Ever since man began navigating the world’s oceans, there have been tales of fantastic and often fearsome creatures crossing his path, or is it in fact man that is doing the path crossing? Is there even so much as a grain of truth in any of these tales or is it in fact a classic case of the exaggerating fisherman gone wild? Have the reports now been blown out of all proportion with so many tellings and retellings, or is it really a case of there being no smoke without fire and what could have invoked such awe and fear in the experienced sailors?
We know of many species in our oceans that may achieve great sizes but do we realise just exactly how big they can reach? Legend tells of a fearsome creature that has been seen by many sailors, and there are also reports of it capsizing ships, and that creature id the “Kraken,” the very mention of which could instil fear into the hearts of men. The Kraken was said to measure 100ft in length and was not afraid to take on a ship in battle, but how reliable are these reports?
For instance in 1874, the 150 ton British schooner, Pearl, was capsized in the Bay of Bengal by a creature with tentacles, and this was witnessed by the crew of the steamer Strathowen, but some reports say that the Strathowen rescued the crew of the Pearl while others say that the Pearl went down with all hands lost.
The prime candidate for the role of the Kraken is the giant squid but there is great debate as to whether or not a squid could reach such enormous sizes as those described in Kraken sightings.
The coast of Newfoundland has seen many giant squid washed up on its beaches but most of them are around 20ft to 30ft long, and it is thought that they may be confused by periodic changes in the cold Labrador current and mistakenly swim into the shallows away from the deeper waters of the North Atlantic.
Squid are known to have a strong attraction to the colour red and Newfoundland fishermen will often fish without the need for bait, instead using metal painted red which they hang near their hooks.
In the 1930s the 15,000 ton tanker Brunswick was in the South Seas off Samoa, travelling at 12 knots when a huge squid attacked her amidships, but it was unable to get a grip on her hull and was cut to pieces by her propeller. Her captain, Arne Gronningsaeter, reported that the ship was attacked twice more in a similar way, and this prompted suggestions that there was something about the colour, the shape or the speed of the Brunswick which caused squid to perhaps think that she was a whale.
Whales and squid are known to prey on one another and a good example of this is given by the British writer F.T. Bullen who, in the late nineteenth century, was on board the whaleship Cachelot when bursting out of the water came a whale and a squid locked together in mortal combat. The whale was locked in the tentacles of the squid, part of which was in the whale’s mouth, and locked together they disappeared below the surface again and were lost beneath the depths. Whales will often bear the scars of these titanic struggles in the form of huge sucker marks on their bodies, but the strongest evidence is to be found within the whale.
When a sperm whale is in its death throes it will vomit the entire contents of its stomach and often this will contain thousands of squid, both large and small, and Bullen describes finding pieces of tentacle as thick as a man’s body. It is reported that some pieces of squid seem to indicate a full sized squid of over 100ft in length, and scientists say that this is nothing compared to the creatures yet to be discovered.
Quite common in the fishing nets of the Maldives and the Adamans are giant manta rays measuring 20ft across, and of course there are unconfirmed reports of bigger rays still, and likewise, the largest documented squid is smaller than those of legend, but still measuring an immense 65ft in length. In 1878 a 55ft squid was seen by three fishermen in a boat from Thimble Tickle, Newfoundland, and they watched as it was struggling against the incoming tide. They hooked it with a barbed grapnel and, as the tide brought it further ashore, they secured it to a tree and then measured it. Its body measured 20ft and its tentacles 35ft with suckers measuring 4 inches in diameter, and it seemed that this was a smaller version of the legendary Kraken.
In comparison to this are crews of whaling boats who talk of hauling aboard sperm whales with sucker mark scars that measure 20 inches in diameter, proportionally suggesting a squid of 250ft long, surely not possible, but more in keeping with the scale of the Kraken of legend. Of course, the whales could have received these scars as infants and they then grew in size as the whale itself grew. The Kraken is thought to be a form of squid known as “Architeuthis” and with reports as precise and clear as the following, it is difficult not to believe it.
On board an admiralty trawler off the Maldives in the Indian Ocean was J.D. Starkey who, on his midnight to 4am graveyard watch, would lower a cluster of electric bulbs into the water which would attract shoals of fish and make them easy to catch, but one night all the fish vanished and he recalled:
“As I gazed, a circle of green light glowed in my illumination. This green unblinking orb, I suddenly realised, was an eye. Gradually I realised I was gazing at almost point blank range at a colossal squid – the body alone filled my view as far as my sight could penetrate. I am not squeamish, but that cold, malevolent, unblinking eye seemed to be looking directly at me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so coldly hypnotic and intelligent before or since.
I took my Quartermasters torch and shining it into the water I walked forward. I climbed the ladder to the Fo’c’s’le and shone the torch downwards. There in the pool of light were its tentacles.”
Starkey said that the tentacles were 2ft thick with the suction cups clearly visible. He then walked aft again, keeping the squid in view.
“This was not difficult as it was lying alongside the ship, quite still, except for a pulsing movement. As I approached the stern again where my bulb cluster was hanging, there was the body still. Every detail was visible – the valve through which the creature appeared to breather and the parrot-like beak. Gradually the truth dawned: I had walked the length of the ship, 175ft plus.”
Starkey had experience of most large sea creatures, and he says he had 15 minutes or more to look at this one “It seemed to swell as its valve opened fully, and without any visible effort it zoomed into the night.”
There is another well known military account of a sea monster, this time by a German officer during the First World War. On July 30th, 1915 the German u-boat U-28 torpedoed the British steamer Iberian and wreckage from the blast was thrown into the air. An officer of the Imperial German Navy on board the submarine gave the following account:
“A little later pieces of wreckage, and among them a gigantic sea animal, writhing and struggling wildly, were shot out of the water to a height of 60-100ft…. The animal sank out of sight after 10 or 15 seconds…. It was about 60ft long, like a crocodile in shape and had four limbs with powerful webbed feet and a long tail tapering to a point.”
This truly astounding account brings to mind one fundamental question, have there been any other accounts of dead sea monsters that have been examined closely? The answer is yes, there have, but have they brought us any closer to an answer?
In 1808 a creature washed up on Stronsay in the Orkneys which was 53ft long. It had a long neck, an undulating tail and six legs – unique in a vertebrate, but before a detailed examination could be made, the body was destroyed by severe storms. In June 1928 a huge rotten carcass was washed up on Prah Sands, Conrwall but it was not in a good condition and the head was missing. It measured 30ft long, had four small flippers and a tapering tail and, more importantly, it defied identification.
The Japanese organise squid fishing on an enormous scale, and the lights from their fishing fleets are clearly visible on satellite images and appear brighter than any other light source on earth. In 1977 one of the fleet, the Zuiyo-Maru, caught a rotting carcass in its nets off Christchurch, New Zealand. The smell from the unexpected catch was so foul that the crew feared that it might be contaminated so they threw it back, but before they did, they took a number of photographs of it and took a sample of its flesh. The photographs appear to show a creature not dissimilar to a plesiosaur in its appearance and the measurements and shape of the catch were supplied by the assistant production manager of the Taiyo Fisheries, Michihiko Yano.
The creature was 33ft long and had no dorsal fin and most thought that it was a badly decomposed basking shark which decompose in a deceiving manner. First of all the jaws, which are attached by just a small piece of flesh, will fall away leaving what looks like a small skull and a thin serpent like neck. Then as only the upper half of the tail fin carries the spine, the lower half rots away leaving the lower fins which look like legs, but Dr Fujio Yasuda of the Tokyo University of Fisheries, and one of the world’s leading marine biologists, disagreed. He noted that:
“In no known species attaining a large size is the trunk so elongated…. We are not able to find any known living fish species which agree with the animal trawled off New Zealand. If it is a species of shark, it may represent a species unknown to science.”
Obata and Tomada of the Tokyo National Science Museum agreed with Yasuda’s opinion, that it matched no shark, they said: “Whether the animal belongs to a group of sharks or whether it is a marine reptile, we do not know of any genera of species that agree with it.”
Another unidentified carcass was washed up on a beach in Gambia, West Africa on the night of 11th June, 1983. Fortunately, amateur naturalist Owen Burnham was on holiday there with his family and he heard about the creature that morning, and at 8:30, along with his brother, sister and father he went down to the beach to look at it. When they got there they found two African men trying to sever its head so that they could see the skull, but Burnham managed to persuade them to stop long enough for him to measure the creature.
The body was battered and distended with internal gas, it smelled foul but had not yet begun to decompose fully as it had not been dead for long. It was smooth skinned and had four flippers, one of which, a rear one, had been torn off. It was 15ft long, 5ft of which was its long, pointed tail whose cross section was triangular with rounded corners. It had a slightly domed forehead and what appeared to be two nostrils at the end of its 18 inch snout. Burnham at first thought that it was some sort of marine mammal (whale or dolphin) and he looked for a blowhole but couldn’t find one. The teeth were a similar shape to those of a barracuda and Burnham counted 80 in all, and they were evenly distributed, very sharp, but whiter and thicker than those of a barracuda. The flippers were solid and rounded, and there were no toes, claws or nails.
The two African men completed the task of removing its head, which took them around 20 minutes, and Burnham could now see that its vertebrae were very thick. Burnham, who was able to speak the local language, Mandinka, fluently and he asked the men what the animal was and they told him that it was “Kunthum Beleir” which translates as “Cutting Jaws” which is what the local fishermen call dolphins.
Burnham later described the creature to native fishermen in the hope that they could identify it but they had no idea what it was as they had never seen anything like it before. Burnham concluded that the two men at the beach had called it a dolphin because it looked more like that than anything else they had seen. He also “looked through encyclopaedias and every book I could lay hands on” to try and identify the creature and he found a photograph of a skull of the extinct Australian “Kronosaurus Queenslandicus” and, though the skull was similar, it was 10ft long, so it obviously wasn’t the same animal.
The detailed reports, measurements and sketches that Burnham made were studied by zoologist Dr. Karl Shuker in the mid 1980s and Shuker ruled out a lot of possibilities and came to the conclusion that the only creature that matched Burnham’s account had been extinct for 60 million years. One of the top contenders was the pliosaur, which was a family of short necked plesiosaurs that included the kronosaurus that Burnham had recognised but rejected. Another was a group of sea crocodiles called “Thalattosuchians” which had slender bodies and four paddle-like limbs. Thatlattosuchians had a dorsal fin but the carcass Burnham found may have lost its fin and would then look uncannily like the body on the beach. Burnham says of the whole incident:
“When I think of the Coelocanth, I don’t like to think what could be at the bottom of the seas. I’m not looking for a prehistoric animal, only trying to identify what was the strangest thing I’ll ever see. I couldn’t believe this creatures was lying in front of me. Even now I can remember every minute detail of it. To see such a thing was awesome.”
Not all carcasses that are washed up are unidentifiable, some of them are quite easily identified, but that is not to say that they are any less beyond belief. Dr. De Witt Webb of the Scientific and Historical Society went to St. Augustine Beach, Florida one day in 1896 to look at a carcass that had been washed up there in the winter tides. Webb found that he had to dissuade souvenir hunters and even a showman who wanted the body to use as an exhibit, but he was eventually able to examine the large, rotting corpse.
It had lodged itself in a shallow pit in the sand and after trying unsuccessfully to turn it over, he said that “It must weigh 6 0r 7 tons, for twelve men with a block and tackle ought to move anythign less.” So he later returned with four horses, six men and three sets of tackle, a rigger and a lot of heavy planking, all of which were used to move the body 40ft further up the beach.
Webb relayed his findings to Professor W.H. Dall of the National Museum in Washington in meticulous letters, and he wrote that the carcass was an invertebrate with no sign of a beak or other characteristics of a squid. The body was 21ft across and 7ft thick with skin 3.5 inches thick which was almost impervious to axe blows, but Webb did manage to carve large chunks off it to send to Washington, and these were examined, but dismissed as being part of a whale.
The Smithsonian Institute decided that it was not worth its while sending somebody all the way to Florida to view the creature as it could “scarcely afford the expense” but they did preserve some of the samples in bottles in their cellars where they remained for 75 years. After this time two scientists found and read about them, they were Joseph Gennaro and F.G. Wood, and they took the samples, foul-smelling but intact, and they prepared slides for histological analysis. Gennaro, Professor of Cellular Biology at New York University, concluded that the sunday roast sized samples were not whale blubber, and nor did the tissue have the characteristic pattern of a squid, and he was forced to conclude that the creature had been an octopus.
