• Why not search the loch using submarines? This approach seems obvious, if expensive. It was, of course, tried. In 1969, for example, the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau fielded a custom-built submersible called Viperfish, armed with biopsy harpoons (figure 4.15). Sponsored by The World Book Encyclopedia, the mission was a failure.209 Other subs were deployed at Loch Ness in 1973 and (as a commercial-tourism concern) throughout 1994 and 1995.210 The critical obstacle for this search strategy is that the water of Loch Ness is very opaque (typically described as “inky” or “murky”), and thus visibility under the water is limited to only a few feet.
• Why not search the loch using underwater cameras? The opacity of the water of Loch Ness likewise severely limits the usefulness of underwater photography. Despite this hindrance, a team led by lawyer Robert Rines claimed to have taken underwater photographs of a plesiosaur-like creature in 1972 and again in 1975. The first set of shots, purported to show a dramatic diamond-shaped flipper, was apparently taken with the assistance of a dowser—a local psychic who “detected” the monster using paranormal means and directed the camera placement.211 (She also claimed at least fifteen personal sightings of Nessie.)212 The resulting photos were extremely indistinct, but were altered by an artist to depict an unmistakable flipper (figure 4.16). Exactly how that modification was done is controversial to this day. After computer enhancement, the photos remained ambiguous—only to later achieve shocking clarity through some additional undocumented process of creative compositing or retouching.213 According to Nessie author Tony Harmsworth, “paint brush marks” are clearly visible on large blow-ups of the revised versions. “That is how it became so clearly a flipper,” Harmsworth explains. “The retouching is not sophisticated air brushing or modern Photoshop effects, but relatively crude paint brush effects.” Confronted with this evidence at a “tense meeting” with Adrian Shine, Rines himself admitted that there may have been retouching by a magazine editor.214 In any event, these photographs were followed in 1975 by a shot alleged to show a plesiosaur-like body and neck and another said to show the monster’s head. Unfortunately, as pro-Nessie author Nicholas Witchell explained, “the camera and strobe light were photographing through the heavy gloom of the water, strongly stained with the peat brought down into the loch by the mountain streams. It was like a green fog in which the individual particles of this liquid suspension were almost large enough to see.”215 Critics argue that the images in Rines’s photos from 1975 are consistent with those of silt or wood debris. (The “head” photo turned out to be an underwater stump that has been identified and recovered.)216 Thus, as Witchell wrote, “it would be foolish to cling to the photos in the face of such uncertainties. Bob Rines, I think, now agrees.”217 (I might add that the double-jackpot coincidence here would also stretch credibility. Rines’s underwater cameras watched just a handful of the loch’s 261 billion cubic feet—and for very short periods.)
Figure 4.15 Dan Taylor in Viperfish, his yellow submarine, at Loch Ness in 1969. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
Figure 4.16 The unenhanced original version of the first photograph of the purported flipper of a plesiosaur-like monster, taken by Robert Rines, compared with the retouched version (inset). A scan of the unenhanced version made from a 35mm Kodachrome transparency was provided by Rines to Loch Ness investigator Dick Raynor around 1972 (stated to be copied from “camera original” 16mm Kodachrome 11, with an ASA speed rating of 25). (Reproduced by permission of Mirror Syndication International; photograph courtesy of Dick Raynor)
• Why not dredge the loch for bones? In 1934, Rupert Gould pointed out that a population of giant animals should leave clear signs of its presence. Consider, for example, the “rather startling consequences” if the loch were home to a breeding colony of plesiosaurs: “What, on this assumption, has become of the bones which should, by now, have carpeted the entire floor of the Loch?” Could that biological treasure be just sitting there for the taking? Unfortunately, no. Gould noted that “no trawl-net—and many have been put down for biological purposes—has ever brought up any fragment of the kind.”218 Yet this was, on the face of it, a promising strategy. As Binns pointed out, “The bed of Loch Ness is, in most places, as flat as a billiard table. If the loch contains an unknown species of giant animal with a bone-structure then evidence of skeletal remains ought not to be hard to find.”219
In fact, Loch Ness has been sampled extensively using dredges, scoops, and core samplers, including serious scientific efforts undertaken from the 1970s through the 1990s.220 (In 2003, for that matter, a diver named Lloyd Scott walked the entire length of the floor of Loch Ness in a charity fund-raising stunt.) No monster bones were discovered, although a great deal was learned about the life of the loch, from fish to plankton to an invasive species of American flatworm thought to have been introduced on monster-hunting equipment!221 The researchers with the Loch Ness and Morar Project also discovered that the deep, even, and undisturbed sediment on the floor of Loch Ness is a delicately stratified geologic record of the region. Thus any future dredging efforts will have to be weighed against the damage that dredges cause to this historical resource.
