1.0 Preamble
In this web article we will examine the enduring Mystery of the Loch
Ness Monster ... what we choose to call
The Nessie Mystery, because the Scots affectionately calls the Loch Ness
Monster — whether he, she or it exists or
not — as 'Nessie'.
Surely for many people, the Loch Ness Monster (or 'Nessie') is a lifeform that
would be as fascinating to learn about as ... UFOs and
Aliens-ETs — and perhaps just as dangerous as in a UFO
encounter classified as a 'Close Encounter' (within 500 ft / 160 m) of the
'Third Kind' (where "animate beings" are involved).
Of course, in the mind of the public, the Loch Ness Monster is probably seen as
a surviving form of aqueous (if not marine) dinosaur, known as a plesiosaur. Never mind that plesiosauri was supposed to have died out some 60 million
(i.e., 60,000,000) years ago!
Note that in our 'Articles' section, we also have another web article on Nessie, where we examine the
various hoaxes that had been perpetuated from the 1930s right up to the 1970s
... we examine these Loch Ness Monster hoaxes in the context of a field of
study or endeavor which has come to be known as 'cryptozoology'. This is a field of study that is regarded as little more than a pseudoscience, from the viewpoint of the mainstream scientists, i.e., biologists in general
and, especially, zoologists in particular.
Click here to find our web article on 'Cryptozoology - Hoaxes, says SSPIA'.
If you look closely at the above picture of my favorite mysteries, you may
realize that it represents a 'continuum' of Mysteries, beginning at the left of
the picture with The UFO Mystery and Aliens Mysteries, then through earthbound exotic lifeforms such as the Loch Ness Monster
(hence, The Nessie Mystery) that may be living in strange places, such as Scotland's Loch Ness and the
Atlantic Ocean's Bermuda Triangle, aka Devil's Triangle ... and then the picture rounds off with the mysterious
and wonderful works of humankind, including handiworks of art, such as the Mona Lisa, as well as mysterious monumental megaliths such as Stonehenge and the Egyptian Pyramids, with perhaps some assist from ETs, eh? — if the 'ancient
astronauts' idea is true, that would bring us back to the beginning of the
picture, with the UFOs and the Aliens-ETs. Note that this steady and regular
progression of the Mysteries is the reason that the above picture appears on every web page, for the picture, although not amounting to an exhaustive list of
Mysteries, still is a reasonably good pictorial representation of many
Mysteries of interest ...
Also, note that the set or group of mysteries in the picture happens to be the
set of Mysteries that are in most people's 'top-of-mind' recall category
... as the marketing communication researcher would say. That is, people seems
to recall these Mysteries more easily than they do other Mysteries ...
Anyway, the Loch Ness Monster — as a member of the group of
'cryptozoologically' exotic lifeforms or objects as interesting as UFOs and
Aliens-ETs — represents the next logical step in our
'continuum' of Mysteries. We reproduce part of the above (ubiquitous) picture
to highlight this ...
Okay ... Let's start our exploration of the Loch Ness Monster with some
lighthearted look at Nessie ... below are two video clips from the famous
video hosting site, YouTube ...
Toyota Tacoma Loch Ness Monster Ad
 Javascript must be enabled!
Required at least Flash 8 ... |
|
Toyota Loch Ness
Javascript must be enabled!
Required at least Flash 8 ... |
|
Note that if JavaScript is not enabled within your browser settings, then
instead of either of the above videos, this is what you will see (reproduced
for illustration purpose):
Javascript must be enabled!
Required at least Flash 8 ... |
2.0 Nessie Sightings
Most of the Nessie sightings that have managed to be recorded in the form of
photos or videos are usually the easiest to dispose of, because these photos or
videos tend to show vague images of things that are simply too
indistinguishable to say that they are anything at all ... Thus, using
Occam's Razor (
principle of parsimony) and, erring on the side of caution, unless a more concrete form of evidence
(such as a
bona fide carcass or, better still, a living specimen), then we would not be unjustified to
write off such vague photos or videos.
In fact, we could even say that these images may be about some other, more
innocuous, aqueous — freshwater or
marine — lifeforms ...
Maybe the pictures are just showing tree logs or stumps or branches that have
fallen into the water and which have resurfaced temporarily due to water
currents.