However, this had unthinkable implications, and they were that with a body of this size, the complete animal would have been over 200ft long. While Gennaro was reaching these conclusions, Wood was working on some of his own. He looked at the documents from 75 years earlier, and he found that as well as the body on the beach, there had also been stumps of arms beside the body. A local man named Wilson had seen these arms, he saw one lying to the west of the body that was around 35ft long, three arms lying to the south of the body, “One I measured over 32ft and from appearances attached to the body, although I did not dig quite to the body as it laid well down in the sand and I was very tired.”
The evidence suggests that there are, or were, octopuses ten times larger than the marine biologists are prepared to admit, and Wood went on to collect stories and accounts of octopuses well in excess of the text book maximum of 20ft. Accounts such as these clearly give rise to tales and rumours about the colossal Kraken among the seafaring fraternity, however, it wasn’t only the Kraken that was prevalent on the oceans but also other large creatures, some of them decidedly unusual.
On September 3rd, 1959, 120 miles off Bermuda, Joseph H. Bourassa, a man of twenty years experience at sea, saw something unlike anything he had ever seen before. He was on board the scalloper Noreen when he saw a strange animal.
“He had a large body and a small alligator-like head. The neck seemed to be medium size, matching the soize of the head. The body was very large, shaped somewhat like a seal. There was a mane of bristly hair or fur which ran down the middle of his head.
He would surface the upper part of his body and glide out of the water with the lower part of his body remaining submerged. The protion of his body which was visible measured about 40ft in length. We estimate his weight to be between 36 tons and 40 tons over all.
At no time did the whole body show. He stayed on the surface no longer than 40 seconds at a time. You could hear the heavy weight of his upper body when he dove below, creating a large splash and a subsequent wake. He surfaced four times in twenty minutes during which we tried to stay clear of him. The captain changed course to steer away from him and the queer fellow surfaced on our starboard beam.
Another peculiar thing about him was that when he’d surface he would turn his head looking towards us and it seemed to us he was playful and curious. Another point was that on the upper part of his body there were two flippers similar to those of a seal.”
While this one was apparently “playful and curious” the annals are not devoid of those which one would rather not meet face to face. The U.S. Navy frigate USS Stein pulled out of San Diego, California on a cruise across the equator to South American waters where she was to track submarines, but soon after crossing the meridian she began to experience problems with her sonar. The crew tried to effect a repair, but they could not eliminate the heavy “noise” that was drowning out all useful signals, so the captain ordered the ship to the dry dock at Long Beach naval Dockyard, California.
As the frigate sat in the dry dock the water drained away until finally the sonar dome was visible, and the watching crew could see that it had been battered and had huge holes and gouges in the rubber covering that protects it from weeds and barnacles. When the dock was totally dry, the officers climbed down the steps to inspect the damage and they found, embedded in the rubber, hundreds of pointed teeth, sharp and hollow, some of them an inch or more long, which had broken off whatever creature had attacked the dome.
Staff from the nearby Naval Oceans Systems Centre examined the teeth and the damage to the dome and, after several months, they came to the conclusion that the creature responsible “must have been extremely large and of a species still unknown to science.”
Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans analysed 587 sightings of sea monsters made between 1639 and 1964 in his book “In The Wake Of The Sea Serpents” and after discounting hoaxes, misidentifications and vague or incomplete reports, he was left with 358 sightings. These remaining sightings he then split into nine different categories, and they are:
Records of the sea serpents date back to centuries ago, for example, Aristotle wrote in his “Historia Animalium” of the fourth century BC:
“In Libya the serpent are very large. Mariners sailing along that coast have told how they have seen the bones of many oxen which, it was apparent to them, had been devoured by the serpents, and as their ships sailed on, the serpents came to attack them, some of them throwing themselves on a trireme and capsizing it.”
The coast of New England saw a number of sea serpent sightings between 1815 and 1823, and in 1815 an animal was seen moving rapidly through Gloucester Bay, its body was around 100ft long and seemed to have 30-40 humps, each the size of a barrel. Its head was shaped like a horse and was dark brown in colour. Two years later it was seen in the same place and was reported in the “Gloucester Telegraph” which said:
“On the 14th August the sea serpent was approached by a boat within 30ft, and on raising its head above water was greeted by a volley from the gun of an experienced sportsman. The creature turned directly toward the boat, as if meditating an attack, but it sank down…”
The following year it was seen again in Nahant, and an account was given by Samuel Cabot of Boston. He was standing on the crowded Nahant Beach when he noticed a number of boats heading for the shore. He wrote:
“My attention was suddenly arrested by an object emerging from the water at the distance of about 100 or 150 yards, which gave to my mind at the first glance, the idea of a horse’s head. It was elevated about two feet from the water, and he depressed it gradually to within six or eight inches as he moved along. His bunches appeared to me not altogether uniform in size. I felt persuaded by this examination that he could not be less than 80ft long.”
The following year it was seen again by dozens of holiday makers, one of whom looked at it through binoculars and said; “that it was neither a whale, nor a cetacean (water mammal). None of these gigantic animals has such an undulating back.” Another witness was the Reverend Cheever Finch who watched its “smooth rapid progress back and forth for half an hour.”
The American incidence of sea monsters than moved inland, and the next North American area to play host was British Columbia, where deep lakes are found in between the Pacific coast and the Rocky Mountains. In 1854 a half breed Indian man was taking a team of horses across Lake Okanagan when he was “seized by a giant hand which tried to pull me down into the water.” He struggled and managed to get away, but his horses were not so fortunate, and they were pulled under. The Indians know the creature responsible as “Naitaka” and the settlers know it as “Ogopogo.” From then on the monster of Lake Okanagan was seen regularly, and another man escaped while his horses were taken, and by the 1920s Ogopogo had become internationally renowned and was the subject of a London music hall ditty which went:
His Mother was an earwig,
His father was a whale
A little bit of head
And hardly any tail
And Ogopogo was his name.
It wasn’t too long before other American lakes began to boast monsters, the next being in 1860 when the Salt Lake City newspaper “The Desert News” reported the monster in Bear Lake which had been seen many times by the Shoshone Indians of Utah who referred to it as “The Beast Of The Storm Spirits” but their sighting were largely ignored. The report covered the sighting by a respected local man who was on the lake’s east shore when “he saw something in the lake which…. he thought to be a drowned person.” He did not see the body, only the head and what he supposed to be part of the neck. “It had ears or bunches on the side of its head nearly as big as a pint cup. The waves at times would dash over its head, when it would throw water from its mouth or nose.” The next day it was seen again, this time in motion, by a man and three women who said that it “swam much faster than a horse could run on land.”
Idaho’s Lake Payette produced a monster called “Slimy Slim” which was first seen in 1941. During July and August over thirty people, most of them boating on the seven mile long lake, saw it but they tended to keep quiet about it until the City Auditor of Boise, Idaho, Thomas L. Rogers, spoke up about his experience of seeing the monster. He told a reporter: “The serpent was about 50ft long and going five miles an hour with a sort of undulating movement. His head, which resembles that of a snub-nosed crocodile, was 8 inches above the water. I’d say he was about 35ft long by consideration.”
When this evidence brought the other witnesses forward, Slimy Slim became hot property and people flooded to Lake Payette in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. He was even featured in Time Magazine but the summer of 1941 had been his hey day and he was seldom seen again which meant that the focus of attention was once again switched to Lake Okanagan and Ogopogo.
Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, is a serpentine lake of around 80 miles long and never more than a couple of miles wide. It is also both deep and cold and, like Loch Ness, it was carved out of the bedrock by Ice Age glaciers. The shores are well populated and roads run very close to the lake’s edge. The Okanakane Indians called the monster “Na-Ha-Ha-Itkh” and whenever they had to cross the lake by canoe they would carry with them a dog or a chicken as a sacrificial offering in case Na-Ha-Ha-Itkh came too close for comfort. There is also a legend that the local Indians nicknamed him “The Remorseful One” because he was actually a man, a murderer, who had been turned into a serpent as punishment for his crimes.
The post-war sightings of Ogopogo and others of his ilk were the subject of a 1946 article in the New York Times under the heading “Normalcy?” which reported, not completely without irony, that following the insanity of World War Two, the world was returning to normal as monsters were once again being reported.
A captain in the Canadian Fishery Patrol described Ogopogo as like “a telegraph pole with a sheep’s head.” A Vancouver woman swimming in the lake saw him swim within a few hundred feet of her and she described it as “a head like a cow or horse that reared right out of the water,” and she went on to say: “The coils glistened like two huge wheels.… There were ragged edges (along its back) like a saw. It was so beautiful with the sun shining on it.” It came up three times, then submerged and disappeared.
Another good report appeared in the Vernon Advertiser on July 20th, 1959. It was reported and written by R.H. Millar who was the newspaper’s owner and publisher. He was returning from a cruise down the lake at 10mph when he noticed, in the boat’s wake, about 250ft away: “What appeared to be the serpent.” He looked at it through his binoculars and saw that it was indeed Ogopogo and that it was travelling much faster than his boat. He guessed it to be around 15-17 inches above the water. Millar described the creature as having “a snake-like head with a blunt nose, and there were five humps visible, which went smaller as he submerged, and they could not see a tail. The creature’s colour was a very dark green and it swam gracefully in a smooth motion.”
In 1976 Ed Fletcher from Vancouver was out on Lake Okanagan with his daughter Diane when a strange animal cut across his bows. He said: “If I had not shut the engine off I could have run him over or jumped on his back, for the boat drifted to within 15 or 30ft of him.” They were quite close to the shore at Gellatly Bay so they went to fetch their camera and they were also joined in the boat by Gary Slaughter of Kelowna, and once again Ogopogo surfaced.
Fletcher recounts: “I saw his whole length this time, about 70-75ft. I shut the engine off when we got near him and the boat coasted to within 50ft of him when I shot the first picture.” The three of them stayed in the boat for the next hour and watched, and followed Ogopogo. “He would submerge, swim at least two city blocks, then surface, and all the while we chased after him.” Fletcher would accelerate the boat toward the creature then cut the engine and coast as close as he could before taking a photograph of it.
The creature emerged over a dozen times and Fletcher got five pictures in all. They saw it stretched out and coiled up, and even coiled they estimated its length to be 40ft. Diane Fletcher described his skin as smooth and brownish. Like a whale’s with small ridges on its back, and both she and Gary Slaughter estimated its head to be 2ft or more in length, flattened like that of a snake with “two things standing up from the heal like the ears of a Doberman Pinscher.”
Tales of such sightings reached the press, and between April 1977 and August 1978 the “Kelowna Daily Courier” the “Penticyon Herald” and the “Vernon Daily News” carried a dozen reports of sightings including those of confirmed skeptics. One such skeptic was Harry Staines of Westbank who reported: “I did not believe it before, but we circled the thing in our boat, keeping it about a hundred yards away.” He described iot as looking like a black eel about 35ft long which swam with an up and down motion which left “quite a wake.”
In 1977 another witness also had a near collision with Ogopogo. Erin Neely was water skiing on Lake Okanagan and she almost ran over him. She was so shocked that she let go of the tow line, fainted and almost drowned.
Ogopogo has also been caught on film. In 1968 Art Folden of Chase, British Columbia was driving home one August evening when he reached a stretch of road on Highway 91 which was high above the lake at Penticton where he was roughly 300 yards from the water. As he looked down at the lake he could see an object in the water so he stopped the car in order to film it using his cine camera with a telephoto lens and some film left over from a day making home movies.
To help conserve film he would stop whenever the creature submerged. The film he shot has been examined closely and, using the trees in the foreground as a guide, most investigators agree that the object in the lake is 60ft long, or more, and moving at considerable speed. One person who has seen the film many times is Mrs Arlene B. Gaal and she is in no doubt about its authenticity and says that it shows an unusual “form of life in Lake Okanagan.”
Ogopogo is one of the best known of the American lake monsters but it is certainly not alone, some of the other lakes which are claimed to house monsters are Lake Walker in Nevada, Lake Folsom in California and Flathead Lake in Montana which has produced so many sightings that a company has offered a reward of $1,000 for anybody who catches a creature of any description, fish included, which is greater than 14ft in length.
Perhaps the best known, along with Lake Okanagan, is Lake Champlain which runs down from Quebec, Canada through Vermont and New York states, totalling 109 miles in length. It was named after Samuel Champlain who discovered it in 1609 and, ironically, he was also the first man to see the monster who was nicknamed “Champ.” During the 1870s he scared the cream of New York society as they were enjoying a steamboat ride, and at the turn of the century he had a $50,000 price tag put on his head by the showman P.T. Barnum. However, sightings of him are quite rare and this would seem to be true of most North American lake monsters when compared to their UK and Canadian counterparts, and even those off the coast of Newfoundland which were abundant in the early nineteenth century.
