4 - Strange Tales from the Lakes

The waves came crashing onto the shore and we both immediately rushed to see what was happening. Only minutes before we had remarked on the stillness of the loch.

There was obviously something very large in the water moving at great speed close to the shore.

Initially, I could see one black hump-like object but it submerged. Then within seconds I could see two objects, one of which I took to be the tail.

I watched spellbound for some time before the creature dived deeply, creating a considerable displacement of water and disappeared.

Thus Mrs Dilys Fisher, a teacher from the south of England, claimed to have spotted the Loch Ness monster in August 1982. At the time of the sighting, Mrs Fisher and her husband were repairing a hired moped in a lay-by on the A82 Inverness to Fort William road. As they tinkered with the engine, they heard 'a sudden, violent movement' in the loch.

Four years later, in August 1986, three teenaged girls working for the summer at the Loch Ness Hotel, Drumnad-rochit, were standing near Urquhart Castle, a picturesque ruin on the northern shore. It was near midnight. The loch was quiet. But they claim that when they looked out over the water, they saw a dark shape in the middle of the loch.

'It had a large hump at one end and a smaller hump at the other,' said Catriona Murray. 'At first we thought it was an island, but then we realized there are no islands in that part of Loch Ness.'

Catriona's companion, Sharon Boulton, was equally astonished. 'It kept appearing and disappearing,' she said, 'and, despite its massive size, we could not hear a sound. It could not have been an illusion because we all saw it.'

The girls tried to rouse the occupants of a nearby house, but no one stirred. Instead, they stopped a passing milk lorry and its driver obligingly shone his headlights over the water. But there was nothing unusual to be seen: just the glinting water, unruffled by humps.

As these stories suggest, public interest in the puzzle of the Loch Ness monster has not declined in recent years. The dedicated hunters have been as active as ever, and so, apparently, has Nessie herself, for eye-witnesses continue to come forward with claimed sightings of the world's most famous lake monster. Most ambitious of all the recent schemes to find definitive proof of Nessie's existence came in 1984, when a huge tubular trap, 80 ft (25 m) long and made of fibreglass, was airlifted into the loch.

Despite rising winds, helicopter pilot Jim Wood dropped it precisely on target off Horseshoe Scree near Fort Augustus; and the trap's designer, a twenty-five-year-old civil servant called Steve Whittle, his sponsors - a vodka company - and the British public, settled down to the kind of wait every fisherman knows is essential to ensure a catch.

Whatever she is [said Whittle] Nessie must be aware of exactly what is going on in the loch, every corner of which she will know as well as you or I know our own living rooms.

For that reason, we have made the trap as flimsy in appearance as possible, and will leave her to get used to it for a couple of weeks. She will undoubtedly be afraid of it at first, but will eventually see salmon and trout swimming through it as they become accustomed to its presence.

Then, hopefully, she will become braver and will not be able to resist the temptation of a concentration of a shoal of 40 salmon in one place.

But patience was not rewarded. The trap - designed merely to detain the monster for photography and examination by a zoologist - was never sprung.

Other researchers took to the air in the Goodyear blimp Europa, but its crew of twenty-five failed to spot anything out of the ordinary as they cruised above the loch at a stately thirty-five miles per hour.

Theories advanced to explain the monster's elusive nature and its reasons for taking up residence in Loch Ness have become weirder and wilder. 'Is Nessie a Giant Squid?' asked a writer in Britain's journal of strange phenomena, Fortean Times. Meanwhile, in 1983, monster-hunter Eric Beckjord explained his new idea to reporters:

I am beginning to think of it this way: you need a pair of polaroid glasses to see the laminations on your car windscreen.

What if there is a monster and it has quasi- or pseudo-invisibility? The human eye cannot register the whole spectrum of light. We cannot see infra-red.

Maybe Nessie's coat has some sort of colour that doesn't show up too good on most people's retinas. That would explain a lot.

Yet it would be wrong to suggest that little has changed. At Loch Ness the heyday of monster-hunting seems to be over. Ironically, the fiftieth anniversary in 1983 of the first eyewitness claims to receive worldwide attention prompted a resurgence of scepticism, and the idea that an unknown creature may lurk in the loch has been subjected to a number of carefully researched and skilfully argued attacks.