There are also many videos that show what could easily be interpreted as waves
or water wakes, plus possible movements of some lifeforms or logs, other than
our purported Nessie — such as is shown in the video on the
right. Such vagueness in these video 'evidence' can be interpreted in too many
ways to say that they definitely show Nessie moving or paddling or swimming in
the water. | | |
Here is another of those vague video images of what purportedly may be Nessie
herself ... this Loch Ness Monster video comes from YouTube, and carries the
title "New Loch Ness Monster Video in CCTV News" ... where CCTV News is the China news agency:
The original clip is in Mandarin, showing two news anchor persons, one Asian
man, one Asian woman, both probably from China, reporting on the possible
Nessie sighting. The segment that we excerpted and shown above, may apparently
be showing a Loch Ness Monster type of creature moving in the water ... what
you really see is a vague, ill-defined and practically indistinguishable
picture, compared to what is claimed may be the Loch Ness Monster itself
because of the shadowy 'shape' moving through the water.
If you imagine just a little or even squint a little, you can even convince
yourself that it's a plesiosaur! Of course, as Dr. Michael Shermer, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, said at a presentation at the TED 2006 Conference in California (TED =
Technology, Entertainment, Design), that when you are squinting, you are
'transforming' an image from fine grain to coarse grain and thus you are
reducing the quality of your data. And, of course, when you are exploring or investigating
something, you want better and better quality in your data, and not the reverse
(say, by "squinting").
Face on Mars
Dr. Michael Shermer — "Why People Believe Strange Things"
TED 2006 Conference, Monterey, California.
(TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design)Download?
CLICK HERE!
(New window will open.) And, of course, there is always the
psychological dimension in all these extraordinary claims ... while looking at photo or video
image(s), if you aren't really thinking about the Loch Ness Monster at all,
then you may not know what it is that you are viewing or looking at, until
someone
suggests it to you that it
is the Loch Ness Monster ... and straightaway ... you 'see' the Loch Ness Monster
in the photo or video image(s).
Basically, the problem with such ill-defined pictures as we have seen in the
Loch Ness Monster video images we see above (as well as many still photo
images, such as those we show in our web article on
'Cryptozoology - Hoaxes, says SSPIA') is that, the possibility of a hoax becomes almost a highly probable event.
Even if no hoax was actually intended, we have no choice but to reject these
images as an interim conclusion (which I refer to as 'Temporary Judgment' in a web article entitled 'Why Mysteries?'). In our examination, investigation, exploration or study (take your pick!) of
each of the 'Mysteries of the World', we SHOULD and MUST always bear in mind what the late Dr. Carl Sagan (1934-1996) once said (and he was referring specifically to UFOs, but it
applies to all Mysteries of the World), "Precisely because of human
fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!"
Probably, the only time when what a scientist like Dr. Sagan calls
"extraordinary evidence" is not required is when we are talking about what is
usually known as 'Religion' ... but then Religion is not Science, Religion is based on 'faith' ...
And in matters (e.g., the 'origin of man' issue) where both Science and
Religion have something to say from each's perspective, then it is up to any
one individual to make up his or her mind whether to look for "extraordinary
evidence" or to believe based on 'faith'.
In the case of the Loch Ness Monster, whether a particular lifeform exists or
not — or in this case, whether a prehistoric lifeform has
survived the geological times (from the 'early Jurrasic Period', of the
'Mesozoic Era', within the 'Phanerozoic Eon') up to the present
day — is not a matter of faith (no matter how much you claim
you 'believe' that the Loch Ness Monster exists today): if you make a claim of
such magnitude and sensation, then you need to be able to back up your
"extraordinary claim" with "extraordinary evidence".
3.0 Plesiosaur — Cambridge Encyclopedia
As we stated above, near the beginning of this web page, it has been thought
that the Loch Ness Monster may be a surviving plesiosaur. According to the
Cambridge Encyclopedia, "The Loch Ness Monster is reported to resemble a
plesiosaur. Arguments against the plesiosaur theory include the fact that the
lake is too cold for a cold-blooded animal to survive easily, that
air-breathing animals like plesiosaurs would be easily spotted when they
surface to breathe, that the lake is too small to support a breeding colony and
that the loch itself formed only 10,000 years ago during the last ice age."
That encyclopedia also recorded the following points ...
Lake or sea monster sightings are occasionally explained as plesiosaurs. While
the survival of a small, unrecorded breeding colony of plesiosaurs for the
65,000,000 years (with respect to evolution) since their apparent extinction is
unlikely, the discovery of real and even more ancient living fossils such as
the Coelacanth and of previously unknown but enormous deep-sea animals such as
the giant squid, have fuelled imaginations.