Champ, however, put in over two hundred appearances and is clearly not shy about who sees him. In 1883 the Sherriff of Clinton County, New York, Captain Nathan H. Mooney, was on the north west arm of the lake shore when he spotted a huge water serpent about 50 yards away from him. It rose five feet out of the water and its neck was around seven inches in diameter and curved like that “of a goose when about to take flight.”
Mooney also noticed white spots inside the creature’s mouth and he estimated its length to be around 25-30ft. Champ has been photographed, most famously in 1977 by Sandra Mansi of Connecticut, and her photograph showed what she described as a “dinosaur” with its head and neck six feet out of the water, and scientists who have examined it declare it to be a genuine original photograph, but they don’t know what of.
Another region with a strong and lengthy tradition of lake monsters is Scandinavia, and in 1860 an English clergyman and author, Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, heard talk of the monster said to inhabit some of the Icelandic lakes. The creature was known as the “Skrimsl” and Baring-Gould spoke about it to “educated and respectable” lawyers and farmers who spoke of one particular Skrimsl. They described it as being 50ft long and it was similar in appearance to the monster of Loch Ness, and he wrote “I should have been inclined to set the whole story down as a myth were it not for the fact that the accounts of all the witnesses tallied with remarkable minuteness, and the monster is said to have been seen not in one portion of the lake (The Lagarflot) only but at different points.”
Baring-Gould also learned of a similar creature in Norway (a slimy, grey-brown animal) that terrified the locals around Lake Suldal, who had reported that its head was as big as a rowing boat.
Sweden’s Lake Storsso has long been said to be home to a monster, and at the turn of the century a zoologist, Dr Peter Olsson spent several years analysing reports of sightings on the lake, and built up a picture of the monster, and said it was white maned and reddish in colour, and looked like a gigantic sea horse. Olsson regarded it as “the fastest and most fascinating of all lake dwellers” as it was said to be able to swim at great speeds of up to 45mph.
A Stockholm newspaper carried a report that three people had seen Lake Storsso’s monster when the “calm shining surface was broken by a giant snake-like object with three prickly dark humps” which was creating a wake as it swam parallel to the shore. Further sightings in 1965 prompted the local tourist board to use a colour picture of the monster in its brochures and to lay claim to a monster to rival that of Loch Ness.
Around 265 lakes world wide lay claim, or have laid claim, to a monster and 24 of them are in Scotland. They include Oich, Rannoch, Tay, Arkaig, Morar, Nahoon and Loch nan Dubhrachan on Skye. Like Newfoundland, the British coastline also has monster sightings, most famously the coast of Cornwall. In the mid 1970s a two humped, long necked sea monster made appearances in and around Falmouth Bay and it was christened “Morgawr” which is Cornish for “Sea Giant.”
In February 1976, a witness known only as Mary F managed to capture on film a creature that she estimated was no more than 15-18ft long as it played in the sea off Rosemullion:
“It looked like an elephant waving its trunk but the trunk was a long neck with a small head on the end, like a snake’s head. It had humps on the back which moved in a funny way. The colour was black or very dark brown, and the skin seemed to be like a sea lion’s…. The animal frightened me…. I do not like the way it moved when it was swimming.”
Much earlier than this though, the Victorians produced many sightings of mermaids and they held such mystery for the Victorians that many were faked by showmen to use as exhibits in their sideshows, even so, mermaid sightings continued well into the twentieth century, as late as 1947 on the Hebridean island of Muck, including one by the Mayoress of Peel.
Skeptics say that sightings of mermaids can easily be explained away as manatees, dugongs or even seals, but it was Britain’s lakes that would by far out shine her coastal waters.
The Irish lake, Lough Nahooin, on the west coast if Ireland seem far too small at 100 yards long give rise to a monster sighting but that’s exactly what it did. At 7am on February 2nd, 1968 farmer Stephen Coyne was walking along the shore of Lough Nahooin with his eight year old son and his dog when he noticed a black shape in the water. Thinking that it was his dog swimming he whistled for it to come back, but the dog came running from a different direction, and when it reached him, it began to bark at the shape in the lake. Coyne could now see that that the shape was an animal with a long neck and shiny black skin, and when it plunged its head into the water he could see two humps and a flat tail. He estimated that the creature was about 12ft in length. It seemed to hear the dog barking and began to swim towards the shore, and Coyne, in fear, ran to the water to scare it away, and it did turn and swim away.
Coyne’s son ran back to the farmhouse and brought his mother and the other four children and they all stood on the shore and watched the creature until it became too dark to see.
F.W. Holiday, an investigator who wrote a book on the Loch Ness Monster believed that both Nessie and Coyne’s monster were some kind of giant slug, as Coyne had described the monster as having no eyes and horns like those of a snail on top of its head. Holiday decided to try and catch the monster of Lough Nahooin, and he and his team were armed with nets, support bouys and heavy chain. They sailed around the lake and fired rifles into the water to try and coax the creature into their nets, but after several days without success they gave up.
Holiday however, still maintained that there was a monster in the lake despite one glaring argument against it. Lough Nahooin is only 100 yards long and is full of trout. A creature the size of a crocodile would deplete the food supply in a matter of weeks, but could the whole Coyne family have been mistaken? Holiday’s attempt at capturing the creature certainly wasn’t the only failed attempt and is positively innovative when compared to the attempt made by the Japanese.
Issie is a Japanese lake monster which surfaced near a resort favoured by honeymoon couples, and in 1978 a special observatory was built and opened by the reigning Miss Hibiscus. Watchers then proceeded to pour sake into the lake in the hope that Issue would become intoxicated and come to the surface.
It is almost as though the creatures will only put in an appearance when we are not ready for it and run and hide when we are and, like Ogopogo, the monster of Scotland’s Loch Morar (named Morag) has got in the way of people on the lake.
In August 1969 two fishermen, Macdonnell and Simpson, were in a motor cruiser on Loch Morar when they collided with a hump backed creature that was about 25ft long. Macdonnell tried to fend it off with an oar, but it snapped, so Simpson shot at it, but the creature just slowly sank back down beneath the surface.
While there is evidence for there being a monster in some of these lakes, their cases pale into insignificance when compared to that of Loch Ness. Loch Ness is Scotland’s longest loch at 24 miles but it is only up to a mile wide. It is also extremely deep as far as lakes go at up to 1,000ft in places, but because the loch is a receptacle for peat particles from forty five mountain streams and five rivers, visibility below a depth of around six feet is very low indeed, but despite the winter cold, the loch never freezes.
Monster sightings at Loch Ness date back to the sixth century when in AD 565 “Niseag” (to give it its gaelic name) was mentioned by the Irish Saint Columba who was trying to convert the heathen Picts, Scots and Northumbrians to Christianity. He came to Loch Ness from his monastery on the island of Iona, off Scotland’s west coast, and he found some of the local people burying a neighbour who had been mauled by the lake monster while swimming, and had died from his wounds.
One of Columba’s followers began swimming across the loch to retrieve a boat, when he was confronted by a “very odd looking beastie, something like a huge frog, only it was not a frog.” Columba intervened and, with arms raised, he hailed the beast. “Go thou no further nor touch the man. Go back at once!” and according to the legend the monster fled at the words, and many who heard of the incident were duly converted.
Sightings of Niseag remained sporadic until the early 1880s when they became more regular, and people as diverse as a stonemason, school children, a forester and, for some reason, the monster was always affectionately referred to as a she. There were sightings and newspaper reports in 1912, 1927 and 1930 but it was in 1933 that Nessie achieved world fame.
In this year, a new road was built on the loch’s north shore that ran between Fort William and Inverness, and it was said that the drilling, blasting, vibrations and falling boulders roused Nessie from the quiet depths and she clambered ashore, roaming through the bracken to hunt for food, and this would concur with a famous sighting in July 1933 by a Mr and Mrs Spicer.
The Spicers were driving home to London when they saw a strange creature emerging from the bracken, carrying what appeared to be a young animal in its mouth. The creature lurched across the road, through the undergrowth and into the lake with a splash. The whole thing lasted for only a few seconds but Mr Spicer was able to describe the creature to reporters. He said that it was like a “loathsome sight” that looked like “a huge snail with a long neck.” He said it had a long undulating neck, little thicker than an elephant’s trunk, a tiny head, thick body and four feet or flippers.
Around this time an A.A. Patrolman also saw Nessie, and he described her as “a thing with a number of humps above the water line. It had a small head and very slender neck” and a third sighting in 1933 produced a photograph.
Local resident Hugh Gray’s picture was featured in newspapers and magazines around the world, but it was far from convincing, and the object shown was said by some to be a floating tree trunk, a log or a piece of wood carelessly discarded by the construction workers on the new road.
Whatever it is, it got the attention of journalists the world over and they descended on Loch Ness in hope of getting a clearer picture of the monster, and the legend of Loch Ness was born.
Unusual in sightings was that Nessie was seen on land by the Spicers and, as if to add credence to their story, she was seen on land again, this time by a local veterinary surgeon, Arthur Grant in 1934. Grant was making his way home by motorbike when suddenly in the road ahead of him was something lit in the moonlight. He recalled:
“I had a splendid view. In fact I almost struck it with my motorbike. The body would be 15 or 20ft in length and very heavy. I distinctly saw two front flippers and there seemed to be two other flippers behind which it used to spring from the tail would be 5 to 6 feet long; the curious thing about the tail was that the end was rounded off, it did not come to a point.”
Since a sighting in February of 1960 by Mr Torquil Macleod, Nessie seems to have stuck to the water. The water Bailiff of Loch Ness, Alex Campbell, has had 18 encounters with Nessie in his years in the post, one decidedly spooky encounter took place one night when he was out on the lake in a boat with Constable John Fraser of Inverness looking for poachers. Suddenly they felt a great surge of water and Fraser said “What in the name of heaven is that?” to which Campbell replied “It’s Nessie.”
It was after midnight and the night was dark and moonless so it was as dark as it could get, and for ten minutes the boat pitched and rolled in the dark. At one point it was rocking so much that the two men feared the boat would capsize. As the swell subsided a little, they could hear a noise which was like that made by a horse after a canter, and they listened to the heavy panting as it moved around the boat before slowly fading away as the lake around them became calm again. Campbell added that “We finished our journey with no trouble but we had had a bad scare.” He also says that:
”My best sighting was in May 1954 right off the Abbey boathouse. That morning I was standing at the mouth of the river Hawick looking for what we call a run of salmon. 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 to be 30ft at least, the height of the head and neck above water level as 6ft, and the skin was grey.”
Campbell’s last sighting came shortly before his retirement when he was driving past Cherry Island on the road to Inverness.
“There was just one huge hump probably 8ft long and 4ft high. Then without any preliminary cavorting about it just shot off to the other side of the loch. I was staggered at the speed. I had a wonderful view of the body. It did not alter course, but kept up this great pace leaving a wash about 3ft high.”
Also in 1934 came one of, if not, the best known photographs ever taken of Nessie, and it is most often referred to as “The Surgeon’s Photo” as it was taken by a London gynaecologist, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson. One of Wilson’s hobbies was photographing trains and he was armed with his camera and a telephoto lens and he was driving south on his way home from a holiday in Scotland. He stopped at 7:30am to stretch his legs on a slope 200ft above the surface of Loch Ness when he saw the water begin to swirl, and saw “the head of some strange animal rising.” Wilson ran back to his car to get his camera and quickly took four pictures, one of which clearly showed something rising out of the water and it was featured in the London Daily Mail and in countless publications since.
The magazine “New Scientist” carried a report that the surgeon’s photo showed an elephant swimming with its trunk in the air, and many people put forward other possible explanations, including many claims that it was a hoax, but for six decades Wilson maintained that it was genuine. It was examined by many experts who had varying explanations for it, and it was debunked by two researchers, Alastair Boyd and David Martin, and finally, in his declining years, Wilson admitted that it was a hoax he had made using a small model glued to a toy submarine.
Pictures and reports such as these helped to increase Nessie’s popularity and, after 1933, we entered the busiest period of Nessie sightings because, not only did journalists come in search of a story, but also curious holiday makers helped to make the area one of Scotland’s most popular tourist spots. Naturally with the extra presence and attention, the number of sightings also increased, so much so that between the years 1933 and 1974, three thousand people claimed to have seen Nessie, and some claimed to have heard her make a cry of “anger and anguish” when almost run down by a car.
