by Lionel
Fifty-odd years after Duncan McDonald’s encounter, George Spicer and his wife were driving along the south bank of Loch Ness when they saw a strange creature on land, actually emerging from the bracken beside the road. The Spicers said that it appeared to have a long, undulating neck resembling an elephant’s trunk. The head was disproportionately small, but big enough for the monster to hold an animal in its mouth. As the Spicers watched, whatever the thing was lumbered down the bank and into the Loch, where it vanished below the water with a loud splash. In a later interview with a journalist, George said that it had made him think of an enormous snail with a long neck and small head.
During the 1930s, excitement over reports of Nessie reached fever pitch. Among hundreds of reported sightings at that time was one from an AA motorcycle patrolman. His description coincided closely with what George Spicer had reported. Hugh Gray, an engineer, actually managed to get a photograph of it — but although it was agreed by the scientific experts that the picture had not been tampered with, it was not sufficiently clear and distinct for the creature to be zoologically identified.
Alexander Campbell, a journalist, described his sighting in the summer of 1934. His cottage was situated beside the Loch, and, as he left home one morning, he saw the creature rear up out of the water, looking remarkably like a prehistoric monster. He confirmed the descriptions of the long, serpentine neck given by other witnesses, and added that he had seen a flat tail as well. Alexander said that where the neck and body joined there was a hump. He watched it sunbathing for some moments until the sound of a boat on the Caledonian Canal apparently unnerved it. Its sudden dive into deeper water produced a miniature tidal wave.
Saint Columba was by no means the only holy man to see the monster. Some fourteen centuries after Columba rescued the intrepid swimmer, Brother Richard Horan, a monk from St. Benedict’s Abbey at Fort Augustus, also saw the creature. He said that it was in clear view for almost half an hour, and added that the head and neck were thrust out of the water at an angle of about forty-five degrees and were silvery grey. Just as a boat had disturbed the monster when Alexander Campbell saw it, so Brother Horan’s view of it ended when a motor-boat went past. At the sound of the engine, the monster sank back into the impenetrable darkness of the Loch.
There have been so many reliable and sensibly reported sightings over so many years that it is not easy to dismiss Nessie as a figment of the imagination, an optical illusion, or a shrewd publicity stunt. Space prevents more than a few of the hundreds of such reports appearing here, but among the most notable ones are:
• 1895:
Several fishermen, timber workers, and a hotelier reported what they described as something “very big and horrible” surfacing not far from them in Loch Ness.
• 1903:
Three witnesses in a rowboat tried very bravely to get closer to it but failed to narrow the distance between the creature and their boat. They reported the humped contour of what they saw.
• 1908:
John Macleod reported seeing something more than twelve metres long with a body that he described as “eel-like and tapering.” According to John’s account it seemed to be floating on, or very close to, the surface. After a few moments, it moved away.
• 1923:
Miller and MacGillivray had a good clear view of something in the Loch and described its distinct hump.
• 1929:
Mrs. Cummings and another witness saw a humped creature on the surface for a few moments. As they watched, it submerged.
• 1930:
Ian Milne saw something inexplicable in the Loch very early in the morning. He reported that it was moving fast — close to twenty knots — and he was sure he saw two or three of the characteristic humps along its back.
• 1943:
Something at least ten metres long was observed submerged but clearly discernible just below the surface of the Loch. It was very early in the morning and the witness was sure that he saw at least one large hump.
• 1947:
The MacIver family and two or three other witnesses reported something very big and very strange moving fast across the Loch.
• 1953:
A group of timber cutters working beside the Loch reported seeing the creature for two or three minutes.
• 1954:
A fishing boat’s echo-sounder detected something about 20 metres long at a depth of 170 metres.
• 1960:
Torquil MacLeod and his wife reported seeing it while they were in the Invermorriston area. They had it in view for almost ten minutes as it sat on the opposite shore, and they described it as grey with skin like an elephant or hippopotamus. They also noted its paddle-shaped flippers.