• Why not search the loch using sonar? This question, of course, is the doozy. It won’t surprise you to learn that sonar has been tried, but few realize how intensively and how often Loch Ness has been scanned. In addition to attempts using a single boat, a submarine, or pier-based equipment, there have been many systematic grid- or dragnet-style sonar surveys of the entire loch (figure 4.17). In 1962, for example, a Cambridge University team used a four-boat fleet to sweep the entire loch. According to the team leader, “Nothing was detected by any of the boats. This seems to rule out the possibility that a large animal exists in the body of Loch Ness.”222 Exhaustive sonar trawling in 1968, 1969, and 1970 (by a team from the University of Birmingham) produced disappointing results. (The survey of 1968 recorded two unusual contacts, but the work of the following year produced nothing. The intensive survey of 1970 again, as Binns put it, “drew a complete blank.”)223 In 1981, the Loch Ness and Morar Project launched a custom-built sonar boat that scanned the loch from end to end, twenty-four hours a day. (In 1982, this effort racked up 1,500 hours of patrol time. While interesting sonar contacts were made, none indicated anything like the giant Nessie of eyewitness reports.)224 Similarly, in 2003, the BBC sponsored a sonar search that used the Global Positioning System (GPS) to ensure complete coverage of the loch. “We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one, we have covered everything in this loch and we saw no signs of any large living animal in the loch,” according to one of the BBC’s sonar specialists.225
Figure 4.17 Several systematic, dragnet-style sonar surveys of the entire loch were conducted over twenty-five years. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton; not to scale)
The granddaddy of all Loch Ness sonar searches was Operation Deepscan, conducted in 1987 under the command of Shine (figure 4.18). This coordinated, large-scale project mobilized twenty-four boats to sweep the loch from end to end—multiple times. The fleet created a “sonar curtain” across the loch, with follow-up boats ready to investigate anything detected by the curtain. The results? “Sonar Search for ‘Nessie’ Reveals 3 Wobbly Scratches,” ran the Washington Post headline.226
Figure 4.18 The fleet of boats participating in Operation Deepscan in 1987. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)
Results from the long history of sonar surveys of Loch Ness are mixed.227 On the one hand, the sonar searches, conducted over forty years, are most notable for their complete collective failure to find giant monsters. Operation Deepscan and other surveys effectively rule out any possibility of Loch Ness plesiosaurs, giant newts, or 80-foot sea serpents. If they were living in the loch, sonar would have found them decades ago. On the other hand, some sonar contacts remain tantalizingly unexplained (including one of Operation Deepscan’s “wobbly scratches”). These hits are much s
maller than the gigantic creatures reported by Nessie witnesses, but some could suggest animals larger than salmon. Could these anomalous contacts represent a genuine zoological surprise? It’s possible. Shine has argued hopefully for the possibility of sturgeon in Loch Ness.
There are, however, many sources of false-positive sonar contacts. Sonar can refract and reflect off thermal boundaries in the water column. It can reflect off the walls of the loch. Sonar can record schools of fish as larger animals. Even boat wakes can create bogus sonar hits. Most important, sonar can record objects that are not animals. Logs are an obvious culprit, as is debris tethered to the loch bottom (such as from fishing gear). Amusingly, it is even possible that some sonar contacts record sunken equipment left behind over the decades by Loch Ness monster hunters!
UNDERWATER TUNNELS TO THE SEA?
