Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland’s Loch Ness date back more than fifteen hundred years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster was born when a sighting made local news on 2 May 1933. The Inverness Courier newspaper 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” (a moniker chosen by the editor of the Courier) became a media phenomenon, with several London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland, and a circus offering a twenty-thousand-pound 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 nearly eight hundred feet and a length of over twenty miles. Scholars of the Loch Ness Monster find a dozen references to Nessie in Scottish history, dating back to around 500 AD, 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 seventh-century biography of Saint Columba, the Irish missionary who introduced Christianity to Scotland. In 565, according to the biographer, Columba was on his way to visit the king of the northern Picts near Inverness, when he 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 intervened, invoking the name of God and commanding the creature to “go back with all speed”. The monster retreated and never killed another man.
In 1933, a new road was completed along the shore of Loch Ness, affording drivers a clear view of the loch. After a sighting in April of 1933 was reported in the local paper on 2 May, interest steadily grew, especially after another couple claimed to have seen the beast on land, crossing the shore road. Several British newspapers sent reporters to Scotland, including London’s Daily Mail, which hired big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to capture the beast. After a few days searching the loch, Wetherell reported finding footprints of a large four-legged animal. In response, the Daily Mail carried the dramatic headline: Monster of Loch Ness not a legend, but a fact. Scores of tourists descended on Loch Ness and sat in boats or decks chairs waiting for an appearance by the beast. 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. The hoax temporarily deflated Loch Ness Monster mania, but stories of sightings continued.
A famous 1934 photograph (above) 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 plesiosaurs were thought to have died off with the rest of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Loch Ness was frozen solid during the recent ice ages, however, so this creature would have had to have made its way up the River Ness from the sea in the past ten thousand years. The plesiosaurs, believed to be cold-blooded, would not long survive in the frigid waters of Loch Ness. More likely, others suggested, it was an archeocyte, a primitive whale with a serpentine neck that is thought to have been extinct for eighteen million years. Skeptics argued that what people were seeing in Loch Ness were “seiches”: oscillations in the water surface caused by the inflow of cold river water into the slightly warmer loch.
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 tantalizing, 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.
Rico says the loch will probably never give up its secrets, but it's nice to think it might actually be there, isn't it?
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