I must stop here to say that this photograph bothered me from the first moment I saw it. Even as a monster-loving child, I felt that the weirdly angular humps did not look like as though they belonged to an animal. They also conflicted badly with the plesiosaur I understood Nessie to be. (Of course, humps-in-a-line sightings have always composed a significant subset of reports.) But the photo was received as a major breakthrough in the 1950s, partly on the strength of Stuart’s apparent sincerity. “I could not,” Whyte raved, “put forward this photograph with more confidence if I had taken it myself.”130 This confidence was misplaced. As researcher Nicholas Witchell learned, “Lachlan Stuart’s photograph, of three angular ‘humps’ a short distance offshore, was a hoax: Mr. Stuart’s account of what happened, a fabrication. He evidently intended no great mischief, and was both surprised and amused that his picture—in reality of three partly submerged bales of hay covered in tarpaulin—should have been taken seriously.” Shortly after admitting to having set up the hoax, Stuart took another Loch Ness local (author Richard Frere) to see the props. They were “hidden in a clump of bushes.”131
Figure 4.11 The photograph taken by Lachlan Stuart in July 1951. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
The revelation that the photograph is a crude fake may not seem surprising. It looks like a crude fake. Yet Ronald Binns argues that hindsight obscures the photo’s historical influence. Consider that in 1976, the scientific director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau characterized Lachlan Stuart’s photo as “direct photographic evidence as to the probable shape of the central back region of the animal.”132 Looking back, Binns reflects, “What has probably been lost sight of over the years is the impact which the Wilson and Stuart photographs had on monster-hunters back in the 1960s and 1970s. In those days we all firmly believed that they were genuine photographs and that the monster was indeed a very big animal with a long giraffe-like neck, capable of transforming itself into a three-humped object.”133
The Tim Dinsdale Film
If asked to point to the Loch Ness mystery’s equivalent to the Roger Patterson–Bob Gimlin film, which allegedly caught a glimpse of Bigfoot, most people would select the famous Surgeon’s Photograph. Loch Ness researchers probably would give a different, deeper answer: the Tim Dinsdale film. This little piece of black-and-white movie footage, shot in 1960, shows a tantalizingly indistinct, far-off blob moving on the surface of the lake. Nessie researchers find it compelling and evocative. As Roy Mackal, scientific director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, explained, when all other evidence seemed unconvincing, “the one thing that would not go away was the Dinsdale film sequence. Although it was grainy in quality because of the great distance involved in the photography, I could not explain it, try as I would. It alone was sufficient for me.”134
Dinsdale was an engineer who developed a sudden and powerful fascination for Nessie, after reading a magazine article late one night in 1959:
I kept turning the story over in my mind, and, late that night in bed, fitfully asleep, I dreamt I walked the steep jutting shores of the loch, and peered down at inky waters—searching for the monster; waiting for it to burst from the depths just as I had read, and as the wan light of dawn filtered through the curtains, I awoke and knew that the imaginary search beginning so clearly in my dream had grown into fact.135
Reviewing the literature on the monster, Dinsdale hatched a very simple plan: he would drive to Loch Ness and film Nessie. And that, he soon reported, is exactly what he did. Indeed, Dinsdale spotted the monster just minutes after his first view of the loch: “Intrigued, I drove up closer … and then, incredibly, two or three hundred yards from shore, I saw two sinuous grey humps breaking the surface with seven or eight feet of clear water between each! I looked again, blinking my eyes—but there it remained as large as life, lolling on the surface!”136 Alas, this was a false alarm. Upon closer examination through binoculars, the monster “turned out to be a floating tree-trunk after all.”137 But the excitement of his vacation was just beginning. Four days later, after driving about, visiting authors and witnesses, and periodically stopping to observe the loch—bingo! The Loch Ness monster!
