Before hopes are raised too high … it should be borne in mind that predators upon this biomass should not amount to more than approximately a tenth of the gross weight. Thus we have available a total of approximately two tonnes [2.2 tons] of “Monster” … equivalent to scarcely half the weight of a 36-ft (13 m) Whale Shark Rhincodon typus. In fact, two tonnes divided into an absolute minimum viable population of, say, ten creatures, would give an individual weight of only 200 kg [440 pounds].168
Moreover, hypothetical plesiosaurs must not only eat, but also die. A population would leave bones on the loch floor. Dredging and submarine searches have not found bones or other physical remains. Finally, plesiosaurs were air breathers. Any plesiosaurs in Loch Ness could be photographed several times an hour, each time they surfaced to breathe. (Their air-filled lungs would also light up sonar like nobody’s business—which fails to happen in survey after survey.)
Thus the plesiosaur-type Nessie, based on popular culture and hoaxing, can be definitively ruled out on biological grounds. But, then, what are witnesses seeing out on the loch, if not Nessie?
Misidentification Errors
Skeptics argue that simple misidentification accounts for many reports of a monster in Loch Ness, and proponents often agree. As pro-Nessie author Henry Bauer forthrightly asserts, “At Loch Ness the opportunities to be deceived are legion.”169 Under the right viewing conditions (such as the calm water and long distances typical in Nessie sightings), known objects or events can create illusions that seem compelling even to careful observers. Birds, splashing fish, otters, logs, boats and their wakes, and waves are especially common culprits. Reviewing the sighting records, Roy Mackal concluded that “careful examination of the reports tells us that a large proportion of these observations, perhaps 90%, can be identified as errors, mistakes, misinterpretations, and, in a few cases, conscious frauds.”170
Hearing this, monster fans sometimes feel incredulous. Can people really mistake, for example, common birds for plesiosaurs? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is unequivocal: yes—and they often do.
There are many specific, documented cases in which witnesses mistook other objects or animals for the Loch Ness monster. Tim Dinsdale describes seeing Nessie “as large as life,” only to subsequently identify this faux-monster as a “floating tree-trunk after all.”171 Similarly, cryptozoologist John Kirk relates a personal misidentification experience during his “pilgrimage to Loch Ness, a shrine for cryptozoological enthusiasts the world over.” Gazing hopefully over the loch, he “thought the monster had surfaced when a long slender neck popped up out of the water…. I can recall how, for a moment, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.” However, Kirk had binoculars ready, which allowed him to positively identify his monster: “a crested grebe, a common waterfowl frequently responsible for causing false alarms in the loch.”172 Similarly, influential early Nessie witness Alex Campbell admitted that at least one of his sightings of a plesiosaur-like creature was really a sighting of cormorants. Mackal has referred to standing waves (caused when boat wakes reflecting from the sides of the loch intersect one another long after the boat is gone) as “the most ubiquitous of all Loch Ness mirages.” So common were false positives caused by standing waves that “quite early, the [Loch Ness Investigation] Bureau began keeping a record of any and all boats passing through the lake, so as more readily to discount sightings that were really reports of the standing waves.”173
As soon as the monster sightings began, people rushed to propose various living animals as the solution to the mystery: a crocodile,174 a sturgeon,175 an oarfish,176 a beluga, a giant squid, a giant eel,177 and so on. Some suggestions were rather fanciful. One wag joked that the monster could be a “somewhat rare” breed of camel remarkable “for the abnormal length of time it can remain under water while swimming.”178 Others proposed, inexplicably, that the “Loch Ness monster is a sunfish, a native of Australia,”179 or even that “a pair of sharks might account for the mystery, if there are sharks without the green dorsal fin, which would betray them?”180 Indeed, there is an entire book dedicated to the thesis that Nessie is a super-gigantic version of Tullimonstrum gregarium—a soft-bodied, 1-foot-long marine invertebrate known only from 300-million-year-old fossil beds in Illinois.181
Other early suspicions clustered around more plausible suspects: Could witnesses have spotted otters, dolphins, porpoises, or (especially) seals in the loch?