At the same time, the ever-optimistic investigators have set out for lake-shores new in pursuit of creatures which, many believe, have survived in their freshwater fastnesses since prehistoric times.

Reports that a monster had been seen rearing up out of the waters of Lake Hanas, China, were investigated by technicians from Xinjiang University in 1980. They travelled to the lake, which is set deep in thickly forested mountains 500 miles north of Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur region, and laid bait in the water. All they saw, however, was 'a large red shape', which approached the bait before disappearing back into the depths.

In Canada, in the 1980s, a weird pair of creatures was said to inhabit Saddle Lake and Christina Lake in Alberta. Ray Makowecki, Director of the region's Fish and Wildlife Department, told enquirers:

We've received so many reports of the creatures at both lakes that we've had to take them seriously. There is no obvious and logical explanation.

Besides their heads which are shaped like horses', and their eyes which are the size of saucers, the most astonishing feature is their hair, something like Bo Derek's hair-do in the film 10. And all of the reports were from trusted and very credible people.

In 1982 a Polish newspaper, Kurter Polski, described how a student swimming in Zegrzynski Lake near Warsaw claimed he had been confronted by a beast with 'an enormous slimy black head with rabbit-like ears'. He struck out for the shore at once and when he got there the creature had disappeared, leaving only 'huge ripples' to show where it had been.

A Russian writer, Anatoly Pankov, reported on the hunt for a greyish, long-necked creature apparently seen since the 1950s by several witnesses in Lake Labinkir in the province of Yakutia in Siberia. A group of geologists said it made a sound 'much like a child's cry', while some reindeer-hunters claimed they had watched it coil up out of the water and snaffle a passing bird. Pankov tells of another hunter who took ingenious revenge on the monster after it had swallowed his dog. First he made an animal-skin raft and then piled it high with red-hot coals before pushing it out over the water. The monster duly took the bait and dived away, only to reappear a few moments later 'making terrible sounds'.

There have been the inevitable false alarms. From the town of Alma Ata in Kazakhstan in December 1985 the Soviet news agency Tass cabled the results of an expedition mounted by the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute of Evolutionary Morphology and Ecology of Animals. For years, a monster had been sighted in Lake Kol-Kol. Some eyewitnesses said it was like a dinosaur; others reported that 'a twisty body about 20 metres long emerges above the lake surface time and again'.

In reaching their conclusion, the scientists refused to be distracted by the colourful accounts of the locals. The lake is connected to underground cavities by mud-covered cracks,' they reported. 'When the mud is washed away and water rushes down, large whirlpools appear on the water surface - the traces of the unknown beast.'

In West Germany in July 1982 bathers in a flooded gravel pit near Augsburg were horrified to realize that they were sharing the water with a writhing serpentine creature. The police were duly called and arrested a boa constrictor. How had it got into the pit? Answer: It was a very hot day and the snake's thoughtful owner had simply brought his pet along for a swim.

The case for the existence of a monster in Lake Champlain in the United States of America, was boosted in 1984 by the publication of a book called Champ - Beyond the Legend. Its author, Joseph Zarzynski, has collected more than 200 eyewitness reports which suggest that a mysterious creature may live in the lake. There is certainly plenty of room for a monster to hide: Lake Champlain is 109 miles long and runs from the Canadian border through Vermont and down to New York State.

Zarzynski has assembled an impressive number of nineteenth-century sightings. For example, a Captain Crum claimed to have seen 'Champ' from his boat in Bulwagga Bay in July 1819. He said it was almost 200 ft (60 m) long and held its head more than 15 ft (4.5 m) above the water. In August 1871 passengers on the steamer Curlew off Barber Point watched through a telescope as a huge and mysterious creature ploughed through the water 'at railroad speed'. Ten years later a steamboat pilot, Mr Warren Rockwell, took a pot shot at an 'animal' from the rear deck of his vessel near Swanton, Vermont. The creature made itself scarce. In 1880 a Dr Brigham of Bedford, Quebec, and a friend had spotted 'portions of a strange monster's body fully 20 ft long, head as large as a flour barrel, eyes with greenish tinge' in Missisquoi Bay.