The National Museums of Scotland confirmed that vertebrae discovered on the
shores of Loch Ness, in 2003, belong to a plesiosaur, although there are some
questions about whether the fossils were planted (BBC News, July 16, 2003).
On November 2nd, 2006, Leslie Noè of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, UK,
announced research which casts further doubt on a plesiosaur inhabiting Loch
Ness. Instead, he found that the neck evolved to point downwards allowing the
plesiosaur to feed on soft-shelled animals living on the sea floor.
It was reported in The Star (Malaysia) on April 8th, 2006, that fishermen discovered bones resembling that
of a Plesiosaur near Sabah, Malaysia.
The 1977 discovery of a carcass with flippers and what appeared to be a long
neck and head, by the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiyo Maru, off New Zealand,
created a plesiosaur craze in Japan.
I
n an article entitled "What Was the New Zealand Monster?", published in the
Oceans Magazine (November 1977), which we are going to look into rather closely in the next
section ("
New Zealand Monster"), the writer John Koster — who was also the author of
The Road to Wounded Knee (together with Robert Burnette; Bantam Books, June
1974) — explained that, "For the benefit of those who have
never studied paleontology or seen the movie version of
The Land That Time Forgot, a plesiosaur is a marine reptile, a cousin of the dinosaurs which became
extinct about 60,000,000 years ago, except in Hollywood and Japanese movies.
Plesiosauri were probably fish-eaters — 'they had very good
teeth', one scientist observes — and were widely distributed
over the world's oceans in the
Mesozoic era, or age of the dinosaurs." (see picture below, from
Wikipedia)
Below are some pictorial representations of plesiosaurs ...
4.0 "New Zealand Monster"
The last four pictures (above) are apparently actual photographs taken by Yano
Michihiko — the then 39-old assistant production manager of
Taiyo Fisheries Ltd. — who was onboard the Japanese fishing
ship Zuiyo Maru, trawling for mackerel off the coast of New Zealand.
On April 25, 1977, the fishermen "snagged a rotting corpse at a depth of 900
feet and hauled in the remains of a beast that no one anywhere seemed to be
able to identify", wrote John Koster in the November 1977 edition of Oceans Magazine (pp. 56-59; "What Was the New Zealand Monster?"). Koster is a New Jersey
newspaperman and, as we pointed out earlier, the author of The Road to Wounded Knee.
Back to Yano Michihiko — "an intelligent man who had graduated
from Yamaguchi Oceanological High School in 1957" (according to Koster's
article) — who related the following ...
"It was caught in a trawl net," Yano explained. "The surface of the body was
loose and had white fat. I could see flesh here and there, but it was dark red
and was rotten. There were no internal organs. Judging from the condition of
the red meat, we think it was alive until a month ago. The fat was pulling away
in threads like tofu (soybean curd) and the deck turned white. It smelled
terrible. The smell was not that of fish, but of an animal. At first I thought
it was a whale. I reported, 'It's a rotten whale. What shall we do?' The
captain (Akira Tanaka) ordered 'Pull it up as it is.' We wanted to release it
in the sea outside the net basin ... It's common practice not to pick up the
rotten dead body of a creature because the ships deal with food for human
beings ... "The crewmen knew that if we picked it up, we'd have to clean and sanitize the
decks. But we got it untangled from the net and pulled it out with ropes around
the middle of the body. The rope wasn't well handled and it fell suddenly. So
we lifted the neck and I took the pictures. Cameras are my hobby, but I didn't
have my own camera, so I had to borrow one."
According to Yano, "there were eight men on deck, five on the bridge, and two
working the net winch. The creature was seen by all of them and several others
who heard the noise and looked out of curiosity. In all, it was observed by
eighteen crewmen."
Yano took measurements of the carcass: the head was about 45 centimeters long,
the neck 1.5 meters long, the four fins were each 1 meter long (with the front
fins a little bigger or longer than the back fins), and the body (from the top
of the head to the base of the tail) was 6 meters long. Yano also noted that the
"well-developed vertebratae" (backbone) were about 45 centimeters long and 15
centimeters thick.
When Yano first returned to Japan aboard a different ship on June 10, 1977, he
asked his company darkroom to process the five color snapshots he had taken of
the creature. Executives from the Taiyo Fishery Co. were fascinated by the
strange beast and enquired of some local scientists, who apparently said the
creature was "not a turtle, nor a whale, nor a dolphin ... it's something we've
never seen before".