Legendary skeptical investigator Joe Nickell favors otters as a general explanation for many monster sightings in lakes.182 Otter habitat geographically correlates well with lake monster distribution (especially in North America), and otters certainly can resemble monsters. Alone or in pairs, their long sinuous necks and snake-like heads resemble those of plesiosaurs. In larger groups, the rolling dives of otters can create a powerful illusion of undulating coils.183 With that in mind, it is notable that otters do live around Loch Ness.184 Expectant attention operating as it does, we can infer that some Nessie reports must describe otters. Mackal was more direct, asserting that “a good number of monster sightings reported by tourists do result from the observations of otters.”185 Furthermore, a case can be made that otters may lie behind specific sightings. Notably, one witness from the initial rush of 1933 reported a Nessie that “certainly looked like three or four otters together, going in a bunch.”186 Similarly, according to one local at the time, George Spicer’s crucially important sighting could be explained as a misidentified otter.187 (This is the explanation favored by many critics, including Ronald Binns and Nickell. In my opinion, the fingerprints of King Kong are unmistakable in Spicer’s account, but it is possible that he filtered an actual animal sighting through his impressions from the film. This may explain how his initially modest 6- to 8-foot creature grew into a 30-foot giant in subsequent tellings.)
Because Loch Ness is connected to the North Sea by a short hop up the River Ness, Scotland’s local porpoises and seals seemed like obvious suspects from the first—so obvious that Campbell took pains to deny the possibility in his news story about the original sighting by Aldie and John Mackay: “It should be mentioned that, so far as is known, neither seals or porpoises have ever been known to enter Loch Ness. Indeed, in the case of the latter, it would be utterly impossible for them to do so, and, as to the seals, it is a fact that though they have on rare occasions been seen in the River Ness, their presence in Loch Ness has never once been definitely established.”188 However, both types of local animal were more plausible than Campbell’s article claimed. To begin with, they were consistent with many reports. Indeed, according to one of the earliest (in June 1933), “the creature seemed rather like a porpoise or seal.”189 As a matter of practicality, medium-size sea animals can swim up the river and into the loch during high water; and, as Campbell conceded, seals were sometimes seen in the River Ness. From day one, these facts made seals the leading skeptical hypothesis. Although he personally rejected this explanation, Rupert Gould acknowledged that seals were “the most plausible theory of all—one which, at present, holds the field. That is, that the ‘Loch Ness monster’ belongs to the Pinnepedia—and is, in all likelihood, a large grey seal.”190
For our purposes, looking back over the Loch Ness mystery, the key fact is this: it is now known, definitively, that seals do enter the loch. Furthermore, there is documentary evidence that porpoises or dolphins also venture into Loch Ness. Campbell’s claim that “it would be utterly impossible” for porpoises to enter the loch is flatly refuted by an article published in the Daily Mail two decades before the Mackays’ sighting: “A rare phenomenon is now to be observed in Loch Ness, where a school of porpoises have got enclosed. They entered from the Moray Firth when the River Ness was in high flood, and now that the river is almost unprecedentedly low, even a baby porpoise would find it hard to pass the shallow stretches, while the adults would be hopelessly stranded.”191
Even more to the point, seals are a documented fact of life in Loch Ness (as they are in many Scottish
lochs with access to the North and Irish Seas and the Atlantic Ocean). All debate on the presence of seals in Loch Ness was settled in 1985, when a harbor seal made the loch its home for seven months (figure 4.13). During this time, “about 30 people reported about separate sightings of the seal,” and clear photographs were taken by Gordon William-son.192 In 1999, Nessie researcher Dick Raynor captured new video footage of seals in Loch Ness.193 In decades of investigation, Raynor writes (he has been involved since 1967), “none of us have turned up one iota of scientifically valid evidence for any biological ‘monster.’ The most significant development is the realization that seals frequently enter the loch, and probably account for many of the sighting events.” (It is not necessary to dwell on the eyewitness testimony of seals that Williamson collected from water bailiffs and fishermen, but those reports did offer support for the idea that seals are frequent visitors to the loch. Locals claimed many seal sightings and said that salmon fishermen had shot several seals over the years.)194
