Notion Nasa will find Nessie is away with the fairies

So, Nasa is to join the search for Nessie. Not content with exploring outer space for little green men, or at least a habitable planet for humankind, the space agency has been implored to dispatch experts to a Scottish loch to look for a mythical monster.

The revelation comes, tiresomely, on the 90th anniversary of the marketing wheeze – er, study – of the deep in 1934 for the inexplicably shy and singularly long-lived giant eel that has been swimming about, witnessed by no fewer than 1,000 people of varying degrees of bewilderment.

I hope the Nasa experts have the sense to confine their surveys to the solar system, where there is infinitely more possibility of discovery.

Why is it that some myths persist long after they are proved to be nonsense?

Big Foot, for instance. Aliens at Roswell. The sighting of affordable homes in Dublin.

OK, so the last one probably won’t stand the test of time.

My own favourite, with which I was obsessed as a child, was the Cottingley fairies.

A series of five convincing photos taken during photography’s infancy in 1917 by two young girls purported to depict fairies in their garden in Yorkshire. The images show the children (aged 16 and nine) along with four or five tiny, dancing, ethereally gowned winged females.

In an age obsessed with all things spiritual and psychic, they came to the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle (he of Sherlock Holmes fame), who considered them incontrovertible evidence of a fourth dimension phenomenon.

He commissioned Kodak – then a new company – to examine them. It concluded there were “no signs of [them] being faked”, but still refused to authenticate them.

The father of one of the girls, an amateur snapper, dismissed the children’s pictures as a prank or, at best, an unintended double exposure. However, his wife, and a war-weary nation, were hooked.

The public remained infatuated by the story that these two girls had befriended what many believed to be the real deal, much like the fairy forts, leprechauns or guardian angels believed in by Irish people through the ages.

The myth wasn’t debunked until 1986 when the girls, by then octogenarians, admitted they had faked the photos – a not inconsiderable feat in itself – using cut-outs from a picture book and photographing in careful light.

The series sold for £50,000 (€58,500) at auction in 2019.

Legends and story-telling, from nursery rhymes to ghost stories, are an important cultural cornerstone. In a time when many ordinary people couldn’t read or write, being able to pass on information about the world and share cautionary tales with the next generation was important.

Today, of course, we have the internet to propagate every woolly-headed oddball nonsense.

So, Nessie won’t be found, by Nasa or anyone else. And do you think for one moment that if there had been aliens at Roswell, Donald Trump could have kept it to himself for four years?