sea serpents, the Northern Chronicle argued that there can be little doubt that the Loch Ness creature “is a surviving variant of the Plesiosaurus.”69 Strangely enough, it was Alex Campbell, the author of the Inverness Courier’s original Aldie Mackay sighting story, who pushed the plesiosaur idea the hardest. Having written the canonical first Loch Ness monster news story and conjured up the fakelore that “Loch Ness has for generations been credited with being the home of a fear-some-looking monster,” Campbell went on to claim that he personally had seen a plesiosaur in Loch Ness—multiple times.

  In October 1933, Campbell and his neighbor told reporter Philip Stalker that they had experienced spectacular sightings of the monster.70 Stalker wrote that these “men whose honesty and reliability have never been called in question” described the creature as “being of the same form as a prehistoric animal: resembling most nearly the plesiosaurus. That is to say that they described its form, and when shown a sketch of a plesiosaurus stated that was the kind of animal they had seen.”71 Stalker went on to report Campbell’s detailed claim that “one afternoon a short time ago he saw a creature raise its head and body from the loch, pause, moving its head—a small head on a long neck—rapidly from side to side, apparently listening…. While it was above water, he said, he could see the swirl made by each movement of its limbs, and the creature seemed to him to be fully 30 feet in length.”72 This was, Stalker admitted, “a description which, to anyone who is at all sceptical, must appear to be very fantastic.” Skepticism was, we know now, entirely appropriate: Campbell retracted his story just days after Stalker publicized it! In a letter, Campbell explained that his spectacular 30-foot plesiosaur was just a group of ordinary waterbirds:

  I discovered that what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants, and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings as they often do. The other cormorants, which were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the Monster, as it has been described by various witnesses. But the most important thing was, that owing to the uncertain
light the bodies were magnified out of all proportion to their proper size.73

  Campbell’s role in the development of the Nessie legend was absolutely pivotal, but it soon descended into farce. Having admitted that the long-necked creature “fully 30 feet in length,” with its head held “fully 5 feet above the water,” was just a flock of cormorants (figure 4.7), Campbell then went on in 1934 to claim a nearly identical sighting of a creature “30 ft. long” with a “swanlike neck reached six feet or so above the water”!74 By itself, the sheer implausibility of this coincidence seems to disqualify Campbell’s testimony (and, by extension, all later plesiosaur sightings following his example) from serious consideration. But Campbell was not done: he eventually claimed a whopping eighteen sightings of the Loch Ness monster—often close up and sometimes of multiple creatures at one time. (In one of these entertaining adventure tales, his rowboat was lifted into the air on the monster’s back!)75

  Figure 4.7 Waterbirds, such as the plesiosaur-like cormorant, are a frequent source of false-positive sightings of cryptids. (© Stockphoto.com/Jesús David Carballo Prieto)

  We will return to the “plesiosaur hypothesis” later in this chapter. For now, we should pause to discuss the variability of eyewitness descriptions of the monster. “It seems quite clear, from the inquiries which I made between Inverness and Fort Augustus,” wrote Stalker, “that the many observers … are divided, broadly-speaking, into two sections.” On the one hand, there were those “who have seen a long greyish-black shape, evidently the back of a creature”; on the other, “there are those who have … described its head and neck and form as resembling a plesiosaur.”76 In dividing witnesses into these two camps, Stalker both captured and dramatically understated this critical problem. As F. W. Memory, writing in the Daily Mail, explained, “Hardly two descriptions tallied, and the monster took on both curious and fantastic shapes—long neck, short neck … one hump, two humps, even eight humps, and no humps at all! In fact, it rivals the most versatile quick-change artist of the vaudeville stage in the appearances it was able to assume between one viewing and another.”77