In the 1960s Avril Trudeau and a friend reported seeing something with 'an ostrich- or duck-like face' off Maquam shore, Vermont. This is just one of many accounts from this century. Earlier, in 1951, Mrs Theresa Megargee shot at something 'more 30 ft rather than 20 ft long' opposite Valcour Island, New York. She was not convinced it was an unknown creature - it might have been an Atlantic sturgeon - but she let it have the full force of 'an old, octagon-barreled .30-40 Winchester rifle' just in case. She told Zarzynski: 'At the time, I thought my beautiful baby might one day be a tempting "hors d'oeuvre", and I was a protective young mother.' In August 1981 Claude Van Kleeck and others were in a boat in Bulwagga Bay when they apparently saw a creature 'not less than 50 ft long, at least as wide as a 55 gallon barrel', while in May 1984, Anna Gagne was treated to more than one sighting off Popasquash Island.

From his collection of eyewitness reports, Zarzynski has built up a composite picture of the monster:

Champ is approximately 15-30 feet in length ... It is dark or black in colour with some colour differentiations possibly due to age or sex. Champ has a snake-like head with two horns or ears, a mouth and teeth, and a possible mane or fringe/ridge on its head and neck. Due to the infrequency of land sightings, there is no indication as to any or the number of flippers, but several eyewitnesses have observed a tail off the body. Champ has the ability to dive and swim at considerable speeds and can hold its head erect for a lengthy time. Weight is difficult to estimate; however, based on size descriptions, a body weight of several tons wouldn't be out of reason.

Zarzynski's prize piece of evidence is a photograph purporting to show Champ, taken on 5 July 1977. Anthony and Sandra Mansi were at the lakeside near St Albans, Vermont, when, they claim, a dinosaur-like head popped out of the water. Anthony quickly passed a Kodak Instamatic to Sandra before rushing off to rescue her two children who were paddling nearby. Sandra managed to take one snapshot. The picture is puzzling. It apparently shows a hump and what Zarzynski terms 'an appendage', presumably either a neck and head or a tail.

Analysis by two scientists failed to resolve all the questions. Dr B. Roy Frieden of the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona, was satisfied that the photograph had not been tampered with and that it was neither a montage nor a super-imposition. Examination, using the latest technical methods, including computer enhancement, told him virtually nothing more. But he did have doubts.

A woman who had once lived near the lake pointed out a curious brownish streak in the picture. Was it, she wondered, a sand bar? Frieden took another look. 'I think it's a real detail in the picture,' he concluded. This had 'interesting implications', for, if the streak was a sand bar, 'then there is a distinct possibility that the object was put there by someone, either by the people who took the photo or by the people who were fooling them, because you could simply walk out on such a sand bar and tow the object behind you and hide behind it as you made it rise out of the water and so forth.'

Dr Paul LeBlond, an oceanographer from the University of British Columbia, offered a quite different interpretation. He looked carefully at the waves on the water shown in the photograph and wrote:

As waves travel into shallower water, they slow down, steepen, and eventually break. If the paler area corresponded to the presence of a shallow sand bank, one would expect the waves to be modified, and particularly to break more often there than elsewhere. This is not the case, and it seems more reasonable to attribute the different appearance of that part of the lake surface to reflection of light from the overhead clouds.

Resolution of the argument is hampered by the fact that the Mansis, who were strangers to the area, are unable to remember exactly where they were on the lakeside when the picture was taken.

In the meantime, the indefatigable Zarzynski continues in his quest, gathering further eyewitness testimony, probing the depths with sonar and underwater video, in the hope of establishing once and for all that the creature he has pursued for more than a decade really does exist.