•
Tim Dinsdale took a very significant ciné-film of it in the same year. He gave up his profession as an aircraft engineer in order to devote all his time to investigating the creature.
• 1961:
A large group of guests — nearly twenty of them — at a hotel overlooking the Loch reported observing something over ten metres long. It rose from the water and they had a clear view of it for five or six minutes. Those witnesses were convinced that they could clearly see the monster’s humps, which were frequently reported during previous sightings.
• 1962:
Sir Peter Scott (1909–1990), son of the famous polar explorer, was renowned for his high intelligence, his skills as an artist, his services to natural science — and his dry sense of humour. He helped to found the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau and named the creature being sought: Nessiteras Rhombopteryx. That sounds like an excellent piece of scientific nomenclature, but it can be broken down into an anagram of the type that delights advanced crossword enthusiasts. The seemingly dignified, scientific Latin name that Sir Peter awarded to Nessie can be made to spell Monster hoax by Sir Peter S. Was that a deliberate anagram or just a curious coincidence? Cryptographers and code-breaking professionals know just how easy it is for what seems like a clever anagram to be mere chance. No great mathematician from the depths of mathematical history ever decided to call a decimal point a decimal point simply because the anagram A decimal point = I’m a dot in place existed. Sir Peter’s naming of the monster might have been as accidental and innocent as the decimal point example. There are also a great many bluffs and counter-bluffs in the archives of investigations into anomalous phenomena: things that seemed inexplicable at first turn out to have simple, mundane explanations, but the next set of investigations shows that the so-called simple and rational explanations were themselves wrong — and there is an anomaly to be investigated after all! It might well have appealed to Sir Peter’s mischievous sense of humour to pretend that there was only a hoax in Loch Ness, not a mystery. As a dedicated conservationist, it might also have occurred to him that the best way to keep prospective monster hunters away from the Loch was to pretend that it was all a hoax.
• 1969:
Four members of the Craven family watched a creature ten metres long surface, disturb the water significantly, and then sink down into the depths again.
• 1970:
Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Sciences in Belmont, Massachusetts, spent time investigating the Loch and was convinced that the creature — or creatures — existed.
• 1971:
Dinsdale’s team reported something very mysterious and very much alive rearing up out of the Loch.
• 1972:
Former paratrooper Frank Searle investigated carefully and reported several significant sightings. He believes that there’s a colony of at least a dozen of the strange creatures living in the Loch.
• 1974:
Henry Wilson and Andy Call described a creature twenty metres long with an equine head. They saw it surface and thresh the water for ten or fifteen minutes while they watched.
• 1975:
On June 20, Dr. Rines’s team took some very interesting and convincing pictures deep in the Loch.
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sp; • 1996:
Witness Bill Kinder described something odd rising up from the Loch with two humps clearly visible.
• 2003:
Witnesses on the Royal Scot train during the early afternoon saw something big and inexplicable moving at an estimated twenty-five knots along the Loch. They also reported that the weather was calm at the time, so there was no wind to account for the movement of some casually floating, inanimate object.
Leaving Occam’s Razor oiled, sharpened, and ready in its waterproof case for the sake of wider, more complex and imaginative arguments, what speculative explanations might be available? The first possibility is the survival of something like a prehistoric plesiosaur: the general description of the plesiosaur included flippers, humps, a long neck, and a tail. The second theory comes within the sphere of phenomenalism, a philosophical theory that suggests there are hard, scientific, material facts at one end of the spectrum of phenomena — things such as bricks, mortar, and Newton’s Laws of Motion. At the other end are pure imaginings and fantasies, such as dreams of riding up cider waterfalls in canoes made of chocolate pulled by gigantic sugary dragonflies. Phenomenalists hypothesize that between these two extremes there are some intermediate observations that are neither hard, provable fact nor pure, subjective fantasy. Without necessarily including it in their theories, phenomenalists would entertain the ancillary possibility that things like the Loch Ness monster, ghosts, apparitions, and phantoms might have a quasi-existence — perhaps gliding between time-frames or probability tracks to impinge upon what we fondly call “reality.” This realm of speculation also includes tulpa-like thought-forms.
