The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  That June the first scientific expedition to Loch Ness embarked on a month-long investigation, with thirty student volunteers and a Marconi echo-sounder, as well as a large collection of cameras. A ten-foot hump was sighted in July, and the echo-sounder tracked some large object as it dived from the surface to a depth of sixty feet and back up again. The expedition also discovered large shoals of char at a depth of a hundred feet – an answer to sceptics who said that the loch did not contain enough fish to support a monster; the team’s finding was that there was enough fish to support several.

  But Dr Denys Tucker, of the British Museum of Natural History, who had organized this expedition, did not lead it as he had intended to; in June he was dismissed from his job – as he believed, because he had publicly expressed his belief in the existence of the monster.

  Dinsdale became a close friend of Torquil MacLeod, who had seen the monster almost out of the water in February 1960. MacLeod had watched it for nine minutes, and admitted being “appalled by its size”, which he estimated at between 40 and 60 feet. It had a long neck, like an elephant’s trunk, which kept moving from side to side and up and down, and “paddles” at the rear and front. In August 1960 MacLeod had another sighting from the shore, while a family in a motor yacht belonging to a company director, R.H. Lowrie, saw the monster at close quarters for about a quarter of an hour, taking a few photographs. At one point they thought the monster was heading straight for them and about to collide; but it veered away and disappeared.

  It was also in August 1960 that Sir Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl Trust, and Richard Fitter of the Fauna Preservation Society approached the Member of Parliament David James and asked for his help in trying to get government assistance for a “flat-out attempt to find what exactly is in Loch Ness”. In April 1961 a panel decided that there was a prima facie case for investigating the loch. The result was the formation of the Bureau for Investigating the Loch Ness Phenomena, a registered charity. In October 1961 two powerful searchlights scanned the loch every night for two weeks, and on one occasion caught an eight-foot “finger like object” standing out of the water. In 1962 another team used sonar, and picked up several “large objects”; one of these sonar recordings preceded an appearance of the monster on the surface.

  In 1966 Tim Dinsdale’s film was subjected to analysis by Air Force Intelligence, which reported that the object filmed was certainly not a boat or a submarine, and by NASA’s computer-enhancement experts, who discovered that two other parts of the body also broke the surface besides the main hump.

  In August 1962 another “monster-hunter”, F.W. (“Ted”) Holiday, parked his van by Loch Ness, on the southern shore opposite Urquhart Castle. As darkness fell he had a feeling that “Loch Ness is not a water by which to linger”. Two nights later, on a perfectly still night, he heard the crash of waves breaking on the stony beach, although there was no sound of a boat engine. Two days later he had his first sighting of the monster. On a hill close to the spot where Dinsdale had taken his 1961 film, he suddenly saw a black and glistening object rise three feet out of the water; then it dived like “a diving hippopotamus”. He could still see the shape of the animal just below the surface. He judged it to be about 45 feet long. Then a man on a nearby pier started hammering, and the creature vanished.

  Every year from then on Holiday returned to the loch; but in 1963 and 1964 he was unlucky. Then in 1965 he saw it on two occasions; on the first he saw it (looking like an upturned boat) from three different positions as he raced his car along the loch to get a better view. But he had already reached a conclusion about the nature of the monster, that it was simply a giant version of the common garden slug, an ancestor of the squid and octopus. In his book The Great Orm of Loch Ness he argued that the monster is a type of Tullimonstrum gregarium, a creature looking a little like a submarine with a broad tail. He also came to believe that these monsters were once far more plentiful in the British Isles, that they used to be known as “worms” (or “orms”), and that they gave rise to the legend of dragons. A photograph in the book shows the Worm’s Head peninsula in South Wales, and argues that it is so called because it resembles the “orm” of legend and of Loch Ness.

