This variability of description leads researchers in radically divergent directions. If it is true that “the most striking feature about the Loch Ness ‘monster’—one which differentiates it from all other known living creatures—is a very long and slender neck, capable of being elevated very considerably above the water-level,”78 as Gould concluded, then this leads the investigation in one direction. If, instead, the creature has “a massive bull-like head set on a very thick neck, not unlike that of a seal or sea lion,”79 then the search takes an entirely different turn.
MONEY AND THE MONSTER
The commercial potential of the Loch Ness monster was obvious from the first—so obvious, indeed, that the Scottish Travel Association found it necessary to issue a denial: “[C]ontrary to rumours which are circulating, the Loch Ness ‘monster’ was not ‘invented’ by this Association as a means of publicity for bringing people to Scotland.”80 Yet, such is Nessie’s value as an attraction that rumors of deliberate tourism-related fraud continue to circulate. (It seems that even Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, argued that Nessie was a hoax created by British tourism agencies.)81
There seems little need to conjure a central conspiracy when good humor, expectation, and simple human error could so easily provide ample fuel to spark a monster myth. The Nessie legend seems to have emerged in a sporadic, haphazard, and organic manner, with free enterprise simply seizing the opportunity. And what an opportunity it was! As the Daily Express explained in December 1933:
It’s an industry. It is Scotland’s answer to the Taj Mahal, New York Empire State Building, Carnera, and Ripley, believe it or not. Many newspapers in many countries are doing all they can for it. Scotland is in the front-page news day by day…. When the winter sun pales on the Mediterranean the Riviera has no attraction left. Loch Ness can defy all weather, seasons, ages with this fellow. He’s a monster advertisement—whether he’s there or not.82
Travel companies leaped into the Nessie industry, aggressively promoting commercial train and bus tour packages.83 Loch-side bus traffic became so excessive in 1934 that special safety rules had to be introduced.84 And while Nessie brought crowds of visitors to Scotland, the monster could also be exported as popular entertainment. In addition to appearances on radio programs and in comic strips, Nessie splashed immediately onto the silver screen. For example, a British Pathé variety short presented a pop song called “I’m the Monster of Loch Ness” in January 1934.85 Amazingly, “a new ‘talkie’” feature film, The Secret of the Loch, was announced, shot, and released before the end of that year.86
Nessie was put to work as a sales monster as well. Advertisers raced to print Nessie-themed campaigns for consumer products from mustard to floor polish to breakfast cereal.87 Nessie merchandising also exploded immediately. In January 1934, a parade featuring a 17-foot-long monster escorted by bagpipers ushered three sizes of a cuddly velveteen toy called Sandy, the Loch Ness Monster, into Selfridges, a posh department store.88 A series of large advertisements and cash contests urged children to “Join the Monster Club” by purchasing a wooden puzzle toy called Archibald: The Loch Ness Monster.89 Rubber beach toys were rushed into production in anticipation of the 1934 tourist season.90
The humor of the Nessie industry was not lost on commentators. As one headline put it, “Monster Bobs Up Again … Hotels Doing Fine.”91 Another noted, “There have, of course, been unworthy suggestions that, as a major and unique tourist attraction, she is being very strictly preserved from any undue scientific de-bunking, by those who recognize her value as an invisible export.”92
A PARADE OF PHOTOGRAPHS
The Hugh Gray Photograph
The era of Loch Ness monster photography began in November 1933, when a British Aluminium Company employee named Hugh Gray was walking home from church along Loch Ness. Spotting the monster close to the shore, Gray apparently took five photographs, four of which showed nothing.93 But the fifth photo showed—something wiggly? Or maybe not?