The intensive searching has revealed none of the evidence we should expect if Loch Ness were home to one or more large monsters. This implies that eyewitness reports of such creatures must break down to a collection of hoaxes and (more commonly) errors of various types.
But what if Nessie only visits the loch? A part-time monster could explain the absence of sonar evidence. The Loch Ness and Morar Project concluded its review of the sonar evidence: “In the case of a single occasional migrant, detection would be virtually impossible.”228
The rivers and canals that flow into Loch Ness can be confidently ruled out as commuter routes for large monsters, being shallow, well travelled, obstructed by weirs, broken up by shipping locks, or some combination. Indeed, the best route from Loch Ness to the North Sea—the River Ness—is so shallow that fishermen often wade across it.229 (The river also runs smack dab through the city of Inverness.) But could there be an additional, secret route?
Many people believe (as I did, as a child) that Loch Ness is connected to the North Sea through underwater tunnels. This is an amazingly persistent myth, perhaps because it is so convenient. How else could a gigantic monster hide in a confined space, other than by slipping out through a back door? However, this explanation has been known to be silly since the very origin of the Loch Ness monster legend. Speaking to reporters in late 1933, Rupert Gould ruled out the rumors of “a subterranean passage connecting Loch Ness to the sea” on the sensible basis that “the surface of Loch Ness is above sea level, and obviously could not be if there were a passage by which it would be drained down to sea level.”230 Indeed, the surface of the loch stands more than 50 feet above sea level, and pressure of 50 vertical feet of water would propel a monster down a tunnel like a bullet.
It is worth noting that rumors of underwater tunnels to other lakes or to the sea are not unique to Loch Ness. Indeed, folklorist Michel Meurger has emphasized that hidden passageways are extremely common components of the legends surrounding monster-haunted lakes around the globe.231 While cryptozoologists take pains to distance themselves from the supernatural origins of lake monster traditions (such as the shape-shifting demonic kelpies), Meurger argues that the myths of secret outlets to the sea are merely a revision of the idea that monster lakes conceal passages to hell or the underworld.
THE BOTTOM LINE
More than thirty years ago, Roy Mackal wrote that even unfalsifiable monsters must eventually fade away: “At least in theory no amount of failure could disprove our basic assumption. However, in practice, human nature being what it is, continued and total failure would be equivalent to disproof.”232 Has that day come at last?
For eighty years, serious researchers have thrown money, reputations, and long years of labor into the depths of Loch Ness—with no sign of a monster to show for it. This outcome was inevitable. For all the science and technology brought to bear, Nessie was born from magic: the kelpie folklore of Scotland and the movie magic of Hollywood. Today, the creature has been forced into a paradox as magical as its roots: a giant monster that many people see, but that cannot ever be detected by science.
As Adrian Shine and David Martin explained in 1987, “Work in the 1980s is not a quest for the dragon of popular expectation. The media-christened ‘Monster,’ by definition imaginary and by connotation prehistoric, has an existence in the realms of entertainment copy, quite independent of research findings.”233 After decades of fruitless searching, researchers had shifted from hunting the Loch Ness monster to studying the environment of the loch for its own sake.
And what of Nessie, that companion of my own childhood dreams? She swims on, swift and elusive, in the imagination of millions.
OF ALL THE WORLD’S STOMPING, slithering, and bloodsucking monsters, nothing else quite matches the Great Sea Serpent. Enduring for centuries, the sea serpent legend has a unique place in the history of cryptozoology—and a unique place in my own family history as well.
One of the lessons of cryptozoological investigation is that most cryptids are brand-spanking new. The Loch Ness monster (a Hollywood spin-off) was born after my own grandmother. The modern Bigfoot legend premiered the same year as Leave It to Beaver. If the chupacabra (goat sucker) were a person, it would be in high school, the story of this vampiric cryptic from Puerto Rico being only as old as the sci-fi horror movie Species (1995), on which it was based.1
But sea monsters are, if you will forgive me, a different kettle of fish. Descriptions of sea monsters are as old as written language. They appear in the Bible and in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even by the very strictest definition, the fully formed modern version of the Great Sea Serpent goes back at least to 1755, when Bishop Erich Pontoppidan’s book The Natural History of Norway made it a permanent part of global popular culture.
