NESSIE NOT A DICK
Comedian resurrects the 2005 "sea monsters are whale penises" theory
A Twitter thread by comedian James Felton suggesting that the Loch Ness Monster was actually a whale penis caused a significant flurry of media interest during May, with many of the UK’s tabloid papers running the story. The comment was prompted by a paper published in 2005 in the Archives of Natural History by cetacean researcher (and sometime FT contributor) Charles Paxton and colleagues that concluded that many classic sea monster sightings were most likely of erect whale penises (see FT200:16).
When mating, male whales often break the surface with their phalluses which are long and sinuous and do indeed look a lot like drawings and descriptions of sea monsters from the past. Paxton’s paper, however, makes no mention of Loch Ness. Felton’s tweet explicitly makes the connection though, pairing an image of a whale penis with the famed “Surgeon’s Photo” picture of the Loch Ness Monster and remarking on the similarity. As might be expected, the tabloids had a field day with the story, but monster researchers reacted with scepticism, pointing out that while the theory might work for sea monsters, it would be almost impossible for a whale to get into the loch and that sightings occur all year round, not just in whale mating season. Further complicating the matter is the fact that the 1934 Surgeon’s Photo is known to be a hoax cooked up by the photographer Robert Kenneth Wilson and two friends, Christian Spurling and Marmaduke Wetherall, and shows an 18-inch clay model mounted on a toy submarine, not a monster.
2021 has been a good year for Loch Ness Monster sightings so far, paradoxically largely due to the lockdown preventing people from leaving their homes. Up to June, seven sightings had been reported to the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register (http://www.lochnesssightings. com/index.asp?pageid=717286), all but one of which had been made via the 24-hour Loch
Ness webcam, which has many dedicated watchers viewing it from home in the hope of a sighting.
Three sightings were made by Eoin O’Fagan and two by Kalynn Wangle in this way, all involving anomalous black shapes on the Loch in the absence of boat traffic, while Roslyn Casey spotted a hump-like shape on the webcam. Photos and video captures of their sightings are on the Register site.
The first actual physical sighting of the year was on
2 June when a young man visiting from Cambridge saw an unidentified creature close to the castle in Urquhart Bay. The sighting lasted two seconds and took place on a sunny day with excellent visibility. The witness told the Register that he saw a hump come up, going against the waves; it looked like a turtle’s back, black in colour with a green tinge to it. Sun, 24 Mar 2021; Daily Star, 23 May 2021; Snopes.com 27 Apr 2021.