Wrote Koster: "Excited now, the Taiyo officials brought Yano before a second
the Taiyo officials brought Yano before a second blue-ribbon panel of eminent
marine scientists to try to ascertain what the strange beast had been."
In the press-covered panel discussion with Professors Ikuo Obata and Hiroshi
Ozaki of Japan's National Science Museum and Professor Toshio Kasuya, of Tokyo
University's Marine Research Center, Yano said, "From seeing only these
pictures, it's possible this could look like a rotten seal. In the Antarctic
they have the southern elephant seal, which grows to 3.5 meters [long] but the
size [6 meters long] doesn't fit."
To which Professor Toshio Kasuya said, "If this had been a seal, the tail would
be too long," and Professor Hiroshi Ozaki said , "If this had been a reptile,
the number of bones around the neck should be greater, according to the
drawing". Professor Ozaki was referring to a simple sketch with measurements
that Yano had drawn after his return to Japan some two months after actually
examining the creature.
A reporter covering the panel discussion then asked the ominous question,
"Could the New Zealand monster have been a dinosaur?" To which Professor Ikuo
Obata replied cautiously, "It's easier to survive in the sea than on land. One
theory is that the creature is a mammal, and the other is that it is a
long-necked monster ... [plesiosaur]. And there are many points that don't fit
the mammal theory. Within my knowledge, it looks like a plesiosaur. But I can't
say for sure unless I have the skull and vertebrae to examine."
Professor Ozaki disagreed with the "Nessie" / plesiosaur theory, saying "If
it's not a sea monster, it could be either a mammal or a fish, but I don't
think it's a fish." To which , Professor Kasuva agreed, "If it were a shark, the
spine would be smaller. And the neck itself is too long as shown in the
picture. I think we can exclude the fish theory."
Thus, most of the panel agreed to discount the fish theory, so that, as
Professor Obata concluded, "It must be either a mammal or a reptile. But with
the materials we have, we can't judge which one."
The mammal theory was soon disposed of on two fronts by the Japanese scientists
...
The July 21, 1977, edition of the Japanese broadsheet, Asahi Shimbun — which broke the news of the strange "monster" to the
world on that day — quoted Professor Yoshinori Imaizumi
of Japan's National Science Museum as saying, "It's not a fish, whale, or any
other mammal. It's a reptile, and the sketch looks very like a plesiosaur. This
was a precious and important discovery for human beings. It seems to show that
these animals are not extinct after all."
This did not go down well with Western scientists. As John Koster wrote:
To Japanese scientists who examined the available evidence left in the New
Zealand monster's foul-smelling wake, the most likely candidate for
identification seemed to be the plesiosaur."Nonsense! shouted back the American and British scientific communities,
and not a few people in Japan, where the New Zealand monster was front-page
news for weeks. Rather than face the stinking carcass of a dinosaur apparently
deceased not more than thirty days, paleontologists, mammalogists and marine
biologists all over the world advanced their own theories — it
was a seal, a whale, a basking shark, ... but no theory, whether prehistoric
[or] mundane, was completely adequate to explain away the 4,000-pound, 32-foot
body, which was examined, photographed five times, clipped for tissue samples,
and then dumped back into the sea for fear it would contaminate the Zuiyo Maru's
catch of fish.
[...]
"It's baloney," said Dr. Bobby Schaeffer, curator of vertebrate paleontology
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "Every ten years or
so, something is found, usually in the Pacific, and people think it's a
dinosaur. And it always turns out to be a basking shark, or an adolescent
whale. When sharks find a dead whale, they have a merry old time, and the
half-eaten corpse looks like a dinosaur skeleton."
British scientists, even more distant, were much less impressed. While the
colony of true believers around Loch Ness hailed the discovery as proof that
Nessie had living relatives, most academics scoffed at the very idea. Dr.
Alwyne Wheeler, of London's Natural History Museum, said the corpse was
probably a shark. "Sharks are cartilaginous fish," he explained in the New
Scientist, July 28, 1977. "When they start to decompose after death, the head
and gills are first to drop from the body . . . Greater experts than the
Japanese fishermen have been foiled by the similarity of shark remains to a
plesiosaur."
[...]
A Scottish zoologist, Dr. Alan Fraser-Brunner, aquarium curator at the
Edinburgh Zoo, blasted the Nessie theory. He said the body was "at once
recognizable to a zoologist as that of a dead sea lion ... that the estimate of
length and weight must be an exaggeration, and that ... as seems to be the
rule with 'monsters' we are left with no evidence except an indistinct
photograph, but it is clear enough to show that the animal was mammalian.