One reason levelled for the rise in the number of sightings after 1933, besides the increased level of potential witnesses, was the rewards offered for Nessie’s capture, including £20,000 from Bertrand Mills Circus, and a huge £1 million from the makers of Black and White Whisky. Even the House of Commons became involved.
On November 12th, 1933 an MP called for an official investigation to settle this “monster matter” once and for all, but the government spokesman replied that it was “more properly a matter for the private enterprise of scientists aided by the zeal of the press and photographers.” Ironically, this debate took place on the same day that Hugh Gray took his infamous photograph. As well as parliament, Nessie’s fame also reached the royal household, as the Duke of York (later King George VI) addressed the London Inverness Association and told them that:
“It’s fame has reached every part of the earth. It has entered the nurseries of this country. The other day I was in the nursery, and my young daughter, Margaret Rose (later Princess Margaret) aged 3, was looking at a fairy story picture book. She came across a picture of a dragon and described it to her mother: ‘Oh, look mummy, what a darling little Loch Ness Monster”’
Sightings continued and Nessie became almost a part of the British psyche, with chancing holiday makers getting in on the Nessie act, and making some worthwhile home movies. Peter and Gwen Smith of Luton, England were on holiday and one day Gwen was idly gazing across at Urquhart Castle hoping to shoot some film for the family movie, when:
“Suddenly this thing came vertically up out of the water, more or less where I was looking. I started filming and of course, I caught it just as it was going down. We stood for a minute and then it came up again and I started filming again, and then a third time.”
Her husband had also been watching and he added:
“The head rose up at least the height of a man. It was a good foot thick across the neck. The head seemed to me strangely rectangular. I watched it actually turn its head through ninety degrees as though it was looking directly at us or directly away from us. The last time it came right next to a youth who was in a boat. It came up very confidently as before, then suddenly, seemed to change its mind and withdrew very quickly as it perceived the boat. I am convinced if only because of the enormous length of the neck that it was no animal we are familiar with.”
A chance sighting of Nessie wasn’t good enough for everyone, and four firemen from Hemel Hempstead wanted to increase their chances of spotting her. For their 1975 trip to Loch Ness they built as 30ft long papier mache monster with an outboard motor, and they also had a recording of a mating call. The motorised monster held a two man crew as it sailed around the loch with the mating call sounding, but they found no sign of Nessie. Hardly surprising really, as the tape recording they were playing was the mating call of a bull walrus.
With hapless amateur attempts such as this, it is not surprising that no conclusive proof of Nessie’s existence was found, but nevertheless they did receive coverage and help to boost the reputation of Nessie, and predictably it was soon the turn of the experts to step in and try their luck.
A film shot of Nessie in 1960 was shown to specialists at the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre and, after studying and analysing the humped object moving through the water, they came to the conclusion that something existed in the loch. They decided that the film showed “probably an animate object, 12 to 16ft long, 3ft high and 6ft wide travelling at 12mph, but their verdict was not as conclusive as that of David James, a highland Laird and a member of Parliament.
James was part of a panel discussing the Loch Ness Monster on a television program for Grampian and Border Television in February 2nd, 1963, and he had kept a two week, round the clock, vigil on the loch’s shores as part of his role as the founder of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. He told viewers of the program that the watch had been a success as:
“On October 19th, 1962, in the middle of the afternoon, we had seven people at Temple Pier, and suddenly everyone was alerted by widespread activity among the salmon. After a few minutes the salmon started panicking – porpoising out in the middle of the loch – and immediately we were aware that there was an object following the salmon which was seen by practically everyone there for three or four minutes.”
At the end of the program the panel concluded:
“We find that there is some unidentified animate object in Loch Ness which, if it be mammal, reptile, fish or mollusc of any known order, is of such a size as to be worthy of careful scientific examination and identification. If it is not of a known order, it represents a challenge which is only capable of being answered by controlled investigation or carefully scientific principles.”
That need for controlled investigation was met in August 1968 by a team from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Birmingham University who set up sonar equipment on one of the piers on the loch, and directed the scan at the south east corner. A movie camera photographed the cathode display screen every ten seconds, but for days there was nothing to be seen, until 4:30pm on August 28th when there was a thirteen minute spell of activity from the depths.
“A large object rose rapidly from the floor of the loch at a range of 0.8km, its speed of ascent being about 100ft per minute. It was rising obliquely away from the sonar source at a velocity of about 6.5 knots, and was soon 1km away. Its upward movement had now slowed to about 60ft per minute. This object then changed direction to move toward the pier at about 9 knots, keeping constant depth. Finally, it plunged to the bottom at about 100ft per minute before rising again at 0.6km range, when it apparently moved out of the sonar beam and was lost to record. Meanwhile, a second large object had been detected at 0.5km from the pier which finally dived at the astonishing velocity of 450ft per minute. Both objects remained many feet below the surface.”
One of the team, Dr. H. Braithwaite, wrote a magazine article on the sonar equipment in which he stated that:
“The high rate of ascent and descent makes it seem very unlikely that the objects were shoals of fish, and fishery biologists we have consulted cannot suggest what fish they might be. It is a temptation to suppose they must be the fabulous Loch Ness monsters, now observed for the first time in their underwater activities.”
The ball was certainly rolling by now and other teams took up where this one had left off, and each came with technology in abundance. In 1970 Robert Rines of the Massachusetts Academy of Applied Science took a Klein Sidescan Sonar to the loch, and in the deeper water he detected several large moving objects, and later said:
“We wouldn’t have been here if we didn’t have the suspicion that there is something very large in this loch. My own view now, after having personal interviews with, I think highly reliable people, is that there is an amazing scientific discovery awaiting the world here in Loch Ness.”
The BBC got in on the act and sent a team equipped with a sonic depth finder to try to track Nessie down, and they did record a “mysterious object” at a depth of 12ft and they followed it to a depth of 60ft before it went out of range of the equipment. Experts from the British Museum and Zoological Society of London were asked for their opinions, and they blamed it on sturgeons, fin whales, sperm whales and, the old favourite with Nessie and Nessie photographs, a tree trunk.
The Americans again tried their luck in 1972 when an American doctor, along with Robert Rines through his Academy of Science, brought together American money and inventiveness when they used the Egerton Underwater Camera (favoured by Jacques Cousteau) and linked it to a Raytheon Sonar Scan. On the night of August 7th the equipment was picking up lots of fish which suddenly vanished off the screen and were replaced by a big, black trace, and one of the observers in the sonar boat went to fetch Rines who was in another boat. The man, Davies, said:
“I don’t mind telling you that it was a rather strange feeling, rowing across that pitch black water knowing that there was a very large animal just 30ft below. It was the sheer size of the echo trace that was frightening.”
The pictures were developed in America by Kodak and one of them became the famous “Flipper Picture” which Rines asserted showed the animal’s body and one flipper, but many failed to see the shot as being as significant as Rines made out. As an interesting aside, this photograph inspired the naturalist Sir Peter Scott to give Nessie a Latin name based on the rhomboid shape of the alleged flipper. He named her “Nessiteras Rhomboperyx” but this turned out to be a rather unfortunate name, as somebody noticed that the letters could be re-arranged to read “Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S.”
Was this really a coincidental anagram, part of a conspiracy or a jibe at Rines? Either way, the flipper shot failed to have the impact that Rines had hoped it would, and the same can be said of the shot that Rines claims to show the head and neck of Nessie taken in 1975. Rines felt that the creature had bumped against the underwater rig, but when the team returned to New York they found nothing on the main camera, so there was no rush to develop the film in the back up cameras. Then, one morning, Rines was woken by the telephone at 3am and it was his colleague Charlie Wycoff who said, “My goodness. We’ve got it.”
Rines went over to look at the picture but, much to the team’s consternation, the pictures were leaked before the press conference and were not very well received, with most people saying that it was a stretch of the imagination to say that it showed Nessie’s head and neck, and that it was just the murky, peaty water of the loch, and if you looked hard enough, you could picture any image you fancied, almost like looking at the clouds in the sky.
Rines however, was not dissuaded by this and said: “We’re going to stick to it until we get a definitive enough set of pictures for the so called experts to identify what these animals are and then I think the world will love us.”
It may be that the very equipment we are using to try and track these animals is what is scaring them away, sonar and motor boats etc, so to try and compound this, Rines isn’t going to wait for Nessie to come to him, he is training a pair of dolphins to pursue her.
Certainly not everyone is convinced by the evidence, and in the case of British Zoologist Dr. Maurice Burton it is quite the opposite. Burton began by believing in the Loch Ness Monster and did so for thirty years before he had a change of heart. This was brought about by an incident one sunday afternoon when almost the whole village of Foyers were standing, watching the monster swim in the loch, but Burton had earlier seen a small motor boat set out from the shore and had kept it in view in his binoculars and even taken photographs of it. He later questioned the villagers about what they had seen, and came to the conclusion that what they had been looking at was the same boat, but they were adamant that they had seen Nessie.
Burton now thinks that many sightings could be explained away as motor boats, especially those which are of the monster moving at speed. He says that others could be otters, and points out that an 8ft otter was caught on the Shetland Isles in the last century, but it is difficult to believe that hundreds and thousands of observers, many of them experienced naturalists and fishermen, could be mistaken as to identify an 8ft otter or a small motor boat for a 40ft plus monster with humps and a long neck. He adds that the wash from a vessel can pass up to ten minutes after the vessel itself has passed, and that seals could get in to the loch from the sea or that gaseous rubbish could float up from the bottom of the loch, but could sonar be deceived in the same way or, for that matter, the fish that swim suddenly away?
One of the strongest arguments against there being a monster in Loch Ness is the fact of the loch’s food chain, because despite the size of the loch, for the species to have survived, there would have to be a colony of creatures, and such a colony would deplete the food supply and starve, but it is a fact that there are fresh salmon in the loch. Mature salmon enter the loch from the sea via the River Ness, and more importantly they do so all year round, thus constantly replenishing the food supply.
It is thought that Nessie may also be able to make its way to the sea at will via underground tunnels, and film of underwater caverns would seem to support the possibility. Another idea is put forward by Loren Coleman who says that “There are enough reports of the larger loch creatures being sighted on land for us to assume they can cross from the seas to rivers and lochs.” However, if these monsters do move about, what are they? There would seem to be three possibilities:
Along with the plesiosaur was the shark-like ichthyosaurus, and in time they are believed to have been suppressed by the aggressive 40ft long mososaurus. The zeuglodon is also considered by many to be a prime candidate for the role of sea monster, and it is a prehistoric snake-like primitive whale, but the favourite still remains the plesiosaur.
The label “extinct” is not proof positive that a species has died out, but it reflects the currently accepted knowledge, and it is not unheard of for a species, long thought to be extinct, to turn up alive and well. It is not only possible but probable that there are undiscovered species living in the oceans, for example, in 1983 a new breed of porpoise, now named the “Cochito” was found in the Gulf of California. In 1966 a Hawaiian survey ship hauled up its anchor, and along with the anchor came a shark that was so different from other sharks that zoologists had to create an entire new family in order to accommodate it, and it became the third largest known species of its kind, and is now known as “Megamouth.”
As recently as 1983 a new species of killer whale, the Prudes Bay, peculiar to the Antarctic was discovered. More amazing than these though, was a discovery made in 1939 in a trawler’s net. There was a fish in the net which had first existed 300 million years ago and had been thought to have become extinct millions of years ago. That fish was the “Coelocanth” and further living examples were later found swimming in South African waters. As it swam, it was noticed that its fins didn’t move as a fish’s normally would but they actually moved in the order that a land animal would move its legs as it ran over land. It also only used its tail in order to escape from predators or to hunt prey and, like other ancient species, the coelocanth has a primitive, hollow backbone.
Is the coelocanth possible evidence of the prehistoric transition from sea to land animals in the evolutionary ladder? We know that the land dwelling dinosaurs died out very rapidly and fell prey to mass extinctions but we are not so certain about what befell the marine animals of the period, and if the coelocanth has survived through the eons, then how many other ancient species have survived along with it? Could they survive in their environment, or perhaps adapt to life at a greater depth where their environment would be far less likely to be affected by the changes occurring above the surface?
Only around a third of the planet’s surface is not covered by water, and if the polar ice caps were to melt, it is estimated that this would halve again. The Pacific Ocean alone is bigger than all of the land areas combined, and at its deepest point it is an amazing seven miles deep. This point is called the “Mariana Trench” which from top to bottom is taller than Mount Everest.