The light began to fail, and then, quite suddenly, looking down towards the mouth of the river Foyers, I thought I could see a violent disturbance—a churning of rough water, centering about what appeared to be two long black shadows, or shapes, rising and falling in the water! Without hesitation I focused the camera upon it and exposed twenty feet or so of film…. I went straight to bed quite sure of the fact that the Monster, or part of it at least, was nicely in the bag!138
Nor was Dinsdale’s luck, it seemed, exhausted. On the sixth day of his vacation, he filmed Nessie a second time! Coming over a hill,
I saw an object on the surface about two-thirds of the way across the loch…. I dropped my binoculars, and turned to the camera, and with deliberate and icy control, started to film; pressing the button, firing long steady bursts of film like a machine gunner…. I could see the Monster through the optical camera sight … as it swam away across the loch it changed course, leaving a glassy zigzag wake; and then it slowly began to submerge.139
Flush with the knowledge that he and his camera had “reached out across a thousand yards, and more, to grasp the Monster by the tail,”140 Dinsdale returned home. When his motion-picture film was developed, however, he discovered with disappointment that his first sequence of “Nessie” footage was “no more than the wash and swirl of waves around a hidden shoal of rocks; caused by a sudden squall of wind…. I had in fact been fooled completely!”141
Two of his three “monster” sightings had proved to be simple misidentification errors. But what of the last? Viewing the remaining film sequence, Dinsdale was convinced that he had truly captured proof of the existence of the Loch Ness monster—and felt that science would soon agree. Unfortunately, even he had to concede that this “shabby little black and white image that traced its way across the screen” looked fairly unimpressive.142 Shot at extremely long range, the film depicts an indistinct blob moving on the surface of the water a mile in the distance. Not surprisingly, it was greeted with indifference by the scientists whom Dinsdale approached. However, television audiences proved much more receptive. Dinsdale’s television debut was covered by major newspapers as far away as Chicago,143 securing him a Nessie book deal (the first of several) and launching his new career as a Nessie researcher, author, and lecturer.144 Dinsdale became a monster celebrity. (He even appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during a lecture tour of the United States in 1972—a six-week “whirlwind of appointments, interviews and rehearsals for TV, radio and the newspapers.”)145
But what exactly did Dinsdale film? Certainly, his footage depicts a moving object on the surface of the loch; beyond that, it’s difficult to say. This “fuzzy, distant, inconclusive” film, as the Boston Globe described it,146 lends itself to various highly uncertain interpretations. For example, consider the conclusion of the Royal Air Force photographic experts from the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC) who studied the film in 1966. Dinsdale felt that the investigators had “vindicated” his film,147 but this is a significant overstatement. In fact, they found that the appearance and speed of the blob in the film are consistent with those of a motorboat (“a power boat hull with planing hull”). However, the report continued, if the blob were a motorboat, this “would scarcely be missed by an observer.” That is, because Dinsdale said that it was not a boat, “it probably is an animate object.”148 The assumption that Dinsdale would have recognized a distant motorboat is extremely shaky. After all, Dinsdale mistook other inanimate objects (first a log, and then some rocks) for the Loch Ness monster two other times during the same week!
Essentially, the experts at JARIC found that Dinsdale’s blob is consistent with a monster—or with a boat. This conclusion is not terribly helpful. Since the film was analyzed, various authors, experts, and television produ
ctions have attempted to enhance the film, with results supporting (variously) either a monster or a boat. For example, pro-Nessie author Henry Bauer asked “a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech … [to] scan a number of frames at higher resolution and to examine them under various types of enhancing techniques”; from this, he concluded that the film does not show a boat.149 By contrast, Adrian Shine found frames of Dinsdale’s film that suggest a manned boat. When he asked members of the original JARIC team to have another look at the film in 2005, they found that the object “has the overall appearance of a small craft with a feature at the extreme rear, consistent with the position of a helmsman.”150
The Dinsdale film has quite a bit in common with the Patterson–Gimlin film. Both are influential among core proponents. Both filmmakers took a short trip with the intention of filming a famous cryptid, and then immediately did. And both films ultimately frustrate the search for answers. Could Dinsdale really have filmed a monster? The film’s mysterious blob cannot tell us—not for sure.