Not everyone gives him much chance. Michel Meurger of the Institut Metapsychique International in Paris, and Claude Gagon, Professor of Philosophy at Montreal University, began to collect claimed sightings of monsters in Canadian lakes in 1981. Meurger told readers of the Fortean Times that, by February 1983, their work had revealed 'the surprising number of fifty monstrous lakes, and we had only covered a small part of our map!' A detailed examination of the eyewitness reports left the two investigators unconvinced. The descriptions given seemed so inconsistent:

In vain we seek coherence in the details; we have a choice of features for each part of the body - head, neck, back, tail and appendages. Depending upon our cryptozoological theories, we can recognize fashionable mammals, acceptable saurians, and, for the more conservative, comprehensible fishes. The only problem is that everything is available.

Even in small lakes at least four different types of monster had allegedly been spotted: in Saint-Francois, for example, there were the 'upturned boat' variety, the 'giant fish', the 'living trunk' and the 'horse-like head'. Comments Meurger:

The lake monsters themselves taunt us with elusiveness in their bodies as well as their habitats. Their forms melt away like jelly or the fauna of dreams. It seems impossible that four (or more) quite different and totally unknown types of large animal could co-exist in some Quebecian lakes, many of which are of only average size and depth. It is difficult to believe that such lakes could sustain a viable breeding population of each - even the resources of the giant Lake Champlain would not be sufficient!'

And he concludes: 'Certainly, my fieldwork in Quebec seems to indicate that it would be more promising to study the inhabitants on the shores of a lake than to probe its murky waters.'

The watchers on the banks of Loch Ness have now been under scrutiny for a full half-century, and they can have drawn little comfort from a book published to mark the anniversary in 1983. It bore the bold but simple title, The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Authors Ronald Binns and R.J. Bell are veterans of monster investigations in Scottish lochs, but the revelations in their book make it abundantly clear that they no longer believe in the existence of such a creature in Loch Ness.

In 220 pages, many of the accepted 'facts' about the monster are entertainingly challenged, and the book should certainly be read in full by anyone planning an expedition to Loch Ness. Here are a couple of examples of Binns' and Bell's well-argued 'demolition jobs':

The first concerns the idea, much loved by Nessie's 'biographers', that eyewitness accounts of monster sightings can be traced far back into history. Binns and Bell decided to go back to the original sources of these tales, and what they found convinced them that 'under scrutiny, the legends of Loch Ness all vanish into thin air'.

For example, a neolithic carved stone found near the loch is said to portray the monster, when in fact it carries a Pictish design common throughout Scotland. Frequently quoted references to sightings in 1520, 1771 and 1885 come from what the authors call 'an eccentric letter which appeared in The Scotsman on 20 October 1933'. They add that the letter-writer 'failed to supply either his address or any specific references to the chronicles or publications wherein his weird and wonderful stories could be found'.

References to a Loch Ness monster in the works of a Greek historian called Dio Cassius, who wrote a history of Rome in about A.D. 200, or to an article apparently containing a woodcut of the creature in the Atlanta Constitution for November 1896 turn out not to exist. Even St Columba's encounter with a 'water beast' in the River Ness, reported in a life of the saint written in A.D. 565, is persuasively dismissed on the grounds that the River Ness is some way from the loch and is separated from it by another lake; the 'water beast' is merely one of a cast of many obviously mythical creatures introduced into the story to show that Columba possessed magical powers.

The authors' second target is a man known to generations of monster-seekers. For decades, Alex Campbell was the water bailiff of Loch Ness, employed by the local Fisheries Board. A mesmeric raconteur and therefore much sought-after by television programme makers and journalists, Campbell claimed to have seen the monster no less than eighteen times, and Binns and Bell aptly dub him 'the self-appointed high priest of the loch's mysteries, always at hand with advice and inspiration for new devotees of his fabulous beast'.

They reveal that Campbell's role in the Loch Ness monster story has been under-estimated. Campbell was not only the water bailiff; he was also a part-time journalist, filing stories from the Fort Augustus end of the loch for the two local papers, the Inverness Courier and the Northern Chronicle. The first monster report to capture national attention - the sighting by Mr and Mrs John Mackay of Drumnadrochit in April 1933 - can be traced to his colourful pen.

