Monster of the deep? No, Nessie’s just an umbrella stand
... or possibly a toy submarine
OveR the centuries, the Loch ness Monster has been confidently identified by eye-witnesses as being like a giant salamander or conger eel, a big otter or ‘a family of otters swimming in a line’, a dragon, a black carthorse, a large seal and a squid.
Others have described it as an iguana ‘that specialised in chewing through divers’ breathing equipment’, a short-necked crocodile, ‘a morbidly obese newt’, a mini-submarine, a massive slug and ‘an elderly killer whale’.
At 263,000 million cubic feet, a mile across and 23 miles from end to end, Loch ness is the largest body of fresh water in the British Isles. It also, as Gareth Williams explains in his fascinating study, attracts cranks, drunks, publicity-seekers and lunatics like a magnet.
The loch is at least 600ft deep, and the water is impenetrably black: ‘a cold, permanently dark underworld, completely invisible from the surface’. Its bottom consists of ridges, caverns and caves.
The entire place would make a perfect horror movie set. An elderly couple once came back from a run in their Morris Traveller by the loch, babbling about how ‘the creature disported itself, rolling and plunging . . . the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron. Soon, however, it disappeared in a boiling mass of foam’.
A nessie expert who interviewed the couple said: ‘I am quite satisfied that Mr Macnab is a perfectly trustworthy person. he is a bank manager.’ That sentence gave me the first good laugh of 2016.
The other trustworthy person who made himself into a nessie expert was Sir Peter Scott, a founder of the World Wildlife Fund and the founder of the Severn Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.
‘I have for a long time thought it more than probable that an undescribed animal lives in Loch ness,’ he announced in 1960.
Scott, recently returned from investigating the Icelandic breeding grounds of the pink-footed goose, was intrigued by the film shot by Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer at heathrow.
Dinsdale had spent 82 days on the loch in his cabin cruiser, his craft ‘bristling with cameras, radios, fishing rods and a parabolic reflector-cum-microphone’.
Scott passed the strip of celluloid on to the RAF boffins at the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre, who couldn’t be certain what the black object or smudge might be — but it was ‘probably animate’, just maybe a creature with a fin.
Scott formally named the putative animal, with its traditional bulbous body and elongated neck, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, and assumed it was a version of the ocean-going plesiosaur, which was thought to have died out 60 million years ago.
he published a paper explaining his views in the journal nature in December 1975. Scott also set up a Loch ness Study Group, and invited eminent zoologists, professors, fellows of the Royal Society and authorities on marine mammals to join the panel.
SCOTT and Dinsdale also sought to rope in the Queen, who had been to Slimbridge to inspect the cygnets. Through her Private Secretary, however, she made the very sensible pronouncement that the whole business was in danger of getting ‘over-heated’.
In a letter to Scott, Martin Charteris, the Private Secretary, continued: ‘There is obviously something about the Loch ness Monster which makes normally sane and balanced people behave in a highly emotional manner.’
It was a sage warning. For what we have with nessie Studies is something akin to religion, with believers at war with agnostics. On the one hand there are the buccaneers and mavericks, the so-called men of science willing at any cost to identify a new animal species.
On the other, there is the establishment, which points out there is no acceptable proof, no incontrovertible evidence. It hardly needed them to stress that no
specimens have been captured in Loch Ness, no physical remains found, and ‘not the tiniest fragment’ has ever been studied under a microscope in the laboratory.
When, in 1959, the expert on eels at the Natural History Museum, Dr Denys Tucker, came back from a trip to Scotland insisting he’d seen a plesiosaur, he ‘refused to retract his belief in the Monster’, and was summarily sacked from his post.
The establishment stance was clear: the Nessie affair was ‘a preposterous insult to the intelligence of anyone who understood the basic rules of science’.
Not that a hard line ever deters the faithful. Gareth Williams has fun describing the acolytes who have patrolled the loch in converted army surplus lorries. Others planned to turn up with Bren guns mounted on canoes, harpoons and machetes.
Bertram Mills, the circus impresario, offered a bounty of £20,000 — £1.5 million in today’s figures — for Nessie’s capture. An ostensibly authoritative book was written by Rupert Gould, a radio personality from The Brains’ Trust, an ‘infinitely wise uncle-like figure who explained the wonders of the universe to the children of Britain’.
As long ago as 1933, this newspaper hired a big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to look around. He found massive footprints, which showed four short-clawed toes. Movie monster: How an Austrian film-maker imagined Nessie in the Eighties Marmaduke concluded that Nessie was a hippo. He was right, or very nearly. Somebody had naughtily created the footprints using a hunting trophy that had been converted into an umbrella stand.
For that is the problem with Nessie Studies: it abounds with hoaxers, charlatans, liars and deceivers. When people are desperate to believe, they’ll believe in anything — they have no trouble inventing what we might call the Proofs of Holy Writ.
The grainy photographic evidence is all of questionable veracity — Gareth Williams has found a history of doctored negatives, cut with a scalpel, and often ‘someone has taken a fine paintbrush and created an edge of darkness and a beautiful flipper’.
Plastic sacks and a curved stick can be made by anyone to look suggestive. One picture, which fooled the gullible for decades, involved glueing a plaster head and neck on top of a toy clockwork submarine, bought in Woolworths in Richmond.
The negatives were then taken to a chemist in Inverness for developing.
WILLIAMS, a dean of medicine at Bristol University and the author of textbooks on diabetes, gleefully exposes the bogus science, the warped facts, and the misunderstanding of evolution.
Sifting the evidence, analysing the hearsay, showing the extent of the leg-pulling, he says that Nessie is no more than the action of the wind and the waves.
Specifically, masses of debris, ‘rafts of pine-needles and sticks, bound together by skeins of stinking algae’, are left rotting in the depths, until they are lifted to the surface by the gas from the decomposing vegetation.
Seen from a distance in the mist or at dusk by amateur photographers or the naked eye, this phenomenon can look supernatural or scarily prehistoric and straight out of a Hammer Horror film.
Furthermore, sonar echoes are no more than the reverberations coming off mooring chains, and Nessie’s humps can be explained as the wake of boats.
Tim Dinsdale’s film, it transpires, was simply the shadow of a zig-zagging dark-hulled fishing boat with an outboard motor. Modern enlargement techniques and computer imaging have also managed to identify two passengers and the boat’s circular licence-number plate.
Basically, ‘the human brain is good at embroidery’. And Sir Peter Scott?
Surely he couldn’t really have risked antagonising the establishment, whose support was always essential for his other conservation enterprises?
Look again at Nessiteras rhombopteryx. It is an anagram of ‘Monster hoax by Sir Peter S’.