There are other theorists who regard the Loch Ness monster as something paranormal, sinister, negative, and threatening: perhaps a primitive, elemental spirit being — taking on quasi-physical appearances as and when it chooses.
There are also the mechanical theories — that the supposed monster is really an artifact of some kind. According to these speculations, the more modern appearances may be due to tests of secret inventions of the Ministry of Defence, such as small submarines. The ancient appearances, if mechanical, would have to tiptoe into Von Daniken Land and incorporate theories about highly intelligent aliens from the stars, Atlantis, or Lemuria, equipped with a technology that included submarines.
Interest in the Loch is as fresh today as it ever was — and some is truly heart-warming. Lloyd Scott suffered from chronic myeloid leukaemia until a life-saving bone marrow transplant put things right for him in 1989. Determined to help others in similar circumstances, Lloyd became a record-holding charity marathon runner, completing the London Marathon in an ancient diving suit with a copper helmet. His latest charity venture on behalf of children suffering from leukaemia is to walk all around the edges of Loch Ness, on the narrow ledges a few feet underwater, in his famous antique copper-helmeted diving suit.
The authors warmly congratulate him and wish him every success. Co-author Lionel wore a similar outfit while filming an episode of Fortean TV on the U.K.’s Channel 4. The director wanted him to get into a tank full of fish in the Yarmouth, Norfolk, U.K., aquarium, submerge, then surface to introduce an item about a mysterious diver. The genuine antique diving suit supplied by a theatrical costume company had long since lost its original lead-soled boots, so when Lionel submerged, his feet shot upwards. The big copper helmet filled with water and held him upside down. Fortunately, Alf, his stalwart guitarist, was also in the tank and fished him out none the worse for wear!
Almost as famous as the Loch Ness phenomenon is the account of the sea serpent observed by Captain Peter M’Quhae and his crew on board the frigate Daedalus on August 6, 1848. They were between the island of St. Helena (where Napoleon reputedly died — but that’s another strange mystery) and the Cape of Good Hope (notorious for its connection with the Flying Dutchman). It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and visibility was not ideal: the weather was described as dull and showery. A young midshipman reported that he had seen what he described as a “strange creature” moving towards the Daedalus’s starboard bow. Various shipmates — including the officer of the watch, the navigator, and the captain himself — responded to the midshipman’s call. A total of seven experienced naval men were now watching the creature. Their reports clearly indicated something serpentine estimated at well over thirty metres long and travelling at about twelve knots. With the aid of telescopes, they kept it in sight for nearly half an hour. Despite the poor visibility caused by the dull, damp weather, M’Quhae reckoned that he and his crew were able to see the monster reasonably well. He said that if the thing had been a person whom he knew, he would have been able to recognize him — the creature was as close and as clear as that! M’Quhae referred to the face and head as “distinctly snake-like.” According to his account, the neck supporting this serpentine head was about forty centimetres in diameter, and the body went back a long way. The head was just above the water, and the underside of the neck was a whitish yellow. The rest of the creature, as M’Quhae and his team described it, was very dark brown, almost black.
The men of the Daedalus were somewhat puzzled by the creature’s ability to maintain its speed and course without any apparent means of propulsion. They said that as far as they were able to ascertain it neither paddled with submerged flippers nor undulated its lengthy body from side to side, as many marine serpents do when swimming. The thing M’Quhae and his men reported bore a striking resemblance to the sea serpent described by Bishop Pontoppidan a century earlier in his book A Natural History of Norway. Pontoppidan had also described merfolk, as noted in our earlier chapter. Media reports in 1848 were not necessarily accurate, and although the Times of October 10 reported that M’Quhae and his men had seen a beast with a huge mouth full of dangerous teeth, they themselves did not seem to have said anything about its dentition.