Nothing about it resembles a plesiosaur, which was a reptile."
Unfortunately for Dr. Fraser-Brunner, Yano — besides taking
pictures of the creature — had also taken tissue samples of
fibrous material from one of the fins for analysis. The tests began on these
specimens as soon as Yano returned to Japan on June 10, 1977.
The test reports came in about a week after the news of the "monster" first
broke on July 21, 1977, in the Asahi Shimbun. Wrote Koster:
"Using a method known as ion-exchange chromatography to determine the
amino-acid structure of the protein in the fibrous strands Yano had given him,
Dr. Shigeru Kimura, a biochemist at the Tokyo University school of fisheries,
found that for every 1,000 units of amino acids in the monster tissue, 40 were
of a type called tyrosine. The amino-acid structure of a blue shark's fin
averaged 44 units of tyrosine per 1,000 of amino acids which, Kimura said,
represented a remarkable correlation. "Among fish, it is known that only sharks and rays have the type of protein
called elastoidin," Dr. Kimura said. "But as for reptiles, I do not think there
is relevant data, even abroad." He added that the protein could not have come
from a mammal's skin or hair. Thus, chemically, the monster may have been
either a fish or, possibly, a reptile, but not a mammal.
So Dr. Fraser-Brunner's conclusion of a mammalian origin did not quite agree
with Dr. Kimura's test results. And Koster wrote that "one would have thought
that his [Dr. Fraser-Brunner's] assertion that the creature had been a seal
would have prompted amusement. Instead, several Japanese, mostly laymen, agreed
with him. Others took the position that the creature was a shark, ignoring
Yano's description of a clearly defined spinal column, the absence of any
dorsal fin, and the small size of the examined head, none of which fit the
morphological features of a shark."
A few words of caution came from Professor Tokio Shikama, a paleontologist at
the Yokohama National University, who said, "Even if the tissue contains the
same protein as the shark's, it is rash to say that the monster is a shark. The
finding is not enough to refute a speculation that the monster is a plesiosaur."
So, again, the Japanese scientists — from the panel of
scientists, from Japan's National Science Museum, and from Tokyo
University — all agreed that the strange "monster" was not any
kind of fish (such as a large basking shark) ... nor any kind of aquatic mammal
(such as a sea-lion seal or a whale).
As John Koster wrote this ending in his article, "In the end, everybody's
individual preconceptions won out. Those who were prepared to believe in living
plesiosauri were convinced or nearly so, while those who refused to believe
found nothing to change their minds. For the open-minded skeptics, or for those
who were just plain curious, the New Zealand monster remains one of the most
tantalizing enigmas of the sea."
It should be noted that the coelacanth, which scientists thought was extinct
about 60,000,000 years ago, was discovered alive and virtually unchanged off the
coast of Madagascar in 1938. So we have on record of at least one case of a
prehistoric creature being alive and well, today in the modern era.
Anyway, the Cambridge Encyclopedia entry on Plesiosaur begins by explaining
that it is:
A marine reptile known from the Mesozoic era; body broad and compact, with
large limbs developed as paddles; neck typically long, head small with a long
snout bearing sharp teeth for feeding on fish; short-necked forms known aspliosaurs. (Order: Sauropterygia.)Plesiosaurs ... (Greek: plesios meaning 'near' or 'close to' and sauros meaning 'lizard') were carnivorous aquatic (mostly marine) reptiles.
Plesiosaurs (sensu Plesiosauroidea) first appeared at the very start of the Jurassic Period and
thrived until the K-T extinction, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The first plesiosaur skeletons were found in England by Mary Anning, in the
early 1800s.
It is occasionally claimed that plesiosaurs are not extinct, although the
evidence for this belief is generally not accepted in the scientific world.
5.0 Wikipedia
The free online encyclopedia,
Wikipedia, has grown up so much and so fast that it has become such an ubiquitous source
of information, and the
Site Build It! (
SBI!) package that I use to create this
'Mysteries of the World' website lists it as the top 3 sites ranked by Alexa.com for the keyword "loch
ness monster" ... the first two were YouTube web pages (!) with video clips
bearing these titles:
- "Toyota Tacoma Loch Ness Monster Ad"
- "New Loch Ness Monster Video in CCTV News"
Anyway, according to Wikipedia (adapted/re-paragraphed) ...