When Rupert Gould wrote that Gray’s photo, “although indefinite, is both interesting and undoubtedly genuine,” he rather understated the “indefinite” part.94 The alleged monster photo is genuinely terrible (figure 4.8). Its status as the first photograph of Nessie makes it worth mentioning, but it could show anything. To appreciate the true ambiguity of this photograph, consider that at least one book has printed it upside down.95 Some researchers wisely refuse to argue on the basis of the photo. “I believe the picture is probably a genuine photograph of one of the aquatic animals in Loch Ness,” said Roy Mackal (on the strength of Gray’s verbal testimony). “However, objectively, nothing decisive can be derived from this picture. There is no apparent basis for determining which is front or back, and any such decisions must depend largely on what preconceptions one may have.”96
Figure 4.8 The first photograph alleged to depict the Loch Ness monster, taken by Hugh Gray in November 1933. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
While no source can claim any reliable insight into the identity of Gray’s monster, I confess that I can see only one thing: a yellow Labrador retriever, swimming toward the photographer. Once this interpretation was pointed out to me,97 I found it impossible to un-see it. However, I cannot remotely prove that the photo depicts a dog, and this interpretation has been critiqued as pareidolia (the human tendency to perceive bogus patterns—especially faces—in random noise). At the same time, neither can anyone else prove anything on the basis of this picture. In and of itself, Gray’s photograph has negligible evidential value.
Is there circumstantial evidence that could shed light on the matter? Perhaps. One reason for suspicion is that Gray reported at least six Nessie sightings,98 of which his photo was the second.99 When one witness announces multiple, even habitual, sightings of an elusive cryptid, I regard this as a huge red flag. Think of the millions of people who have visited Loch Ness, the thousands who live and work around it, and the organized observation campaigns that have failed to catch any glimpse of the monster. Yet, inexplicably, certain names turn up repeatedly in the Loch Ness sighting record. Of these witnesses, some have admitted to misidentification errors (Alex Campbell disavowed at least one of his eighteen sightings), while others have been caught cheating. For example, Nessie researcher Frank Searle produced an absurdly lucky streak of photographs before his fellow monster hunters proved that he was a hoaxer. (Some of his fake photos showed parts of a painted sauropod dinosaur blatantly cut out of a postcard.) After Searle was exposed, tensions rose to such a point that he allegedly firebombed a Loch Ness and Morar Project expedition. No one was hurt, and he soon left the area.100 Today, Searle is universally remembered as a fraud.
For his part, Gray also sighted Nessie with suspicious frequency—and there is a seemingly implausible convenience to his photograph as well. Walking home after church, he said, “I had hardly sat down on the bank when an object of considerable dimensions rose out of the loch two hundred yards away. I immediately got my camera into position and snapped the object which was two or three feet above the surface of the water.”101 Then, having successfully captured, at close range, history’s first photograph of the Loch Ness monster, Gray apparently went home and left the film in a drawer for almost three weeks.102
Was Gray’s photograph a hoax? I don’t know, but the smart money would not bet any other way.
March of the Hippopotamus
In December 1933, the Daily Mail dispatched a special investigator to Loch Ness to get to the bottom of the mystery: “big-game hunter” Marmaduke Wetherell. Almost as soon as he arrived, Wetherell announced that he had discovered (and cast in plaster) the monster’s footprints on the shore of the loch. This struck some observers as a little convenient. “I am aware,” Wetherell acknowledged in an interview, “that it is suggested that I have had phenomenal luck in finding such definite traces in two days, although others have failed after a long search.”103 Still, it was an astonishing find. In a BBC in
terview (produced, as it happened, by Peter Fleming, the brother of the creator of James Bond),104 Wetherell said, “You may imagine my great surprise when on a small patch of loose earth I found fresh spoor, or footprints, about nine inches wide, of a four-toed animal. It prints were very much like those of the hippo.”105
Recalling this interview, Fleming described Wetherell and his assistant as “transparent rogues” whose “account of their discoveries carried little conviction.” Wetherell struck Fleming as “a dense, fruity, pachydermatous man in pepper-and-salt tweeds.”106 These ad hominem attacks are in keeping with the portrait painted by researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd. Wetherell was “an eccentric, a likeable rogue, a master of hoaxes, a vain attention seeker.” They found that he was not, however, “as the literature would have it, merely a big-game hunter. He was primarily a film director and actor.”107 A mid-level showman, in short—and, with his monster footprints, a showman in the spotlight.