Although their accounts differed in certain details — as honest, independent accounts normally do — the witnesses agreed that the thing they had seen had not struck them as threatening or hostile to the Daedalus in any way. Neither had it seemed to be afraid of the ship. The general impression it gave them was that it was totally preoccupied with some purpose of its own — perhaps something as demanding as searching for a mate, or as simple as a quest for nourishment. M’Quhae made sketches of it, which were eventually reproduced in the Illustrated London News on October 28 — after the Times had told the story on October 13.
Various theories were put forward as to what M’Quhae’s monster might have been. Suggestions included the gigantic variety of seal, phoca proboscidea, referred to as a “sea-elephant” — but M’Quhae, who had seen one, was adamant that the creature observed from the Daedalus was very definitely not an elephant seal.
Brilliant professional underwater cinematographer Jonathan Bird encountered an oarfish (Regalecus glesne) in the Bahamas recently. Although this was by no means as long as the monster that M’Quhae and his team described, it was certainly similar to it, and the specimen Jonathan saw was about fifteen metres long. The oarfish is very elongated and has yellow lures on the ends of its strange antennae. It swims in an upright position using its dorsal fin only — not its entire body: that also sounds like the movement of the weird creature that the men of the Daedalus reported.
A report from 1953 — about a century after the adventure of the Daedalus — came from a diver working in the South Pacific and attempting to establish a new depth record. He said that he was keeping a wary eye on a shark that was taking an unhealthy interest in him and wondering just how far it would attempt to follow him down. His explorations took him to the edge of a vast submarine chasm vanishing down into awesome, unknown depths. He said that the water became markedly colder. The temperature drop was very significant, and it continued to get more pronounced. Clinging tightly to his ledge — to have dropped into the chasm would have been fatal — the diver saw a huge black shadowy something rising very slowly towards him. About the size of a soccer field and dark brown in colour,
the thing pulsated as it floated gradually higher and higher — convincing the diver that it was definitely a living creature of some type.
As it drew level with his ledge, he reported that the coldness became even more bitter. The weird mass drifted ever closer to the shark, which the diver felt was immobilized either by the cold or by pure terror. The outer edges of the sheet-like thing from the depths touched the motionless shark. It convulsed but made no attempt to resist or escape. Its weird attacker drew the doomed shark down into itself like an amoeba surrounding and digesting its prey and then sank slowly back into the abyss. The diver who reported this episode added that he remained motionless on his perilous submarine ledge until the horrific thing from the abyss had vanished again into the depths.
Could whatever that thing was have been responsible for the tragic disappearance of several divers in that area in the late 1930s? The Melbourne Leader at that time reported that the Japanese captain of the Yamta Maru had gone down to salvage pearls from a wreck and had given an urgent signal to his crew to haul him up fast. All that reached the surface was his helmet and lifeline; of the fearless captain himself there was no trace. It happened again in 1938. This time it was Masao Matsumo, another Japanese diver, who went down from the Felton and was never seen again. Like the skipper of the Yamta Maru, Masao gave the signal to be hauled up. His shipmates recovered only his empty helmet and a basket of shells. Fearlessly, his diving colleagues then went down over seventy metres looking for him — but Masao had vanished as completely as the ill-fated captain of the Yamta Maru.
There is a remote possibility that the weird, sheet-like, shark-killing thing seen in 1953 might have had some connection with another oddity reported in the Daily Mail on April 2, 2002. In this press account, it was stated that a huge dark blob — even bigger than the thing that allegedly came up from the chasm and disposed of the shark — was seen drifting towards Florida. Scientists put forward the theory that this particular “monster” was actually a huge cloud of algae. Scientific expeditions sent out to investigate the thing noticed that other marine life seemed to be avoiding it assiduously. Observed from space satellites, it looked very dark, almost black, but when examined from the scientists’ boat it was dark green. Marine chemist Dr. Richard Pierce explained that the algae cloud would remove oxygen from the water around it after dark, and marine life avoiding the strange, discoloured patch might be doing so because they sensed that the water in its vicinity was low in vital oxygen.