On January 23rd, 1960 Dr. Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant D. Walsh of the U.S. Navy broke the previous record for the deepest dive, which was 245ft by a fisherman in 1865, when they descended into the Mariana Trench to a depth of 35,802ft, and they described the bottom as a “waste of snuff-coloured ooze.”
As our oceans are so vast they could easily conceal many unknown creatures, and to give an idea of the scale of the matter, a trawler will sink its nets to a depth of only about 60ft, and until recently scientists believed that fish couldn’t live at great depths due to the enormous pressure and the total lack of light, but a research vessel has raised a fish from a depth of 26,000ft.
Despite the total lack of light at that depth, the fish still retained two small eyes (possible evidence that its species had once lived nearer to the surface) so it is certainly possible that ancient and prehistoric marine animals still live at great depths. We know that giant creatures, much larger than any today, filled the oceans, such as enormous crabs and giant sea serpents, and in 1930 Dr. Anton Brun caught an eel larva at a depth of 1,000ft that was 6ft long. Based on the assumption that it would mature to 18 times its larval length (though some eels attain 30 times their larval length) this meant that Brun’s eel would have matured to a length of 108ft.
This is fine for a huge sea creature, but what about a monster in a lake? If a prehistoric life form could have survived until the last ice age, then it could possibly have found itself stranded in a lake as the glaciers retreated and the Great Glen fault which divides the Scottish highlands opened up to the sea. This would mean that they would have had to adapt to living in fresh water in a relatively short period of time (in evolutionary terms) but that is by no means impossible.
The argument against Nessie being a plesiosaur is that she seems to spend so little time on the surface. She would have to live in the top 125ft or so, as there would be little or no food below that depth, and the water temperature would be too low for a cold blooded reptile. Also, reptiles have lungs and not gills, so it would have breath fresh air, and in order to do this it would have to surface at regular intervals.
To reproduce it would have to come ashore and lay eggs, and though it has been seen ashore, it has not been seen laying eggs and no traces of nests have been found, or the young making their way into the water. Another argument against Nessie being a reptile can be proven by simple mathematics.
For Nessie to have survived through the years there would have to be a colony of a bare minimum of three creatures at any one time. The loch has a surface area of 45 square metres, that is 15 square metres for each creature. The surface area of the Mediterranean is 20,000 times more at 900,000 square metres and it contains the rare and endangered monk seal, of which there are between 300 and 600, at best one for every 1,500 square metres of water. In other words, 100 times the area for the Loch Ness Monster, yet the monk seals are seen frequently.
Like animals on land, we clearly haven’t identified every species in the sea, so whether or not prehistoric creatures are still surviving, there are unidentified creatures in the oceans, and these would obviously be mistaken for something else or something unusual, and with the vastness of their habitat, there are ample places in which to conceal themselves.
Also similar to land animals, and even Bigfoot, is the fact that a dead or dying sea creature will, more often that not, apart from the few carcasses that are washed up, not even manage to sink to the bottom before one predator or another will get hold of them, and from sharks downwards, the animals in the sea will make an excellent job of disposing of the body, so there is very little, if any, remains to be found by humans, and probably none at all in the case of non-vertebrates.
This is all well and good when you are considering an ocean which takes up such a huge part of the earth’s surface, but what about when we are considering a land locked lake, especially one so small as Ireland’s Lough Nahooin at 100 yards long? It is very difficult to believe that every lake monster claimant is a genuine one, but there are some which are worthy of serious investigation, such as Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan, Champ in Lake Champlain and of course Nessie in Loch Ness.
For a lake to support a monster it must clearly have a well maintained food chain, such as the salmon supply in Loch Ness, and especially if the lake is to support a monster for any length of time, and if reports are to be believed, since AD 565. This is one of those phenomena that are, at first glance, totally unbelievable, but once you begin to look at the evidence you become less and less sure, and the alleged facts of a lake monster sighting can become almost humorous when the case is of the scale as Loch Ness and has become almost a part of the psyche and certainly become a great tourist attraction.
Once a case achieves this kind of status, the people of the area then find themselves with a vested interest, and possibly from that point onward, the case must be taken with a pinch of salt, no matter how convincing the evidence might be. There is another possibility however, that is far more deep rooted than a mere trip to a lakeside in the hope of catching a glimpse of the monster within, and that is human nature. It is almost as if man has some inherent need to have something to fear, be it belief in Gods and Deities, catastrophes such as calamitous floods or creatures such as fire breathing dragons or monsters in seas and lakes.
Whatever the reason for this and, after considering all of the evidence on both sides, it seems that there is only one conclusion that one can realistically come to in the case of sea and lake monsters, and that is summed up perfectly by Arthur C. Clarke. He said that he “could believe a dinosaur in, say, the Matto Gross, but not in Central Park or Kensington Gardens” and that he wouldn’t take lake monsters seriously if it weren’t for Loch Ness. “The evidence for something in the Loch is overwhelming; whether it is an animal new to science is another matter. If you want my personal opinion - on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I believe in Nessie.”
We know of many species in our oceans that may achieve great sizes but do we realise just exactly how big they can reach? Legend tells of a fearsome creature that has been seen by many sailors, and there are also reports of it capsizing ships, and that creature id the “Kraken,” the very mention of which could instil fear into the hearts of men. The Kraken was said to measure 100ft in length and was not afraid to take on a ship in battle, but how reliable are these reports?
For instance in 1874, the 150 ton British schooner, Pearl, was capsized in the Bay of Bengal by a creature with tentacles, and this was witnessed by the crew of the steamer Strathowen, but some reports say that the Strathowen rescued the crew of the Pearl while others say that the Pearl went down with all hands lost.
The prime candidate for the role of the Kraken is the giant squid but there is great debate as to whether or not a squid could reach such enormous sizes as those described in Kraken sightings.
The coast of Newfoundland has seen many giant squid washed up on its beaches but most of them are around 20ft to 30ft long, and it is thought that they may be confused by periodic changes in the cold Labrador current and mistakenly swim into the shallows away from the deeper waters of the North Atlantic.
Squid are known to have a strong attraction to the colour red and Newfoundland fishermen will often fish without the need for bait, instead using metal painted red which they hang near their hooks.
In the 1930s the 15,000 ton tanker Brunswick was in the South Seas off Samoa, travelling at 12 knots when a huge squid attacked her amidships, but it was unable to get a grip on her hull and was cut to pieces by her propeller. Her captain, Arne Gronningsaeter, reported that the ship was attacked twice more in a similar way, and this prompted suggestions that there was something about the colour, the shape or the speed of the Brunswick which caused squid to perhaps think that she was a whale.
Whales and squid are known to prey on one another and a good example of this is given by the British writer F.T. Bullen who, in the late nineteenth century, was on board the whaleship Cachelot when bursting out of the water came a whale and a squid locked together in mortal combat. The whale was locked in the tentacles of the squid, part of which was in the whale’s mouth, and locked together they disappeared below the surface again and were lost beneath the depths. Whales will often bear the scars of these titanic struggles in the form of huge sucker marks on their bodies, but the strongest evidence is to be found within the whale.
When a sperm whale is in its death throes it will vomit the entire contents of its stomach and often this will contain thousands of squid, both large and small, and Bullen describes finding pieces of tentacle as thick as a man’s body. It is reported that some pieces of squid seem to indicate a full sized squid of over 100ft in length, and scientists say that this is nothing compared to the creatures yet to be discovered.
Quite common in the fishing nets of the Maldives and the Adamans are giant manta rays measuring 20ft across, and of course there are unconfirmed reports of bigger rays still, and likewise, the largest documented squid is smaller than those of legend, but still measuring an immense 65ft in length. In 1878 a 55ft squid was seen by three fishermen in a boat from Thimble Tickle, Newfoundland, and they watched as it was struggling against the incoming tide. They hooked it with a barbed grapnel and, as the tide brought it further ashore, they secured it to a tree and then measured it. Its body measured 20ft and its tentacles 35ft with suckers measuring 4 inches in diameter, and it seemed that this was a smaller version of the legendary Kraken.
In comparison to this are crews of whaling boats who talk of hauling aboard sperm whales with sucker mark scars that measure 20 inches in diameter, proportionally suggesting a squid of 250ft long, surely not possible, but more in keeping with the scale of the Kraken of legend. Of course, the whales could have received these scars as infants and they then grew in size as the whale itself grew. The Kraken is thought to be a form of squid known as “Architeuthis” and with reports as precise and clear as the following, it is difficult not to believe it.
On board an admiralty trawler off the Maldives in the Indian Ocean was J.D. Starkey who, on his midnight to 4am graveyard watch, would lower a cluster of electric bulbs into the water which would attract shoals of fish and make them easy to catch, but one night all the fish vanished and he recalled:
“As I gazed, a circle of green light glowed in my illumination. This green unblinking orb, I suddenly realised, was an eye. Gradually I realised I was gazing at almost point blank range at a colossal squid – the body alone filled my view as far as my sight could penetrate. I am not squeamish, but that cold, malevolent, unblinking eye seemed to be looking directly at me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so coldly hypnotic and intelligent before or since.
I took my Quartermasters torch and shining it into the water I walked forward. I climbed the ladder to the Fo’c’s’le and shone the torch downwards. There in the pool of light were its tentacles.”
Starkey said that the tentacles were 2ft thick with the suction cups clearly visible. He then walked aft again, keeping the squid in view.
“This was not difficult as it was lying alongside the ship, quite still, except for a pulsing movement. As I approached the stern again where my bulb cluster was hanging, there was the body still. Every detail was visible – the valve through which the creature appeared to breather and the parrot-like beak. Gradually the truth dawned: I had walked the length of the ship, 175ft plus.”
Starkey had experience of most large sea creatures, and he says he had 15 minutes or more to look at this one “It seemed to swell as its valve opened fully, and without any visible effort it zoomed into the night.”
There is another well known military account of a sea monster, this time by a German officer during the First World War. On July 30th, 1915 the German u-boat U-28 torpedoed the British steamer Iberian and wreckage from the blast was thrown into the air. An officer of the Imperial German Navy on board the submarine gave the following account:
“A little later pieces of wreckage, and among them a gigantic sea animal, writhing and struggling wildly, were shot out of the water to a height of 60-100ft…. The animal sank out of sight after 10 or 15 seconds…. It was about 60ft long, like a crocodile in shape and had four limbs with powerful webbed feet and a long tail tapering to a point.”
This truly astounding account brings to mind one fundamental question, have there been any other accounts of dead sea monsters that have been examined closely? The answer is yes, there have, but have they brought us any closer to an answer?
In 1808 a creature washed up on Stronsay in the Orkneys which was 53ft long. It had a long neck, an undulating tail and six legs – unique in a vertebrate, but before a detailed examination could be made, the body was destroyed by severe storms. In June 1928 a huge rotten carcass was washed up on Prah Sands, Conrwall but it was not in a good condition and the head was missing. It measured 30ft long, had four small flippers and a tapering tail and, more importantly, it defied identification.
The Japanese organise squid fishing on an enormous scale, and the lights from their fishing fleets are clearly visible on satellite images and appear brighter than any other light source on earth. In 1977 one of the fleet, the Zuiyo-Maru, caught a rotting carcass in its nets off Christchurch, New Zealand. The smell from the unexpected catch was so foul that the crew feared that it might be contaminated so they threw it back, but before they did, they took a number of photographs of it and took a sample of its flesh. The photographs appear to show a creature not dissimilar to a plesiosaur in its appearance and the measurements and shape of the catch were supplied by the assistant production manager of the Taiyo Fisheries, Michihiko Yano.
The creature was 33ft long and had no dorsal fin and most thought that it was a badly decomposed basking shark which decompose in a deceiving manner. First of all the jaws, which are attached by just a small piece of flesh, will fall away leaving what looks like a small skull and a thin serpent like neck. Then as only the upper half of the tail fin carries the spine, the lower half rots away leaving the lower fins which look like legs, but Dr Fujio Yasuda of the Tokyo University of Fisheries, and one of the world’s leading marine biologists, disagreed. He noted that:
“In no known species attaining a large size is the trunk so elongated…. We are not able to find any known living fish species which agree with the animal trawled off New Zealand. If it is a species of shark, it may represent a species unknown to science.”
Obata and Tomada of the Tokyo National Science Museum agreed with Yasuda’s opinion, that it matched no shark, they said: “Whether the animal belongs to a group of sharks or whether it is a marine reptile, we do not know of any genera of species that agree with it.”