But it was not to last. The cast of the footprints was sent to the Natural History Museum in London, where it was studied by the head of the Department of Zoology and other scientists. These experts identified it easily enough: “We are unable to find any significant difference between these impressions and those made by the foot of a hippopotamus.” Nor did the prints of the monster match those of a living hippo that the museum had cast at the zoo for comparison. Wetherell’s tracks had been made by using a “dried mounted specimen.”108 The footprints were a hoax, and Wetherall himself had offered the first hint.
In 1999, Martin and Boyd revealed, “Marmaduke Wetherell planted the hippo footprints himself” by using a “silver cigarette ashtray mounted in a hippopotamus foot.” The ashtray still exists, in the possession of Wetherell’s grandson Peter.109
Saying that he “could not account” for the fake footprints, Wetherell soon announced that the Loch Ness monster was a seal—and left the area. But his role in the Nessie story was far from over.
The Surgeon’s Photograph
On April 21, 1934, the Daily Mail published a stunning new photograph of the Loch Ness monster, allegedly taken by a gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson. Referred to today as the Surgeon’s Photograph, this is unquestionably the most famous Nessie image ever produced (and an icon for cryptozoology in general) (figure 4.9).110 With a few exceptions, Roy Mackal wrote in 1976, “every student of the Loch Ness phenomena … has accepted this picture as depicting the head-neck of a large animal in Loch Ness.”111
Figure 4.9 The hauntingly indistinct, close-cropped standard version of the Surgeon’s Photograph, taken in April 1934. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
Contemporary critics were quick to propose alternative explanations. “I got a copy of the original from the Times,” wrote legendary paleontological explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, “and it showed just what I expected—the dorsal fin of a killer whale.”112 Others suggested, plausibly enough, that the photograph depicted a diving otter or waterfowl. However, it is now known that the photograph was a hoax. In 1975, the Sunday Telegraph printed a short article in which Ian Wetherell, the sixty-three-year-old son of Nessie hippo-foot hoaxer Marmaduke Wetherell, revealed that the Surgeon’s Photograph was actually another Wetherell family hoax, created by using a small model monster built around a toy submarine: “So my father said, ‘All right, we’ll give them their monster.’ I remember that we drove up to Scotland…. I had the camera, which was a Leica, and still rather a novelty then…. We found an inlet where the tiny ripples would look like full size waves out of the loch, and with the actual scenery in the background…. I took about five shots with the Leica … and that was that.”113 After the photo shoot with the model, Marmaduke Wetherell handed off the film to Maurice Chambers, a collaborator who passed it to Wilson, who submitted it to the newspaper—and history was made.
Strangely, Ian Wetherell’s public confession in 1975 remained little known for many years.114 In 1990, Adrian Shine dug out the forgotten article and set researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd on the trail. By this time, both Marmaduke and Ian Wetherell were dead, but the search led them to Marmaduke Wetherell’s stepson, an elderly gentleman named Christian Spurling. Spurling confirmed Ian Wetherell’s claim: “It’s not a genuine photograph. It’s a load of codswallop and always has been.”115 Spurling and Ian Wetherell had built the monster model together.