  In 1963 Holiday interviewed two fishermen who had seen the monster at close range, only 20 or 30 yards away. One said that the head reminded him of a bulldog, that it was wide and very ugly. The neck was fringed by what looked like coarse black hair. In a letter to Dinsdale, Holiday remarked: “When people are confronted by this fantastic animal at close quarters they seemed to be stunned. There is something strange about Nessie that has nothing to do with size or appearance. Odd, isn’t it”? He was intrigued by the number of people who had a feeling of horror when they saw the monster. Why were dragons and “orms” always linked with powers of evil in medieval mythology? He also began to feel increasingly that it was more than coincidence that the monsters were so hard to photograph: he once had his finger on the button when the head submerged. Either the monsters had some telepathic awareness of human observation or they were associated with some kind of Jungian “synchronicity”, or meaningful coincidence.

  Holiday, who was a fishing correspondent, had also had a number of sightings of UFOs (or Flying Saucers), and one or two close brushes with “poltergeists” (or “banging ghosts”). And he was intrigued to learn that Boleskine House, near Foyers, had been tenanted by the notorious “magician” Aleister Crowley in the early years of the twentieth century, and that Crowley had started to perform there a lengthy magical ritual by a certain Abramelin the Mage. Crowley himself claimed that the house was filled with shadowy spirits while he was performing the ritual (which takes many months), and that they drove a coachman to drink and a clairvoyant to become a prostitute. Crowley failed to complete the ritual, and, according to Holiday “misfortune stalked him” from then on. Although he never says so in so many words, Holiday seemed to entertain the suspicion that the monster may have been conjured up by Crowley: certainly he thought it a coincidence that a creature associated with evil should be seen so often from Foyers, near Boleskine House. He also thought it odd when American students exploring the cemetery near Boleskine found a tapestry and a conch shell beneath a grave slab. The tapestry – probably Turkish in origin – had “worm like creatures” embroidered on it, and its freedom from mildew suggested that it had been hidden recently. Holiday suspected that it had been used in some magical ceremony, and that the ceremony had been hastily abandoned when someone walked into the churchyard. It looked as if black magic is still practised near Boleskine House.

  Soon after this Holiday went to have dinner with a friend near Loch Ness, and met an American called Dr Dee, who was in England looking up his family tree. Dr Dee said that he had discovered that he had a celebrated Elizabethan ancestor of the same name. It was another coincidence: John Dee, the Elizabethan “magician”, had published the ritual of Abramelin the Mage.

  In a letter to me in 1971 Ted Holiday described a further coincidence. Looking across the loch, he found himself looking at the word DEE in large yellow letters. Bulldozers engaged in road-widening had scraped away the soil running down to the loch, and the top half of the “letters” was formed by the yellow subsoil. The bottom half of the letters was formed by the reflection of the top half in the perfectly still water.

  In fact Holiday was coming to a very strange conclusion about lake monsters; it arose from some investigations he had undertaken in Ireland in 1968, where more monsters had been sighted in lochs (or “loughs”) in Galway. The sightings sounded very much like those of “Nessie”, and the witnesses were of unimpeachable reputation – on one occasion, two priests. Yet after weeks of careful observation, and even an attempt to “net” a monster in Lough Nahooin, Holiday had failed to obtain the slightest bit of evidence for the monsters. What puzzled him was that these Irish lakes were too small to support a fifteen-foot monster, still less a colony of them. He began to wonder whether the peiste (as the Irish called the creature) was a
thing of flesh and blood. Jung had suggested that UFOs are a “projection” from the human unconscious, modern man’s attempt to recreate lost religious symbols. Could it be, Holiday wondered, that the lake monsters are also some kind of “projection”?