Another unidentified carcass was washed up on a beach in Gambia, West Africa on the night of 11th June, 1983. Fortunately, amateur naturalist Owen Burnham was on holiday there with his family and he heard about the creature that morning, and at 8:30, along with his brother, sister and father he went down to the beach to look at it. When they got there they found two African men trying to sever its head so that they could see the skull, but Burnham managed to persuade them to stop long enough for him to measure the creature.
The body was battered and distended with internal gas, it smelled foul but had not yet begun to decompose fully as it had not been dead for long. It was smooth skinned and had four flippers, one of which, a rear one, had been torn off. It was 15ft long, 5ft of which was its long, pointed tail whose cross section was triangular with rounded corners. It had a slightly domed forehead and what appeared to be two nostrils at the end of its 18 inch snout. Burnham at first thought that it was some sort of marine mammal (whale or dolphin) and he looked for a blowhole but couldn’t find one. The teeth were a similar shape to those of a barracuda and Burnham counted 80 in all, and they were evenly distributed, very sharp, but whiter and thicker than those of a barracuda. The flippers were solid and rounded, and there were no toes, claws or nails.
The two African men completed the task of removing its head, which took them around 20 minutes, and Burnham could now see that its vertebrae were very thick. Burnham, who was able to speak the local language, Mandinka, fluently and he asked the men what the animal was and they told him that it was “Kunthum Beleir” which translates as “Cutting Jaws” which is what the local fishermen call dolphins.
Burnham later described the creature to native fishermen in the hope that they could identify it but they had no idea what it was as they had never seen anything like it before. Burnham concluded that the two men at the beach had called it a dolphin because it looked more like that than anything else they had seen. He also “looked through encyclopaedias and every book I could lay hands on” to try and identify the creature and he found a photograph of a skull of the extinct Australian “Kronosaurus Queenslandicus” and, though the skull was similar, it was 10ft long, so it obviously wasn’t the same animal.
The detailed reports, measurements and sketches that Burnham made were studied by zoologist Dr. Karl Shuker in the mid 1980s and Shuker ruled out a lot of possibilities and came to the conclusion that the only creature that matched Burnham’s account had been extinct for 60 million years. One of the top contenders was the pliosaur, which was a family of short necked plesiosaurs that included the kronosaurus that Burnham had recognised but rejected. Another was a group of sea crocodiles called “Thalattosuchians” which had slender bodies and four paddle-like limbs. Thatlattosuchians had a dorsal fin but the carcass Burnham found may have lost its fin and would then look uncannily like the body on the beach. Burnham says of the whole incident:
“When I think of the Coelocanth, I don’t like to think what could be at the bottom of the seas. I’m not looking for a prehistoric animal, only trying to identify what was the strangest thing I’ll ever see. I couldn’t believe this creatures was lying in front of me. Even now I can remember every minute detail of it. To see such a thing was awesome.”
Not all carcasses that are washed up are unidentifiable, some of them are quite easily identified, but that is not to say that they are any less beyond belief. Dr. De Witt Webb of the Scientific and Historical Society went to St. Augustine Beach, Florida one day in 1896 to look at a carcass that had been washed up there in the winter tides. Webb found that he had to dissuade souvenir hunters and even a showman who wanted the body to use as an exhibit, but he was eventually able to examine the large, rotting corpse.
It had lodged itself in a shallow pit in the sand and after trying unsuccessfully to turn it over, he said that “It must weigh 6 0r 7 tons, for twelve men with a block and tackle ought to move anythign less.” So he later returned with four horses, six men and three sets of tackle, a rigger and a lot of heavy planking, all of which were used to move the body 40ft further up the beach.
Webb relayed his findings to Professor W.H. Dall of the National Museum in Washington in meticulous letters, and he wrote that the carcass was an invertebrate with no sign of a beak or other characteristics of a squid. The body was 21ft across and 7ft thick with skin 3.5 inches thick which was almost impervious to axe blows, but Webb did manage to carve large chunks off it to send to Washington, and these were examined, but dismissed as being part of a whale.
The Smithsonian Institute decided that it was not worth its while sending somebody all the way to Florida to view the creature as it could “scarcely afford the expense” but they did preserve some of the samples in bottles in their cellars where they remained for 75 years. After this time two scientists found and read about them, they were Joseph Gennaro and F.G. Wood, and they took the samples, foul-smelling but intact, and they prepared slides for histological analysis. Gennaro, Professor of Cellular Biology at New York University, concluded that the sunday roast sized samples were not whale blubber, and nor did the tissue have the characteristic pattern of a squid, and he was forced to conclude that the creature had been an octopus.
However, this had unthinkable implications, and they were that with a body of this size, the complete animal would have been over 200ft long. While Gennaro was reaching these conclusions, Wood was working on some of his own. He looked at the documents from 75 years earlier, and he found that as well as the body on the beach, there had also been stumps of arms beside the body. A local man named Wilson had seen these arms, he saw one lying to the west of the body that was around 35ft long, three arms lying to the south of the body, “One I measured over 32ft and from appearances attached to the body, although I did not dig quite to the body as it laid well down in the sand and I was very tired.”
The evidence suggests that there are, or were, octopuses ten times larger than the marine biologists are prepared to admit, and Wood went on to collect stories and accounts of octopuses well in excess of the text book maximum of 20ft. Accounts such as these clearly give rise to tales and rumours about the colossal Kraken among the seafaring fraternity, however, it wasn’t only the Kraken that was prevalent on the oceans but also other large creatures, some of them decidedly unusual.
On September 3rd, 1959, 120 miles off Bermuda, Joseph H. Bourassa, a man of twenty years experience at sea, saw something unlike anything he had ever seen before. He was on board the scalloper Noreen when he saw a strange animal.
“He had a large body and a small alligator-like head. The neck seemed to be medium size, matching the soize of the head. The body was very large, shaped somewhat like a seal. There was a mane of bristly hair or fur which ran down the middle of his head.
He would surface the upper part of his body and glide out of the water with the lower part of his body remaining submerged. The protion of his body which was visible measured about 40ft in length. We estimate his weight to be between 36 tons and 40 tons over all.
At no time did the whole body show. He stayed on the surface no longer than 40 seconds at a time. You could hear the heavy weight of his upper body when he dove below, creating a large splash and a subsequent wake. He surfaced four times in twenty minutes during which we tried to stay clear of him. The captain changed course to steer away from him and the queer fellow surfaced on our starboard beam.
Another peculiar thing about him was that when he’d surface he would turn his head looking towards us and it seemed to us he was playful and curious. Another point was that on the upper part of his body there were two flippers similar to those of a seal.”
While this one was apparently “playful and curious” the annals are not devoid of those which one would rather not meet face to face. The U.S. Navy frigate USS Stein pulled out of San Diego, California on a cruise across the equator to South American waters where she was to track submarines, but soon after crossing the meridian she began to experience problems with her sonar. The crew tried to effect a repair, but they could not eliminate the heavy “noise” that was drowning out all useful signals, so the captain ordered the ship to the dry dock at Long Beach naval Dockyard, California.
As the frigate sat in the dry dock the water drained away until finally the sonar dome was visible, and the watching crew could see that it had been battered and had huge holes and gouges in the rubber covering that protects it from weeds and barnacles. When the dock was totally dry, the officers climbed down the steps to inspect the damage and they found, embedded in the rubber, hundreds of pointed teeth, sharp and hollow, some of them an inch or more long, which had broken off whatever creature had attacked the dome.
Staff from the nearby Naval Oceans Systems Centre examined the teeth and the damage to the dome and, after several months, they came to the conclusion that the creature responsible “must have been extremely large and of a species still unknown to science.”
Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans analysed 587 sightings of sea monsters made between 1639 and 1964 in his book “In The Wake Of The Sea Serpents” and after discounting hoaxes, misidentifications and vague or incomplete reports, he was left with 358 sightings. These remaining sightings he then split into nine different categories, and they are:
- Long Necked Sea Serpent (the most frequently reported) - With four flippers, a cigar shaped body, a capacity to swim at high speed and which grow to between 15 and 65ft long.
- Marine Saurians – Seen only in tropical waters in mid ocean and which may reach 60ft in length;
- Merhorses
- Many Humped Monsters
- Super Otters – Not reported since 1848 and possibly extinct
- Many Finned Monsters
- Super Eels
- Fathers-Of-All-The Turtles
- Yellow Bellies – May be an as yet unidentified fish, possibly a shark
Records of the sea serpents date back to centuries ago, for example, Aristotle wrote in his “Historia Animalium” of the fourth century BC:
“In Libya the serpent are very large. Mariners sailing along that coast have told how they have seen the bones of many oxen which, it was apparent to them, had been devoured by the serpents, and as their ships sailed on, the serpents came to attack them, some of them throwing themselves on a trireme and capsizing it.”
The coast of New England saw a number of sea serpent sightings between 1815 and 1823, and in 1815 an animal was seen moving rapidly through Gloucester Bay, its body was around 100ft long and seemed to have 30-40 humps, each the size of a barrel. Its head was shaped like a horse and was dark brown in colour. Two years later it was seen in the same place and was reported in the “Gloucester Telegraph” which said:
“On the 14th August the sea serpent was approached by a boat within 30ft, and on raising its head above water was greeted by a volley from the gun of an experienced sportsman. The creature turned directly toward the boat, as if meditating an attack, but it sank down…”
The following year it was seen again in Nahant, and an account was given by Samuel Cabot of Boston. He was standing on the crowded Nahant Beach when he noticed a number of boats heading for the shore. He wrote:
“My attention was suddenly arrested by an object emerging from the water at the distance of about 100 or 150 yards, which gave to my mind at the first glance, the idea of a horse’s head. It was elevated about two feet from the water, and he depressed it gradually to within six or eight inches as he moved along. His bunches appeared to me not altogether uniform in size. I felt persuaded by this examination that he could not be less than 80ft long.”
The following year it was seen again by dozens of holiday makers, one of whom looked at it through binoculars and said; “that it was neither a whale, nor a cetacean (water mammal). None of these gigantic animals has such an undulating back.” Another witness was the Reverend Cheever Finch who watched its “smooth rapid progress back and forth for half an hour.”
The American incidence of sea monsters than moved inland, and the next North American area to play host was British Columbia, where deep lakes are found in between the Pacific coast and the Rocky Mountains. In 1854 a half breed Indian man was taking a team of horses across Lake Okanagan when he was “seized by a giant hand which tried to pull me down into the water.” He struggled and managed to get away, but his horses were not so fortunate, and they were pulled under. The Indians know the creature responsible as “Naitaka” and the settlers know it as “Ogopogo.” From then on the monster of Lake Okanagan was seen regularly, and another man escaped while his horses were taken, and by the 1920s Ogopogo had become internationally renowned and was the subject of a London music hall ditty which went:
His Mother was an earwig,
His father was a whale
A little bit of head
And hardly any tail
And Ogopogo was his name.
It wasn’t too long before other American lakes began to boast monsters, the next being in 1860 when the Salt Lake City newspaper “The Desert News” reported the monster in Bear Lake which had been seen many times by the Shoshone Indians of Utah who referred to it as “The Beast Of The Storm Spirits” but their sighting were largely ignored. The report covered the sighting by a respected local man who was on the lake’s east shore when “he saw something in the lake which…. he thought to be a drowned person.” He did not see the body, only the head and what he supposed to be part of the neck. “It had ears or bunches on the side of its head nearly as big as a pint cup. The waves at times would dash over its head, when it would throw water from its mouth or nose.” The next day it was seen again, this time in motion, by a man and three women who said that it “swam much faster than a horse could run on land.”
Idaho’s Lake Payette produced a monster called “Slimy Slim” which was first seen in 1941. During July and August over thirty people, most of them boating on the seven mile long lake, saw it but they tended to keep quiet about it until the City Auditor of Boise, Idaho, Thomas L. Rogers, spoke up about his experience of seeing the monster. He told a reporter: “The serpent was about 50ft long and going five miles an hour with a sort of undulating movement. His head, which resembles that of a snub-nosed crocodile, was 8 inches above the water. I’d say he was about 35ft long by consideration.”
When this evidence brought the other witnesses forward, Slimy Slim became hot property and people flooded to Lake Payette in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. He was even featured in Time Magazine but the summer of 1941 had been his hey day and he was seldom seen again which meant that the focus of attention was once again switched to Lake Okanagan and Ogopogo.
Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, is a serpentine lake of around 80 miles long and never more than a couple of miles wide. It is also both deep and cold and, like Loch Ness, it was carved out of the bedrock by Ice Age glaciers. The shores are well populated and roads run very close to the lake’s edge. The Okanakane Indians called the monster “Na-Ha-Ha-Itkh” and whenever they had to cross the lake by canoe they would carry with them a dog or a chicken as a sacrificial offering in case Na-Ha-Ha-Itkh came too close for comfort. There is also a legend that the local Indians nicknamed him “The Remorseful One” because he was actually a man, a murderer, who had been turned into a serpent as punishment for his crimes.
The post-war sightings of Ogopogo and others of his ilk were the subject of a 1946 article in the New York Times under the heading “Normalcy?” which reported, not completely without irony, that following the insanity of World War Two, the world was returning to normal as monsters were once again being reported.
A captain in the Canadian Fishery Patrol described Ogopogo as like “a telegraph pole with a sheep’s head.” A Vancouver woman swimming in the lake saw him swim within a few hundred feet of her and she described it as “a head like a cow or horse that reared right out of the water,” and she went on to say: “The coils glistened like two huge wheels.… There were ragged edges (along its back) like a saw. It was so beautiful with the sun shining on it.” It came up three times, then submerged and disappeared.
Another good report appeared in the Vernon Advertiser on July 20th, 1959. It was reported and written by R.H. Millar who was the newspaper’s owner and publisher. He was returning from a cruise down the lake at 10mph when he noticed, in the boat’s wake, about 250ft away: “What appeared to be the serpent.” He looked at it through his binoculars and saw that it was indeed Ogopogo and that it was travelling much faster than his boat. He guessed it to be around 15-17 inches above the water. Millar described the creature as having “a snake-like head with a blunt nose, and there were five humps visible, which went smaller as he submerged, and they could not see a tail. The creature’s colour was a very dark green and it swam gracefully in a smooth motion.”
In 1976 Ed Fletcher from Vancouver was out on Lake Okanagan with his daughter Diane when a strange animal cut across his bows. He said: “If I had not shut the engine off I could have run him over or jumped on his back, for the boat drifted to within 15 or 30ft of him.” They were quite close to the shore at Gellatly Bay so they went to fetch their camera and they were also joined in the boat by Gary Slaughter of Kelowna, and once again Ogopogo surfaced.
Fletcher recounts: “I saw his whole length this time, about 70-75ft. I shut the engine off when we got near him and the boat coasted to within 50ft of him when I shot the first picture.” The three of them stayed in the boat for the next hour and watched, and followed Ogopogo. “He would submerge, swim at least two city blocks, then surface, and all the while we chased after him.” Fletcher would accelerate the boat toward the creature then cut the engine and coast as close as he could before taking a photograph of it.
The creature emerged over a dozen times and Fletcher got five pictures in all. They saw it stretched out and coiled up, and even coiled they estimated its length to be 40ft. Diane Fletcher described his skin as smooth and brownish. Like a whale’s with small ridges on its back, and both she and Gary Slaughter estimated its head to be 2ft or more in length, flattened like that of a snake with “two things standing up from the heal like the ears of a Doberman Pinscher.”
Tales of such sightings reached the press, and between April 1977 and August 1978 the “Kelowna Daily Courier” the “Penticyon Herald” and the “Vernon Daily News” carried a dozen reports of sightings including those of confirmed skeptics. One such skeptic was Harry Staines of Westbank who reported: “I did not believe it before, but we circled the thing in our boat, keeping it about a hundred yards away.” He described iot as looking like a black eel about 35ft long which swam with an up and down motion which left “quite a wake.”
In 1977 another witness also had a near collision with Ogopogo. Erin Neely was water skiing on Lake Okanagan and she almost ran over him. She was so shocked that she let go of the tow line, fainted and almost drowned.
Ogopogo has also been caught on film. In 1968 Art Folden of Chase, British Columbia was driving home one August evening when he reached a stretch of road on Highway 91 which was high above the lake at Penticton where he was roughly 300 yards from the water. As he looked down at the lake he could see an object in the water so he stopped the car in order to film it using his cine camera with a telephoto lens and some film left over from a day making home movies.
To help conserve film he would stop whenever the creature submerged. The film he shot has been examined closely and, using the trees in the foreground as a guide, most investigators agree that the object in the lake is 60ft long, or more, and moving at considerable speed. One person who has seen the film many times is Mrs Arlene B. Gaal and she is in no doubt about its authenticity and says that it shows an unusual “form of life in Lake Okanagan.”
Ogopogo is one of the best known of the American lake monsters but it is certainly not alone, some of the other lakes which are claimed to house monsters are Lake Walker in Nevada, Lake Folsom in California and Flathead Lake in Montana which has produced so many sightings that a company has offered a reward of $1,000 for anybody who catches a creature of any description, fish included, which is greater than 14ft in length.
Perhaps the best known, along with Lake Okanagan, is Lake Champlain which runs down from Quebec, Canada through Vermont and New York states, totalling 109 miles in length. It was named after Samuel Champlain who discovered it in 1609 and, ironically, he was also the first man to see the monster who was nicknamed “Champ.” During the 1870s he scared the cream of New York society as they were enjoying a steamboat ride, and at the turn of the century he had a $50,000 price tag put on his head by the showman P.T. Barnum. However, sightings of him are quite rare and this would seem to be true of most North American lake monsters when compared to their UK and Canadian counterparts, and even those off the coast of Newfoundland which were abundant in the early nineteenth century.
Champ, however, put in over two hundred appearances and is clearly not shy about who sees him. In 1883 the Sherriff of Clinton County, New York, Captain Nathan H. Mooney, was on the north west arm of the lake shore when he spotted a huge water serpent about 50 yards away from him. It rose five feet out of the water and its neck was around seven inches in diameter and curved like that “of a goose when about to take flight.”
Mooney also noticed white spots inside the creature’s mouth and he estimated its length to be around 25-30ft. Champ has been photographed, most famously in 1977 by Sandra Mansi of Connecticut, and her photograph showed what she described as a “dinosaur” with its head and neck six feet out of the water, and scientists who have examined it declare it to be a genuine original photograph, but they don’t know what of.
Another region with a strong and lengthy tradition of lake monsters is Scandinavia, and in 1860 an English clergyman and author, Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, heard talk of the monster said to inhabit some of the Icelandic lakes. The creature was known as the “Skrimsl” and Baring-Gould spoke about it to “educated and respectable” lawyers and farmers who spoke of one particular Skrimsl. They described it as being 50ft long and it was similar in appearance to the monster of Loch Ness, and he wrote “I should have been inclined to set the whole story down as a myth were it not for the fact that the accounts of all the witnesses tallied with remarkable minuteness, and the monster is said to have been seen not in one portion of the lake (The Lagarflot) only but at different points.”
Baring-Gould also learned of a similar creature in Norway (a slimy, grey-brown animal) that terrified the locals around Lake Suldal, who had reported that its head was as big as a rowing boat.
Sweden’s Lake Storsso has long been said to be home to a monster, and at the turn of the century a zoologist, Dr Peter Olsson spent several years analysing reports of sightings on the lake, and built up a picture of the monster, and said it was white maned and reddish in colour, and looked like a gigantic sea horse. Olsson regarded it as “the fastest and most fascinating of all lake dwellers” as it was said to be able to swim at great speeds of up to 45mph.
A Stockholm newspaper carried a report that three people had seen Lake Storsso’s monster when the “calm shining surface was broken by a giant snake-like object with three prickly dark humps” which was creating a wake as it swam parallel to the shore. Further sightings in 1965 prompted the local tourist board to use a colour picture of the monster in its brochures and to lay claim to a monster to rival that of Loch Ness.
Around 265 lakes world wide lay claim, or have laid claim, to a monster and 24 of them are in Scotland. They include Oich, Rannoch, Tay, Arkaig, Morar, Nahoon and Loch nan Dubhrachan on Skye. Like Newfoundland, the British coastline also has monster sightings, most famously the coast of Cornwall. In the mid 1970s a two humped, long necked sea monster made appearances in and around Falmouth Bay and it was christened “Morgawr” which is Cornish for “Sea Giant.”
In February 1976, a witness known only as Mary F managed to capture on film a creature that she estimated was no more than 15-18ft long as it played in the sea off Rosemullion:
“It looked like an elephant waving its trunk but the trunk was a long neck with a small head on the end, like a snake’s head. It had humps on the back which moved in a funny way. The colour was black or very dark brown, and the skin seemed to be like a sea lion’s…. The animal frightened me…. I do not like the way it moved when it was swimming.”
Much earlier than this though, the Victorians produced many sightings of mermaids and they held such mystery for the Victorians that many were faked by showmen to use as exhibits in their sideshows, even so, mermaid sightings continued well into the twentieth century, as late as 1947 on the Hebridean island of Muck, including one by the Mayoress of Peel.
Skeptics say that sightings of mermaids can easily be explained away as manatees, dugongs or even seals, but it was Britain’s lakes that would by far out shine her coastal waters.
The Irish lake, Lough Nahooin, on the west coast if Ireland seem far too small at 100 yards long give rise to a monster sighting but that’s exactly what it did. At 7am on February 2nd, 1968 farmer Stephen Coyne was walking along the shore of Lough Nahooin with his eight year old son and his dog when he noticed a black shape in the water. Thinking that it was his dog swimming he whistled for it to come back, but the dog came running from a different direction, and when it reached him, it began to bark at the shape in the lake. Coyne could now see that that the shape was an animal with a long neck and shiny black skin, and when it plunged its head into the water he could see two humps and a flat tail. He estimated that the creature was about 12ft in length. It seemed to hear the dog barking and began to swim towards the shore, and Coyne, in fear, ran to the water to scare it away, and it did turn and swim away.
Coyne’s son ran back to the farmhouse and brought his mother and the other four children and they all stood on the shore and watched the creature until it became too dark to see.
F.W. Holiday, an investigator who wrote a book on the Loch Ness Monster believed that both Nessie and Coyne’s monster were some kind of giant slug, as Coyne had described the monster as having no eyes and horns like those of a snail on top of its head. Holiday decided to try and catch the monster of Lough Nahooin, and he and his team were armed with nets, support bouys and heavy chain. They sailed around the lake and fired rifles into the water to try and coax the creature into their nets, but after several days without success they gave up.
Holiday however, still maintained that there was a monster in the lake despite one glaring argument against it. Lough Nahooin is only 100 yards long and is full of trout. A creature the size of a crocodile would deplete the food supply in a matter of weeks, but could the whole Coyne family have been mistaken? Holiday’s attempt at capturing the creature certainly wasn’t the only failed attempt and is positively innovative when compared to the attempt made by the Japanese.
Issie is a Japanese lake monster which surfaced near a resort favoured by honeymoon couples, and in 1978 a special observatory was built and opened by the reigning Miss Hibiscus. Watchers then proceeded to pour sake into the lake in the hope that Issue would become intoxicated and come to the surface.
It is almost as though the creatures will only put in an appearance when we are not ready for it and run and hide when we are and, like Ogopogo, the monster of Scotland’s Loch Morar (named Morag) has got in the way of people on the lake.
In August 1969 two fishermen, Macdonnell and Simpson, were in a motor cruiser on Loch Morar when they collided with a hump backed creature that was about 25ft long. Macdonnell tried to fend it off with an oar, but it snapped, so Simpson shot at it, but the creature just slowly sank back down beneath the surface.
While there is evidence for there being a monster in some of these lakes, their cases pale into insignificance when compared to that of Loch Ness. Loch Ness is Scotland’s longest loch at 24 miles but it is only up to a mile wide. It is also extremely deep as far as lakes go at up to 1,000ft in places, but because the loch is a receptacle for peat particles from forty five mountain streams and five rivers, visibility below a depth of around six feet is very low indeed, but despite the winter cold, the loch never freezes.
Monster sightings at Loch Ness date back to the sixth century when in AD 565 “Niseag” (to give it its gaelic name) was mentioned by the Irish Saint Columba who was trying to convert the heathen Picts, Scots and Northumbrians to Christianity. He came to Loch Ness from his monastery on the island of Iona, off Scotland’s west coast, and he found some of the local people burying a neighbour who had been mauled by the lake monster while swimming, and had died from his wounds.
One of Columba’s followers began swimming across the loch to retrieve a boat, when he was confronted by a “very odd looking beastie, something like a huge frog, only it was not a frog.” Columba intervened and, with arms raised, he hailed the beast. “Go thou no further nor touch the man. Go back at once!” and according to the legend the monster fled at the words, and many who heard of the incident were duly converted.