For his part, Wilson was always cagey about “his” famous picture. He hinted to researchers that “there is a slight doubt or suspicion as to the authenticity of the photograph.”116 He insisted, “I have never claimed that this photograph depicts the so-called ‘Monster.’ … In fact I am unconvinced and intend to remain so.”117 Moreover, some witnesses have said that Wilson had confessed to the hoax. One such was a friend of Wilson’s named Major Egginton, who had served under Wilson in the military. In 1970, Egginton told a young Nessie researcher named Nicholas Witchell,
I always recall the occasion when in 1940 my late Colonel (of the Gunners) Lt. Col. R. K. Wilson, who was before the War a Harley Street specialist, told three of us, quietly in the mess how he and a friend had hoaxed the local inhabitants of Loch Ness. His friend with whom he used to fish the loch from time to time … had apparently superimposed a model of a monster on the plate…. [T]he resulting publicity according to “R. K.” so scared them that it was kept very quiet.118
The “friend with whom he used to fish” was Chambers, the link between Wilson and Wetherell. Wilson’s relatives confirmed that Chambers and Wilson used to hunt together in Scotland,119 and Witchell related that the two men leased a “wild-fowl shoot … close to Inverness.”120 (Egginton’s widow likewise confirmed that Wilson “used to fish and shoot up in Scotland.”)121 Egginton’s statement that Wilson said his “friend” (Chambers) had supplied the Surgeon’s Photograph as a ready-made image independently confirms the first-person testimony from Ian Wetherell and Christian Spurling. And, as Egginton emphasized, “The story I have told you was that given to me by Lt. Col. Wilson and not second hand.”122
There is also a great deal of tantalizing hearsay evidence regarding skepticism on the part of Wilson’s friends and family. Researcher Maurice Burton was told that “everyone” in a London club to which Wilson had belonged “knew the picture was a hoax.” Following up this lead, Burton wrote to a friend of Wilson, who “evaded my question but answered rather in the nodis-as-good-as-a-wink manner.”123 According to Wilson’s sister-in-law, Wilson’s younger son “was very skeptical over the whole Loch Ness question, and he told a cousin it was a hoax.”124 A friend of Wilson’s surviving son related that “from all accounts R. K. was a great prankster with a wicked sense of humour…. R. K. didn’t discuss the photo with his family…. [T]he generally held opinion amongst the family is they are sure that it’s probably a fake.”125 Finally, Egginton’s widow recalled that Wilson had told the hoax story for years. “Everybody knew,” she said, “we knew up there. We all laughed about it, we have done so for years. We knew the story, my husband did, I did too. I find it incredible that the hoax lasted so long.”126
Figure 4.10 Less tightly cropped versions of the Surgeon’s Photograph reveal the small size of the model of the monster used to perpetrate the hoax. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
The case for the photograph’s being a hoax is very strong, while that for its being real amounts, essentially, to the impression that the silhouette resembles a monster. Yet, even this gut test fails badly. Looking at the scale of the ripples in the photo—especially in the recently publicized less tightly cropped version—the image seems obviously to depict something very small (figure 4.10). As early as 1960, commentators assessed the object as under 1 foot in height, based on the ripple size. Today, Martin and Boyd explain, “Avid believers in the authenticity of the photograph centre their faith around [Paul] LeBlond and [M. J.] Collins’ more recent size determination…. Using the wind waves visible in the uncropped photograph to deduce a scale
for the object in the center, they concluded this to be about 1.2 m [4 feet] in height.”127 Addressing this embarrassingly small upper-range estimate, Ronald Binns retorted, “Even if the object was 1.2 meters high, so what?”128 That scale is obviously consistent with a small model, not with a dinosaur-size monster.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, this vague, evocative image remains the most powerful icon for Nessie and continues to shape the public imagination. Such is its power. But serious students of the mystery have little choice but to face the historical truth: the Surgeon’s Photograph is a known fake.
The Lachlan Stuart Photograph
World War II suppressed interest in the Loch Ness monster, and sightings fell off correspondingly. But interest began to revive in the 1950s. Key to that cryptozoological renaissance was a new photograph, taken by a forester named Lachlan Stuart (figure 4.11). Among dedicated Nessie researchers, it became arguably as influential as the Surgeon’s Photograph. And, like that famous icon, Lachlan Stuart’s photo was a hoax.
According to Stuart, he got up early on July 14, 1951, to milk his cow. Spotting something strange out his window, he shouted for his wife and house-guest, and grabbed his camera. Running to the shore of the loch, they watched three humps and “a long thin neck and a head about the size and shape of a sheep’s head. The head and neck kept bobbing down into the water.” As the creature cruised—astonishingly, just 40 yards offshore—Stuart snapped his famous photo. He developed the film on his lunch break, and Nessie researcher Constance Whyte saw the negative and photo later the same day.129
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