  By 1971 Holiday had abandoned the notion that the lake monsters are simply “prehistoric survivals”. He was coming round to the admittedly eccentric view that there is some influence at work that actively prevents the final solution of the mystery, just as in the case of Unidentified Flying Objects. And some time in 1972 this view seemed to be confirmed when he read a newspaper controversy between an “exorcist”, the Rev. Donald Omand, and some opponent who thought the Loch Ness monster was simply an unidentified animal. Omand had inherited “second sight” from Highland ancestors, and had no doubt of the real existence of powers of evil – or at least of mischief; he often performed exorcisms to get rid of them. He had caught his first glimpse of a lake monster in Loch Long in Ross-shire in 1967. In June 1968, in a boat in Norway’s Fjord of the Trolls, he saw another, which came straight towards them; the Norwegian captain who was with him told him not to be afraid: “It will not hurt us – they never do”. And in fact the monster dived before it reached their boat. But the Captain, Jan Andersen, was convinced that the monsters were basically evil, that in some way they could do harm to men’s characters (or, as Omand would have said, their souls). In 1972 Omand attended a psychiatric conference at which an eminent Swedish psychiatrist read a paper on the monster of Lake Storsjön, and said that he was convinced that the monsters had a malevolent effect on human beings, especially those who hunted them or saw them regularly. He thought their influence could cause domestic tragedies and moral degeneration. So Omand began to consider the theory that perhaps lake monsters are not real creatures, but “projections” of something from the prehistoric past.

  Holiday wrote to Omand, and the odd result was that in June 1973 Holiday and Donald Omand rowed out into the middle of Loch Ness, and Omand performed an exorcism of the loch. Holiday said they both felt oddly exhausted when it was over. And his suspicion that he was stirring up dangerous forces seemed to be confirmed two days later when he went to stay the night with a retired Wing Commander named Carey. Holiday was telling Mrs Carey about a Swedish journalist called Jan-Ove Sundberg who had been wandering through the woods behind Foyers when he had seen a strange craft in a clearing, and some odd-looking men; the craft had taken off at a great speed, and after his return to Sweden, Sundberg had been plagued by “men in black” – people claiming to be officials who often seem to harass UFO “contactees”.

  Holiday said he intended to go and look at the place where the “UFO” had landed, and Mrs Carey warned him against it. At this moment there was a rushing sound like a tornado outside the window and a series of violent thuds; a beam of light came in through the window, and focused on Holiday’s forehead. A moment later, all was still. The odd thing was that Wing Commander Carey, who had been pouring a drink only a few feet away from his wife, saw and heard nothing. The next morning, as Holiday was walking towards the loch he saw a man dressed entirely in black – including helmet and goggles – standing nearby; he walked past him, turned his head, and was astonished to find that the man had vanished. He rushed to the road and looked in both directions; there was nowhere the man could have gone. One year later, close to the same spot, Holiday had a heart attack; as he was being carried away he looked over the side of the stretcher and saw that they were just passing the exact spot where he had seen the “man in black”. Five years later, Holiday died of a heart attack.

  Perhaps a year before his death, Ted Holiday sent me the typescript of his book The Goblin Universe, in which he attempted to justify the rather strange views he had gradually developed since starting his hunt for the Loch Ness monster. He had already discussed them in his second book The Dragon and the Disc, in which he linked UFOs (“discs”) and “worms” as symbols of good and evil. Then, to my surprise, he changed his mind about publishing the book.

  There were, I suspect, two reasons. The team of investigators from the Academy of Applied Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Dr Robert H. Rines, had taken some remarkable underwater photographs in 1972 and 1975; one of the 1972 photographs showed very clearly an object like a large flipper, perhaps eight feet long, while a 1975 photograph showed very clearly a long-necked creature and its front flipper; this was particularly impressive because the sonar evidence – waves of sound reflected back from the creature – made it clear that this was not some freak of the light or piece of floating wreckage or lake-weed. By the time he was thinking about publishing The Goblin Universe, Holiday was probably wondering whether the book would be contradicted by some new evidence that would establish the physical reality of the monster beyond all doubt. Apart from this, the argument of The Goblin Universe was not quite as rigorous as it might be – he was attempting to explain why his views had changed so startlingly since 1962, and spent a great deal of time dwelling on “the paranormal”. At all events, he decided not to publish the book, and instead wrote another typescript confined to lake monsters. (The Goblin Universe was recently published in America.)