Over the past 250 years, sea serpents have enjoyed a unique level of support from the scientific community. They have been endorsed, discussed, or denounced by some of the great scientific minds in history, including such legendary pioneers of biology as Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Developing alongside the evolution of paleontology and the discovery of dinosaurs and their marine-reptile cousins, the high-level debates about the reality of sea serpents that took place in learned journals and gas-lit parlors helped define the methods and borders of modern science.2
The idea of vast creatures sliding undetected through the abyss stirred my imagination deeply at a young age. How could it not? What kid could read a story like Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” (about a huge, ancient sea serpent drawn to a lighthouse) and not thrill to the idea that it could be true? Imagine such a primeval monster, as Bradbury did, “hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now … the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.”3
Why, anything could be down there, couldn’t it?
But I had a very personal reason to think that sea serpents were just waiting out there to be discovered: my parents saw one, when I was a young child. I was raised as something of a nomad. My family lived in a silver travel trailer and spent winters on the beaches near Victoria, British Columbia. We just pulled in the trailer, and presto: home. On one of those beaches, my parents saw the twentieth century’s best-known regional version of the Great Sea Serpent: Victoria’s own Cadborosaurus. I’ll let my father tell the story as he remembers it—a story that has shaped my career to this day:
We were right by the water. We were young and happy and life was good. We had a morning ritual of sitting up in bed and looking out to sea while we enjoyed our morning cup of tea.
This particular beautiful summer morning we thought that we saw Cadborosaurus. We both saw it at the same time, and both said something stupid like “Wow, look, a sea serpent,” followed by embarrassment at what we had just said. We jumped up in our bathrobes and ran barefoot down to the water’s edge.
There it was, swimming along just 40 feet or so from shore. It was swimming parallel to the beach and making pretty good time. We had to walk briskly to keep up with it, and we wished we had the camera.
We were both saying things like, “It’s
definitely a sea serpent, see the head? I can even see its eyes!”
It was about 30 ft. long, dark in color and clear as day. It had a head, a neck, and many humps. It was swimming along in perfectly coordinated undulating motion. It appeared to be very real, alive, efficient … and very clearly a sea serpent.4
What was it, really? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? My parents had diverging interpretations of this experience, but as a kid, it seemed obvious to me: it was a sea monster! And I was going to catch it.
For years, I dreamed of just that. I scoured catalogues for monster-hunting equipment. I designed logos for my future Cadborosaurus expeditions. I got my local librarian to help me write to the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. And today, bizarrely enough, I find myself in the professional position of actually investigating monsters (albeit skeptically). Through it all, it seemed—and still seems—perfectly plausible that a sea serpent–like animal could exist. Why not? The ocean is certainly big enough, and it is an exhilarating fact that many of its inhabitants remain completely unknown.
Could some sea serpent stories be true? As with other cryptid mysteries, the best place to start is at the beginning. How did the idea get started in the first place? How did it take the form that it did? Why, for example (and this deeply puzzled me as a kid), are classic sea serpents so often described with horse-like manes?
Why, of all things, would sea serpents have heads that resemble those of horses (or cows, sheep, or camels)?
SEA MONSTERS IN ANTIQUITY
Sea Serpents in Ancient Literature and Classical Art
To find the roots of the sea serpent legend, we’ll look back almost 3,000 years to the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. If sea serpents are real, it is likely that the sophisticated coastal cultures of the ancient world would have described and depicted them. After all, the ancients were no slouches, and trade goods and information flowed throughout Eurasia for thousands of years. Besides, sea serpents would tend to stick out. My parents’ 30-foot Cadborosaurus was a minnow by sea serpent standards. Other witnesses have described sea serpents as long as a blue whale or larger: various reports have put them at 150, 200, 300, or even a staggering 600 feet long. A 600-foot sea serpent would be not so much a cryptid as Godzilla.5 Surely, ancient sources would mention the largest animal ever to exist?
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