Figure 4.13
Harbor seals thrive throughout the Northern Hemisphere, found everywhere from the coast of the North Sea in Scotland to the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Canada. (Photograph by Daniel Loxton)
The presence of seals in the loch had been well attested all along. Consider, for example, the monster captured on film in 1934 by members of a team organized by a businessman, Sir Edward Mountain. When screened for “many leading scientists of the day in zoology and natural history … it was the general opinion of the scientists present that from the movements and manner of swimming the creature depicted was in all probability a member of the seal family, possibly a grey seal.”195 The seal hypothesis was also apparently supported by key monster hunters, including Malcolm Irvine, who shot film footage of the alleged monster in late 1933 and again in 1936. Regarding the latter film, the Scotsman reported that Irvine believed that the creature was a seal.196
Finally, several witnesses during the initial rush of Nessie sightings in 1933 and 1934 either described a monster in seal-like terms or flat-out asserted that they had seen a seal. For example, one “Highland Minister, who for various reasons cannot allow his name to be published,” reported a creature with a head “not unlike that of a seal or sea lion.”197 Mrs. Cranston of Foyers was more explicit. She told the Daily Mail that she had seen a salmon leap out of the water 200 yards away (practically point-blank range by Nessie sighting standards), followed immediately by a large round head that bobbed vertically in the manner of a seal. Cranston asserted that she was, sensibly, “convinced that it was a large seal chasing salmon in the loch.” At the Natural History Museum in London, Cranston’s explanation seemed obvious. As one curator explained, “We have thought that to be the probable explanation from the beginning. Grey seals have been known in the past in Loch Ness. They follow the salmon up the river.”198 Interestingly, Marmaduke Wetherell (of hippo-foot infamy) reported that he personally had seen a seal in the loch: “I have not the slightest doubt that what I saw was a very big seal. The head leaves no room for doubt on that point. What appeared to be a hump was actually the creature’s back as it lunged forward to dive. I am now quite satisfied that there is not a prehistoric animal in Loch Ness, but a very big seal.”199 Based on the testimony of these witnesses, the Daily Mail concluded its investigation of the Loch Ness monster with the screaming headline “There Is a Seal in Loch Ness.” While Wetherell is obviously not a trustworthy source, this headline—at least in general terms, and at least some of the time—is completely correct.
Memory Distortion
Reports of mistaken or ambiguous sightings can also become embellished over time, as a result of distortion of the witnesses’ memories, creative enhancement, retelling by the media, or any combination. It is easy to understand how this happens. Consider cryptozoologist John Kirk’s false-positive sighting of Nessie, which turned out to be a Great Crested Grebe. If he had not had binoculars to penetrate the illusion on the spot, how might the “hair on the back of [his] neck stood up” emotional charge have influenced his later memories of the sighting?
Nor is this problem hypothetical. Important Nessie witnesses have embellished their tales over time. For example, the witnesses in the early “three young anglers” story specified in 1930 that they “could see a wriggling motion, but that was all, the wash hiding it from view.” By 1933, the story had already evolved to describe “a dark back, appearing as two or three shallow humps.”200 By 1974, the original hidden-from-view story had been so elaborated that “the length of the part of it we saw would be about twenty feet, and it was standing three feet or so out of the water.”201
Such distortion is not unique to cryptid cases and certainly is not due to any unique flaw in those who claim to have seen monsters.202 Psychologists emphasize that the plasticity of memory is a defining factor of all firsthand testimony. Saints, scoundrels, geniuses, and idiots all face the same reality: the normal operation of human memory involves both creative reconstruction and loss of accuracy over time.
