‘Nessie’ is still hiding

ALTHOUGH accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland’s Loch Ness date back 1 500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster was born when a sighting made local news on May 2, 1933.

The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.” The story of the ‘monster’ became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a £20,000 reward for capture of the beast.

Loch Ness, located in the Scottish Highlands, has the largest volume of fresh water in Great Britain; the body of water reaches a depth of 320m and a length of 36km. Scholars of the Loch Ness Monster find a dozen references to ‘Nessie’ in Scottish history, dating back to around AD 500, when local Picts carved a strange aquatic creature into standing stones near Loch Ness. The earliest written reference to a monster in Loch Ness is a 7th century biography of Saint Columba, who stopped at Loch Ness to confront a beast that had been killing people in the lake. Seeing a large beast about to attack another man, Columba commanded the creature to “go back with all speed.” The monster retreated and never killed another man.

In 1933, a new road was completed along Loch Ness’ shore, affording drivers a clear view of the loch. After an April 1933 sighting was reported in the local paper on May 2, interest steadily grew. London’s Daily Mail hireda big-game hunter to capture the beast. After a few days searching the loch, he reported finding footprints. Plaster casts of the footprints were sent to the British Natural History Museum, which reported that the tracks were that of a hippopotamus, specifically one hippopotamus foot, probably stuffed.

A famous 1934 photograph seemed to show a dinosaur-like creature with a long neck emerging out of the murky waters, leading some to speculate that ‘Nessie’ was a solitary survivor of the long-extinct plesiosaurs. The aquatic plesiosaurs were thought to have died off with the rest of the dinosaurs 65-million years ago.

Amateur investigators kept an almost constant vigil, and in the 1960s several British universities launched expeditions to Loch Ness, using sonar to search the deep. Nothing conclusive was found, but in each expedition the sonar operators detected large, moving underwater objects they could not explain. In 1975, Boston’s Academy of Applied Science combined sonar and underwater photography in an expedition to Loch Ness. A photo resulted that, after enhancement, appeared to show the giant flipper of a plesiosaur-like creature.

Further sonar expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in more tantalising, if inconclusive, readings. Revelations in 1994 that the famous 1934 photo was a hoax hardly dampened the enthusiasm of tourists and professional and amateur investigators to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.

The latest investigations, using a marine robot named Munin to explore areas that have not been reached before, discovered something 10m long at the bottom of the deepest part of the loch this month. But Nessie hunters have been left disappointed this time, after the remains were identified as a long-lost 1970s film prop.

The 30ft model is thought to have sunk after the shooting of The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes.

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