  This account of Holiday’s activities may seem to be something of a digression; yet it illustrates the immense frustration experienced by monster-hunters in the 1970s and 1980s. When Gould wrote his book in 1934 the solution of the problem seemed close; then it receded. Constance Whyte’s book revived interest in the mystery, and when the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau began to co-operate with the team from the Academy of Applied Science, and to use all the latest scientific equipment, it began to look as if the mystery was about to be solved once and for all. Yet at the time of this writing – eleven years after that remarkable underwater picture of the monster – there has still been no major advance. Nicholas Witchell triumphantly concludes his book The Loch Ness Story.(1975) with a chapter entitled “The Solution”, in which he describes his excitement when Rines telephoned him from America to describe the colour photograph of the monster; it contains the sentence: “With the official ratification of the discovery of the animals in Loch Ness, the world will lose one of its most popular mysteries”. And he declares that it would be ignoble now to gloat about the short-sightedness of the scientific establishment for its sceptical attitude towards Loch Ness.

  It is now clear that Witchell was premature. Most people still regard the question of the monster’s existence as an open one, and the majority of scientists still regard the whole thing as something of a joke. In 1976 Roy Mackal, a director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Chicago, published the most balanced and thoroughgoing scientific assessment so far, The Monsters of Loch Ness. He turns a highly critical eye on the evidence, yet nevertheless concludes that it is now proven that “a population of moderate-sized, piscivorous aquatic animals is inhabiting Loch Ness”. If the scientific establishment was willing to change its mind, this book should have changed it; yet it seems to have made no real impact.

  One thing seems clear: that Holiday’s pessimism about the monster was unjustified; even at the time he was writing The Dragon and the Disc, Rines was taking the best underwater photographs of the monster so far. So there seems reason to believe that science will finally solve the problem of establishing its existence beyond all doubt. The problems of capturing the monster either on film or in nets are epitomized in the following description by Dennis Stacy, of San Antonio, Texas, of his own encounter with “Nessie”.

  In 1972 I went to the Loch with the express purpose of looking for Nessie. The idea was to camp along the shoreline for about two weeks and see what was to be seen. I had a very distinct feeling of confidence that if I went to the Loch I would see Nessie. I met some students on vacation from Oxford and stayed with them just above Drumnadrochit. Every day I would take my camera down to the shoreline and have a good look around. Except for the day it was cold and drizzly and all of us wen
t for a walk in the pinewoods there. A girl student and myself soon wandered off on our own from the others and made it down to the lochside. While we had been under the pines, the sky cleared remarkably and the wind died down. By the time we reached the loch, it was completely still and mirror-like. About three quarters of a mile across the loch, nearly under Crowley/Page’s Boleskine, was Nessie, showing about six feet of neck and head above the water. We had jumped up on the little low rock wall skirting the road. We both saw it at the same time and nearly caused each other to tumble over the side by grabbing the other’s shoulders and pointing and saying, Look! Do you see what I see?

  And my camera, a 35mm, was miles away. My companion, however, had a little small, cheap camera, and the presence of mind to take a shot. All that was visible in the picture was a white wake, about a hundred feet in length, left by Nessie (or whatever), and which showed up clearly against the dark reflection of the trees on the other side in the water.

  Nessie herself? The head was definitely angular, as described. Some say like a horse, with the very pronounced wedge-shape. In my own experience, I liken it to the shape of a rattlesnake’s head, a square snout running back in a flare to the jaws. The length of neck out of the water, including the head, was five or six feet. The impression it gave, in the sense that spiders and snakes seem to exude their own peculiar aura, was one not so much of danger as power. I mean it was really cutting a wake through the water, raising a little wavelet on either side of the neck. At times the head was lowered down and forward, and would sweep a small angle from side to side, as if feeding, by lowering the bottom part of the jaw just into the water. But it was really too far away to be absolutely certain of this last manoeuver; the head, however, could be very plainly seen swinging from side to side.