Binns and Bell point out that it makes curious reading, for the article is strikingly lacking in journalistic objectivity. Indeed, it reads as though it has been written by someone determined to convince his readers that they should share his passionate belief in the existence of the monster.

The authors of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved also express surprise at the sheer number of Campbell's claimed sightings, their elaborately lurid detail, the fact that he was one of the very few who claimed to have seen Nessie at close range, and that there was a 'curious absence' of any objective evidence in the way of photographs to back up his tales. Most telling of all, however, are their revelations about Campbell's account of his 'best' sighting. It was a story he loved to tell, and it duly made the pages of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World:

I heard the sound of two trawlers coming through the canal from the West. Suddenly there was this upsurge of water right in front of the canal entrance. I was stunned. I shut my eyes three times to make sure I was not imagining things - the head and the huge humped body were perfectly clear. I knew right away that the creature was scared because of its behaviour. The head was twisting about frantically.

It was the thud, thud of the engines that was the reason for its upset. As soon as the bow of the first trawler came within my line of vision, that's when it was in its line of vision too, and it vanished out of sight, gone. I estimated the length of the body as 30 ft at least, the height of the head and neck above water level as 6 ft, and the skin was grey.

Campbell gave several different dates for this episode, which does not help his case, but far more damning is the fact that the loquacious water bailiff apparently explained it away in a letter to his employers in 1933. First, he describes what he saw:

I noticed a strange object on the surface about six hundred yards from where I stood. It seemed to be about 30 feet long, and what I took to be the head was fully 5 feet above the surface of the Loch. The creature, if such it was, and at the time I felt certain of it, seemed to be watching two drifters passing out of the Canal and into Loch Ness; and, whether it was due to imagination or not, I could have sworn that it kept turning its head and also its body very quickly, in much the same way as a cormorant does on rising to the surface. I saw this for fully a minute, then the object vanished as if it had sunk out of sight.

The explanation followed:

Last Friday I was watching the Loch at the same place and about the same time of day. The weather was almost identical - practically calm and the sun shining through a hazy kind of mist. In a short time something very like what I have described came into my line of vision and at roughly the same distance from where I stood.

But the light was improving all the time, and in a matter of seconds I discovered that what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants, and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings, as they often do. The other cormorants, which were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the Monster, as it has been described by various witnesses.

But the most important thing was, that owing to the uncertain light the bodies of the birds were magnified out of proportion to their proper size. This mirage-like effect I have often seen on Loch Ness, although not exactly in the same form as I have just described.

Does it matter that Campbell, in his enthusiasm for his beloved loch and the monster he had done so much to make famous, may have been guilty of the fault, known to many a journalist, of not letting the facts spoil a good story? It may do, for Campbell's first accounts conditioned visitors to the loch to expect to find evidence of a monster there. Commander Rupert Gould, a noted writer and broadcaster on mysterious phenomena and one of the original investigators of the monster reports in 1933, saw the danger: 'It is quite true that if you are eagerly on the look-out for something and expect to see it, you are very likely to be misled by anything bearing even a faint resemblance to the thing which you expect to see.'

So how do Binns and Bell interpret the hundreds of monster sightings? Since they believe that no single theory can explain them all, they offer quite a variety, among them swimming deer ('horned monsters'), otters (at least two of the rare sightings on land turn out to contain, they say, 'only a marginally exaggerated description of an otter'), floating tar barrels (left over from road improvements), tree trunks ('single-humped monsters'), and wakes of the many boats that criss-cross the loch. Other sightings they ascribe to mirages.

Alex Campbell was far from being the only person to have seen them: the authoritative six-volume Bathymetrical Survey of the Scottish Fresh-Water Lochs, published in 1910, devotes a special section to mirages seen at Loch Ness. The authors of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved add that the summer of 1933 was particularly fine - ideal mirage conditions.

Binns and Bell were not the only investigators at work. In April 1984 perhaps the most formidable of them all, Steuart Campbell of Edinburgh, published an article in the British Journal of Photography to mark - in a devastatingly back-handed way - the fiftieth anniversary of the taking of one of the most famous of all Loch Ness monster photographs. Known as 'the surgeon's picture', it had been snapped in April 1934 by a London gynaecologist called Robert Kenneth Wilson.