The Loch Ness Monster (Nessiteras rhombopteryx) is an alleged animal, identified neither as to a family or species,
purportedly inhabiting Scotland's Loch Ness.
Wikipedia's own article or entry on "Loch Ness" states that:
Loch Ness (Scottish Gaelic: Loch Nis) is a large, deep, freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands ( ... 57°18'N,
4°27'W) extending for approximately 37 km (23 miles) southwest of Inverness.
Its surface is 15.8 meters (52 ft) above sea level.Loch Ness is best known for the alleged sightings of the legendary Loch Ness
Monster, also known as "Nessie"."
It is connected at the southern end by the River Oich and a section of the
Caledonian Canal to Loch Oich.
At the northern end there is the Bona Narrows
which opens out into Loch Dochfour, which feeds the River Ness and a further
section of canal to Inverness.
It is one of a series of interconnected, murky bodies of water in Scotland; its
water visibility is exceptionally low due to a high peat content in the
surrounding soil.
An entry in Wikipedia on "Loch" explains that:
A loch (usually Lough as a name element outside Scotland) is a body of water which is either:
- a lake or;
- a sea inlet, which may be also a firth, fjord, estuary or bay.
Sea-inlet lochs are often called sea lochs.
To continue with the Wikipedia article on the Loch Ness Monster ...
The Loch Ness Monster is one of the best-known cryptids studied by
cryptozoology.Popular belief and interest in the animal has fluctuated over the years since
it came to the world's attention in 1933.
Evidence of its existence is largely anecdotal, with minimal, and much
disputed, photographic material and sonar readings: there has not been any
physical evidence (skeletal
remains, capture of a live animal, definitive tissue samples or spoor)
uncovered as of 2008.
Local people, and later many around the world, have affectionately referred to
the animal by the diminutive Nessie (Scottish Gaelic: "Niseag") since the 1950s.
Origins
The term "monster" was reportedly coined on 2 May 1933 by Alex Campbell, the
water bailiff for Loch Ness [water bailiff: "a law enforcement officer responsible for the policing of
bodies of water, such as a river, lake or coast" — Wikipedia] and a part-time journalist, in a report in the Inverness Courier [Wikipedia cites The Sun 27 November 1975].
On 4 August 1933, the Courier published as a full news item the claim of a London man named George Spicer
that, a few weeks earlier, while motoring around the Loch, he and his wife had
seen "the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal that I have ever
seen in my life", trundling across the road toward the Loch carrying "an
animal" in its mouth.
The following month, another letter came from a veterinary student reporting a
similar encounter while on a night drive.
These stories soon reached the national (and later the international) press,
which talked of a 'monster fish', 'sea serpent' or 'dragon', eventually
settling on 'Loch Ness Monster' [Wikipedia cites Daily Mirror, 11 August 1933; Wikipedia also cites the Oxford English Dictionary as giving 9 June 1933 as the first usage of the exact phrase Loch Ness monster].
To continue with the Wikipedia article on the Loch Ness Monster ...
On 6 December 1933 the first photograph (taken by Hugh Gray) was published
[here Wikipedia cites R. P. Mackal (1983) The Monsters of Loch Ness page 94],
and the creature received official recognition from the Secretary of State for
Scotland, ordering the police to prevent any attacks on it [here Wikipedia
cites Daily Mirror 8 December 1933 "The Monster of Loch Ness - Official! Orders That Nobody is to
Attack it .... A Huge Eel?"]. Other letters began appearing in the Courier, often anonymously, with claims of land or water sightings, either on the
writer's part or on the parts of family, acquaintances or stories they
remembered being told.
In 1934, interest was further sparked by what is known as The Surgeon's Photograph. In the same year R. T. Gould published a book [here Wikipedia cites Gould,
Rupert T. (1934). The Loch Ness Monster and Others. London: Geoffrey Bles.], the first of many which describe the author's
personal investigation and collected record of additional reports pre-dating
the summer of 1933.
Subsequent investigations by other agents over the ensuing decades added
additional material which was eventually woven into a continuum of sightings
dating from the 6th century A.D. to the present, and which appeared to present
a strong case for the existence of a large, possibly unknown and certainly
unidentified animal or family of animals living in Loch Ness.
However, some people, such as Robert H. Rines, believe that the last few
creatures died out in the 20th century [Wikipedia cites Boston Globe Feb 11, 2008 "Loch Ness monster quest nears end"].
6.0 Postscript
This web page is a preliminary look-see at the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster,
if indeed the creature exists ...
Cheers!