Nonetheless, there are circumstantial hints that suggest a more prosaic explanation. For example, Dinsdale’s blob travels in plain sight of a motor vehicle on a road just 100 yards away. The vehicle’s driver and the “monster” would have had clear views of each other, but neither slows or reacts to this close encounter. To critic Ronald Binns, “The fact that the driver just kept going suggests that this was because the object passing by was something perfectly ordinary—a motor boat.”151
As well, there are some red flags about Dinsdale himself. Although he had a reputation among critics and friends alike as “a man of great sincerity,”152 he sometimes let his imagination run away with him, as it did during the two false-positive Nessie sightings he made in the days immediately before he shot his famous film. Given those misidentification errors, it is hard to know how to interpret his spectacular claim of a later, close-up sighting in 1971:
I glanced to starboard and instantly recognized a shape I had seen so often in a photograph, the famous “Surgeon’s Photograph” of 1934—but it was alive and muscular! Incredulous, I stood for a moment without moving. All I could do was stare. Then I saw the neck-like object whip back underwater, only to reappear briefly, then go down in a boil of white foam. There was a battery of five cameras within inches of my right hand, but I made no move towards them.153
Inexplicably, his later books reduce this close encounter to a sort of aside or footnote: “The strangest radio interview I had was in 1971 at Inverness: moments after seeing the Monster’s head and neck from [a boat] I had switched on a tape recorder to make a commentary, and BBC radio wanted to use it for a science programme.” After barely mentioning having seen the Loch Ness monster, Dinsdale spends the next two paragraphs on a pointless anecdote about the “peculiar experience” of technical glitches for an interview.154 What gives?
Dinsdale was also given to flights of supernatural fancy. He was, for example, “conscious of some dark influence” at one secluded beach where he often staked out the monster:
Four of the five expeditions based there resulted in illness or injury, or accident of a most unpleasant nature, and I became aware of some strange influence which seemed to be malevolent…. I do subscribe to the belief that … purely psychic influence can have a physical effect on people, and sometimes on material objects. I have witnessed such phenomena, which absolutely defy the physical laws as we understand them.155
In the same vein, he told the Washington Post that he sometimes experienced “dread” while on his boat on the loch: “That’s the only word I have to describe it. Dread. I knew I wasn’t alone. I knew it.”156
Finally, there is the Dinsdale family’s puzzling approach to stewardship of the film. As longtime Nessie researcher Tony Harmsworth complains, Tim Dinsdale long refused to allow researchers with Adrian Shine’s reputable Loch Ness and Morar Project to study the film—a situation that did not improve after Dinsdale’s death. “Wendy Dinsdale still refuses to allow the film to be properly examined by the Loch Ness Project’s evidence analysts,” Harmsworth writes, “which is both sad and implies that there may be something to hide.”157 While television productions are sometimes granted permission to show portions of the film, scholarship would be much better served if all researchers had ready access to high-quality copies. As it is, many Loch Ness researchers have never seen the complete film, which has been called “the single best piece of photographic evidence of Nessie”!158
A MIXED BAG
The Loch Ness monster is not a species—it is a social phenomenon in which, over many decades, a wide variety of witnesses have described a wide variety of things for a wide variety of reasons. It is not one overarching mystery waiting for one generic solution, but a collection of many unique cases. Among those many cases, some are certainly hoaxes. Others are certainly the result of mistaken identification of known phenomena for an unknown monster. The question is: Could some remainder or subset of “Nessie” cases describe genuinely unknown animals? It’s possible (if unlikely).
Most sources agree intellectually that the Nessie database is a mixed bag. However, the temptation to propose a kind of Grand Unified Nessie Theory has often proved irresistible to skeptics and proponents alike. This urge flies in the face of the highly variable descriptions that eyewitnesses have provided. As one article joked in 1934, “From the evidence, he must be a mixture of all that walks, flies, swims—and makes the hotels do miraculously.”159 Decades later, Tim Dinsdale characterized Nessie witnesses as “consistently inconsistent” on the critical matter of basic body plan: “Everyone seemed to have noted a different number of ‘humps’ in the water—one, two, three and even more on occasions, and sometimes no humps at all, just a huge back like an upturned boat. It was difficult to understand.”160
Figure 4.12 An elasmosaur-type plesiosaur. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton)
This difficulty evaporates once we accept that “Nessie” is a catchall term for whatever witnesses happen to find puzzling when they look out over the loch. But interesting questions remain: What are the various things in the mixed bag? And is it possible that a true monster could hide in that mix? Could there be a signal, or signals, hidden in all that noise?