Wilson's story was that he had been driving along the lochside road early in the morning, when he noticed 'a considerable commotion on the surface, some distance out from the shore, perhaps two or three hundred yards out. When I watched it for perhaps a minute or so, something broke surface and I saw the head of some strange animal rising out of the water. I hurried to the car for my camera ...' He said he took four photographs, but two of them turned out to be blank when they were developed by the local chemist. One was bought by a newspaper, which published only the section showing the 'monster'.

Steuart Campbell managed to locate the full print, by then extremely tattered, and looked carefully at both pictures. Wilson had claimed that he had been 'some hundred feet above the loch' when the pictures were taken and that the 'monster' had been 'between 150 and 200 yards from the shore'. But using the prints, and calculating the angle from which the pictures must have been taken, Campbell calculated that Wilson had, in fact, been very much nearer the water than he had said. Campbell also showed that the 'monster' must be only 28 in (0.70 m) high, observing, 'That is a rather small monster!'

Finally, Campbell suggested that the photographs probably show an otter. In one - the frame usually published -its tail is visible; in the other, its head. Commented Campbell: 'It can hardly be an accident that this second picture, which might have revealed the true nature of the object, is out of focus.' There seemed, in short, to be a distinct element of hoax about the whole thing. This revealing analysis shook one of the main photographic pillars of support for the existence of the Loch Ness monster.

Campbell later moved on to a re-examination of the most famous piece of motion picture evidence, the so-called 'Dins-dale film'. This was taken on 23 April 1960 by Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer who was on a lone investigation of the monster. On the last morning of his trip, Dinsdale was in his car, rolling down the road near the Foyers Hotel, when he saw a puzzling object about three-quarters of a mile out in the loch.

It was large, dappled, and 'a distinct mahogany colour'. Dinsdale slammed on the brakes, jumped out and located the object with his binoculars. Now it looked like a living creature - with humps. He started to film, pausing only to rewind the motor of his clockwork cine camera. With only a few feet of film left, he made a desperate dash to the lochside in the hope of a closer shot, but, to his exasperation, by the time he got there the object had disappeared from view.

Shortly afterwards, with good scientific principles in mind, Dinsdale persuaded the owner of the Foyers Hotel to take a dinghy with an outboard motor on to the water and to follow the course taken by the mysterious object. The two sequences could then be compared.

Later, the film was analyzed by experts at JARIC (the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre), a leading British photographic interpretation unit. The centre's Report Number 66/1 set the seal on the mystery, for the experts opined that the object was not a boat - it had been moving too fast to have been a dinghy with an outboard motor, and was not painted in the bright colours of a power boat. The report's conclusion brought joy to monster-hunters: 'One can presumably rule out the idea that it is any sort of submarine vessel for various reasons which leaves the conclusion that it is probably an animate object.'

Some twenty years later, in the Photographic Journal, Steuart Campbell took another look at the report, and discovered what he took to be a crucial flaw. Dinsdale had said that he had not only paused during filming but had also had to stop so that he could wind up his camera. Campbell suggested that he had done this at least twice. This of course meant that the film did not show one continuous sequence. JARIC, however, appeared not to have taken this into account and, by mistakenly contracting the timescale, had reached the wrong conclusion about the speed at which the object had been travelling.

When the pauses between shots had been added to the overall timings, the object and the hotel-owner's dinghy, which Dinsdale had filmed for comparison, were found to have been moving at a similar rate. Campbell therefore arrived at this no-nonsense verdict: 'The only mystery about the film is why it should ever have been thought that it showed anything other than a boat, and why JARIC did not reach the right conclusion.'

The arguments, of course, will continue, as they have done now for the past half-century, in the pages of learned journals, in books, in the lochside pubs far into the chilly Highland nights, and on the shores of the great lake itself during long, hopeful vigils. The monster-hunters, assailed as they increasingly are by the carefully researched doubts of the sceptics, can bask in one certainty: the world wants Loch Ness to have a monster. While there is a chance, however faint, that such a creature may exist, the search is sure to go on.

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