THE ASTONISHING HISTORY OF ORGANIZED SEARCHES
The sheer longevity of the Nessie legend makes it difficult to appreciate the number and scale of the decades of serious, sustained efforts to penetrate the mystery. From gyrocopters to giant Nessie traps, almost any imaginable scheme has been tried—long ago and many times. The history of the hunt is too extensive to cover here in depth, but let’s have a look at a few of the projects you might have thought of yourself.
• Why not seek evidence in old books and newspapers? Archival-sleuthing efforts hit the ground running in 1933 and have never stopped. Yet even today, with centuries’ worth of national and regional newspapers scanned into searchable databases, the archival evidence remains the same: Nessie was born in 1933, in the wake of King Kong. There is no sign of a local cryptid tradition before that time (and certainly no record of a long-necked monster in the loch before George Spicer claimed to have seen it). Worse, what records there are suggest that such a tradition did not exist. When reporting that a group of Loch Ness locals mistook swimming ponies for kelpies in 1852, the Inverness Courier gave no hint of an existing Nessie legend beyond the generic international water-horse mythology. Four years later, the same newspaper covered claims of a 40-foot eel in a loch on the Isle of Lewis without ever hinting that Loch Ness might host a monster of its own.203
• Why not hire an army of paid observers and station them around the loch with cameras? This approach was tried in the summer of 1934, when Sir Edward Mountain paid twenty men to keep vigil around Loch Ness for a month. Working from dawn to dusk with “almost military precision, with a careful distribution of watchers at places most likely to yield satisfactory photographs,” the men dutifully generated twenty-one photographs of the alleged monster.204 Roy Mackal asserts that they were false positive photos of waves and boat wakes (with one possible exception, showing an ambiguous hump), and this seems to be the consensus view: Mountain’s observation campaign was a bust. As Ronald Binns explains,
Unfortunately there was a flaw in Mountain’s great idea. His watchers were all unemployed men, drawn from Inverness labour exchange. In the hungry thirties to be paid 2£ a week just to sit at the side of Loch Ness on a summer’s day must have been an attractive proposition. To be offered a bonus of ten guineas each time anyone photographed Nessie must have provided a great incentive to pander to the noble baronet’s whimsy that there was a monster in the loch.205
Figure 4.14 A battery of cameras overlooks Loch Ness in 1966. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
Still, the strategy of an “army of observers” seems like an obvious one. For that reason, it has been tried many times since, using teams of volunteers—not to mention the informal coverage by thousands of camera-armed tourists!
• Why not keep watch with super-high-powered telescopic movie cameras? This scheme was tried, too, with person-years of observation from custom-built stationary platforms (figure 4.14) and mobile truck-mounted fi
lm rigs. For example, starting in 1964 the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau kept a significant percentage of the loch under observation by using giant camera rigs, which, as F. W. Holiday recalled, “were almost certainly the most formidable photographic tools that had ever been used for natural history purposes in Britain.”206 With several months of continuous watches, the searchers expected success that very year. As Holiday explained, “It was not unreasonable to suppose that dawn to dusk watching, seven days a week for five months, would produce results. After all, if you watch a given area of sky for long enough, you are bound to see a rainbow.”207 And, indeed, this strategy should have worked, if eyewitnesses were really seeing a monster. As Mackal reflected, “The number of recorded reports during the 30-year period following 1933 was roughly 3,000. This figure, taken at face value, would mean that about 100 observations were made annually. From this it is clear why it was reasonable to expect photographic surveillance of the loch surface to produce evidence rapidly.”208 But it was not to be—not that year, or any year thereafter. In 1972, the camera batteries were finally dismantled. The failure of this heroic effort of sustained photographic observation indicates that most eyewitness reports must be wrong—with grim implications for a legend based on eyewitness sightings.
Abominable Science Page 20