The “Plesiosaur Hypothesis” Redux
We have seen that the “plesiosaur hypothesis” was based on three exceedingly wobbly pillars: George Spicer’s King Kong–inspired sighting, a report that Alex Campbell recanted as a mistake, and the fraudulent Surgeon’s Photograph. Given that unstable foundation, are plesiosaurs worth considering at all? Prominent cryptozoologist Loren Coleman suggests that they are not:
Most American cryptozoologists, from the beginning, and, indeed, most critical thinking cryptozoologists today reject The Plesiosaur Hypothesis. The mammalian focus and other schools of thought have won out long ago. We realize that these extinct marine reptiles are extinct, and to promote or use them as candidates for Loch Monsters is done mostly by “true believers” (on both sides of the aisle, whether they are pro- or anti-Nessites).161
In addition, plesiosaurs are a terrible explanation for reports of a multi-humped, sea serpent–type Nessie (figure 4.12). Still, many witnesses have described creatures that clearly do resemble plesiosaurs—pivotal early witnesses and recent witnesses as well. In 1997, for example, a journalist claimed (“apparently seriously,” according to Coleman)162 that he had seen five plesiosaurs:
I was on the banks of Loch Ness the other morning, sunning my long legs, when one of those Nessies—those plesiosaur-type monsters that inhabit the loch—surfaced in front of me. She was 10 or 15 yards away. She had three or four humps and a greenish-brownish hide. Small, imperious head. Long, graceful neck…. Within a few seconds, a second monster surfaced, and bobbed beside the first one. Then a third and a fourth one—followed by a juvenile…. But my camera was in my car.163
In the context of a lighthearted travel story, this outrageous sighting seems like an obvious joke—especially given the write
r’s aside: “Perhaps it was just a brain storm; increasingly, I seem prone to them.” Be that as it may, this man and other witnesses clearly describe “plesiosaur-type monsters.” The ethos of cryptozoology (essentially, “take eyewitness testimony seriously”) seems to demand that cryptozoologists accept this option. And while the “plesiosaur hypothesis” may have fallen on hard times (especially in the wake of the revelation that the Surgeon’s Photograph was a hoax), there is no getting around its decades-long popularity—not only in the public imagination, but in the cryptozoological literature as well. As legendary cryptozoology pioneer Bernard Heuvelmans pointed out in 1977, “the plesiosaur has remained the candidate of choice for Anglo-Saxon researchers favorable to the creature’s existence.”164 Writing in 2003, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker agreed that the hypothetical relict plesiosaur “remains the most popular identity among cryptozoologists for the Loch Ness monster.”165 Many Nessie books and Nessie researchers have gone to bat for this idea or at least included it as a distinct possibility. Tim Dinsdale advocated plesiosaurs as a more parsimonious explanation than any large undiscovered species. At least we know that plesiosaurs used to exist! Besides, he said, “the Monster looks exactly like a type of long-necked Plesiosaur…. If it is not a type of Plesiosaur, then I have no idea what it can be.”166
Notwithstanding this long (and continuing) history of reports of plesiosaur-like creatures in Loch Ness, this idea was always spectacularly unlikely. Plesiosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years, while Loch Ness was a solid glacier just a few thousand years ago. Even if we were to imagine that plesiosaurs had survived undetected somewhere in the oceans, it is unlikely that they could have colonized Loch Ness. They were tropical animals, unsuited for the cold waters of the loch—and most plesiosaurs were marine animals, unsuited for freshwater in general. Plesiosaurs would also require more food than the loch can provide. Indeed, extensive biological sampling and sonar surveys conducted by Adrian Shine and other researchers of the Loch Ness and Morar Project have revealed that the loch has a total fish population of only about 22 tons.167 This is simply not enough food for a breeding population of plesiosaurs. As Shine explains,
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