Sightings of Niseag remained sporadic until the early 1880s when they became more regular, and people as diverse as a stonemason, school children, a forester and, for some reason, the monster was always affectionately referred to as a she. There were sightings and newspaper reports in 1912, 1927 and 1930 but it was in 1933 that Nessie achieved world fame.
In this year, a new road was built on the loch’s north shore that ran between Fort William and Inverness, and it was said that the drilling, blasting, vibrations and falling boulders roused Nessie from the quiet depths and she clambered ashore, roaming through the bracken to hunt for food, and this would concur with a famous sighting in July 1933 by a Mr and Mrs Spicer.
The Spicers were driving home to London when they saw a strange creature emerging from the bracken, carrying what appeared to be a young animal in its mouth. The creature lurched across the road, through the undergrowth and into the lake with a splash. The whole thing lasted for only a few seconds but Mr Spicer was able to describe the creature to reporters. He said that it was like a “loathsome sight” that looked like “a huge snail with a long neck.” He said it had a long undulating neck, little thicker than an elephant’s trunk, a tiny head, thick body and four feet or flippers.
Around this time an A.A. Patrolman also saw Nessie, and he described her as “a thing with a number of humps above the water line. It had a small head and very slender neck” and a third sighting in 1933 produced a photograph.
Local resident Hugh Gray’s picture was featured in newspapers and magazines around the world, but it was far from convincing, and the object shown was said by some to be a floating tree trunk, a log or a piece of wood carelessly discarded by the construction workers on the new road.
Whatever it is, it got the attention of journalists the world over and they descended on Loch Ness in hope of getting a clearer picture of the monster, and the legend of Loch Ness was born.
Unusual in sightings was that Nessie was seen on land by the Spicers and, as if to add credence to their story, she was seen on land again, this time by a local veterinary surgeon, Arthur Grant in 1934. Grant was making his way home by motorbike when suddenly in the road ahead of him was something lit in the moonlight. He recalled:
“I had a splendid view. In fact I almost struck it with my motorbike. The body would be 15 or 20ft in length and very heavy. I distinctly saw two front flippers and there seemed to be two other flippers behind which it used to spring from the tail would be 5 to 6 feet long; the curious thing about the tail was that the end was rounded off, it did not come to a point.”
Since a sighting in February of 1960 by Mr Torquil Macleod, Nessie seems to have stuck to the water. The water Bailiff of Loch Ness, Alex Campbell, has had 18 encounters with Nessie in his years in the post, one decidedly spooky encounter took place one night when he was out on the lake in a boat with Constable John Fraser of Inverness looking for poachers. Suddenly they felt a great surge of water and Fraser said “What in the name of heaven is that?” to which Campbell replied “It’s Nessie.”
It was after midnight and the night was dark and moonless so it was as dark as it could get, and for ten minutes the boat pitched and rolled in the dark. At one point it was rocking so much that the two men feared the boat would capsize. As the swell subsided a little, they could hear a noise which was like that made by a horse after a canter, and they listened to the heavy panting as it moved around the boat before slowly fading away as the lake around them became calm again. Campbell added that “We finished our journey with no trouble but we had had a bad scare.” He also says that:
”My best sighting was in May 1954 right off the Abbey boathouse. That morning I was standing at the mouth of the river Hawick looking for what we call a run of salmon. 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 to be 30ft at least, the height of the head and neck above water level as 6ft, and the skin was grey.”
Campbell’s last sighting came shortly before his retirement when he was driving past Cherry Island on the road to Inverness.
“There was just one huge hump probably 8ft long and 4ft high. Then without any preliminary cavorting about it just shot off to the other side of the loch. I was staggered at the speed. I had a wonderful view of the body. It did not alter course, but kept up this great pace leaving a wash about 3ft high.”
Also in 1934 came one of, if not, the best known photographs ever taken of Nessie, and it is most often referred to as “The Surgeon’s Photo” as it was taken by a London gynaecologist, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kenneth Wilson. One of Wilson’s hobbies was photographing trains and he was armed with his camera and a telephoto lens and he was driving south on his way home from a holiday in Scotland. He stopped at 7:30am to stretch his legs on a slope 200ft above the surface of Loch Ness when he saw the water begin to swirl, and saw “the head of some strange animal rising.” Wilson ran back to his car to get his camera and quickly took four pictures, one of which clearly showed something rising out of the water and it was featured in the London Daily Mail and in countless publications since.
The magazine “New Scientist” carried a report that the surgeon’s photo showed an elephant swimming with its trunk in the air, and many people put forward other possible explanations, including many claims that it was a hoax, but for six decades Wilson maintained that it was genuine. It was examined by many experts who had varying explanations for it, and it was debunked by two researchers, Alastair Boyd and David Martin, and finally, in his declining years, Wilson admitted that it was a hoax he had made using a small model glued to a toy submarine.
Pictures and reports such as these helped to increase Nessie’s popularity and, after 1933, we entered the busiest period of Nessie sightings because, not only did journalists come in search of a story, but also curious holiday makers helped to make the area one of Scotland’s most popular tourist spots. Naturally with the extra presence and attention, the number of sightings also increased, so much so that between the years 1933 and 1974, three thousand people claimed to have seen Nessie, and some claimed to have heard her make a cry of “anger and anguish” when almost run down by a car.
One reason levelled for the rise in the number of sightings after 1933, besides the increased level of potential witnesses, was the rewards offered for Nessie’s capture, including £20,000 from Bertrand Mills Circus, and a huge £1 million from the makers of Black and White Whisky. Even the House of Commons became involved.
On November 12th, 1933 an MP called for an official investigation to settle this “monster matter” once and for all, but the government spokesman replied that it was “more properly a matter for the private enterprise of scientists aided by the zeal of the press and photographers.” Ironically, this debate took place on the same day that Hugh Gray took his infamous photograph. As well as parliament, Nessie’s fame also reached the royal household, as the Duke of York (later King George VI) addressed the London Inverness Association and told them that:
“It’s fame has reached every part of the earth. It has entered the nurseries of this country. The other day I was in the nursery, and my young daughter, Margaret Rose (later Princess Margaret) aged 3, was looking at a fairy story picture book. She came across a picture of a dragon and described it to her mother: ‘Oh, look mummy, what a darling little Loch Ness Monster”’
Sightings continued and Nessie became almost a part of the British psyche, with chancing holiday makers getting in on the Nessie act, and making some worthwhile home movies. Peter and Gwen Smith of Luton, England were on holiday and one day Gwen was idly gazing across at Urquhart Castle hoping to shoot some film for the family movie, when:
“Suddenly this thing came vertically up out of the water, more or less where I was looking. I started filming and of course, I caught it just as it was going down. We stood for a minute and then it came up again and I started filming again, and then a third time.”
Her husband had also been watching and he added:
“The head rose up at least the height of a man. It was a good foot thick across the neck. The head seemed to me strangely rectangular. I watched it actually turn its head through ninety degrees as though it was looking directly at us or directly away from us. The last time it came right next to a youth who was in a boat. It came up very confidently as before, then suddenly, seemed to change its mind and withdrew very quickly as it perceived the boat. I am convinced if only because of the enormous length of the neck that it was no animal we are familiar with.”
A chance sighting of Nessie wasn’t good enough for everyone, and four firemen from Hemel Hempstead wanted to increase their chances of spotting her. For their 1975 trip to Loch Ness they built as 30ft long papier mache monster with an outboard motor, and they also had a recording of a mating call. The motorised monster held a two man crew as it sailed around the loch with the mating call sounding, but they found no sign of Nessie. Hardly surprising really, as the tape recording they were playing was the mating call of a bull walrus.
With hapless amateur attempts such as this, it is not surprising that no conclusive proof of Nessie’s existence was found, but nevertheless they did receive coverage and help to boost the reputation of Nessie, and predictably it was soon the turn of the experts to step in and try their luck.
A film shot of Nessie in 1960 was shown to specialists at the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre and, after studying and analysing the humped object moving through the water, they came to the conclusion that something existed in the loch. They decided that the film showed “probably an animate object, 12 to 16ft long, 3ft high and 6ft wide travelling at 12mph, but their verdict was not as conclusive as that of David James, a highland Laird and a member of Parliament.
James was part of a panel discussing the Loch Ness Monster on a television program for Grampian and Border Television in February 2nd, 1963, and he had kept a two week, round the clock, vigil on the loch’s shores as part of his role as the founder of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. He told viewers of the program that the watch had been a success as:
“On October 19th, 1962, in the middle of the afternoon, we had seven people at Temple Pier, and suddenly everyone was alerted by widespread activity among the salmon. After a few minutes the salmon started panicking – porpoising out in the middle of the loch – and immediately we were aware that there was an object following the salmon which was seen by practically everyone there for three or four minutes.”
At the end of the program the panel concluded:
“We find that there is some unidentified animate object in Loch Ness which, if it be mammal, reptile, fish or mollusc of any known order, is of such a size as to be worthy of careful scientific examination and identification. If it is not of a known order, it represents a challenge which is only capable of being answered by controlled investigation or carefully scientific principles.”
That need for controlled investigation was met in August 1968 by a team from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Birmingham University who set up sonar equipment on one of the piers on the loch, and directed the scan at the south east corner. A movie camera photographed the cathode display screen every ten seconds, but for days there was nothing to be seen, until 4:30pm on August 28th when there was a thirteen minute spell of activity from the depths.
“A large object rose rapidly from the floor of the loch at a range of 0.8km, its speed of ascent being about 100ft per minute. It was rising obliquely away from the sonar source at a velocity of about 6.5 knots, and was soon 1km away. Its upward movement had now slowed to about 60ft per minute. This object then changed direction to move toward the pier at about 9 knots, keeping constant depth. Finally, it plunged to the bottom at about 100ft per minute before rising again at 0.6km range, when it apparently moved out of the sonar beam and was lost to record. Meanwhile, a second large object had been detected at 0.5km from the pier which finally dived at the astonishing velocity of 450ft per minute. Both objects remained many feet below the surface.”
One of the team, Dr. H. Braithwaite, wrote a magazine article on the sonar equipment in which he stated that:
“The high rate of ascent and descent makes it seem very unlikely that the objects were shoals of fish, and fishery biologists we have consulted cannot suggest what fish they might be. It is a temptation to suppose they must be the fabulous Loch Ness monsters, now observed for the first time in their underwater activities.”
The ball was certainly rolling by now and other teams took up where this one had left off, and each came with technology in abundance. In 1970 Robert Rines of the Massachusetts Academy of Applied Science took a Klein Sidescan Sonar to the loch, and in the deeper water he detected several large moving objects, and later said:
“We wouldn’t have been here if we didn’t have the suspicion that there is something very large in this loch. My own view now, after having personal interviews with, I think highly reliable people, is that there is an amazing scientific discovery awaiting the world here in Loch Ness.”
The BBC got in on the act and sent a team equipped with a sonic depth finder to try to track Nessie down, and they did record a “mysterious object” at a depth of 12ft and they followed it to a depth of 60ft before it went out of range of the equipment. Experts from the British Museum and Zoological Society of London were asked for their opinions, and they blamed it on sturgeons, fin whales, sperm whales and, the old favourite with Nessie and Nessie photographs, a tree trunk.
The Americans again tried their luck in 1972 when an American doctor, along with Robert Rines through his Academy of Science, brought together American money and inventiveness when they used the Egerton Underwater Camera (favoured by Jacques Cousteau) and linked it to a Raytheon Sonar Scan. On the night of August 7th the equipment was picking up lots of fish which suddenly vanished off the screen and were replaced by a big, black trace, and one of the observers in the sonar boat went to fetch Rines who was in another boat. The man, Davies, said:
“I don’t mind telling you that it was a rather strange feeling, rowing across that pitch black water knowing that there was a very large animal just 30ft below. It was the sheer size of the echo trace that was frightening.”
The pictures were developed in America by Kodak and one of them became the famous “Flipper Picture” which Rines asserted showed the animal’s body and one flipper, but many failed to see the shot as being as significant as Rines made out. As an interesting aside, this photograph inspired the naturalist Sir Peter Scott to give Nessie a Latin name based on the rhomboid shape of the alleged flipper. He named her “Nessiteras Rhomboperyx” but this turned out to be a rather unfortunate name, as somebody noticed that the letters could be re-arranged to read “Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S.”
Was this really a coincidental anagram, part of a conspiracy or a jibe at Rines? Either way, the flipper shot failed to have the impact that Rines had hoped it would, and the same can be said of the shot that Rines claims to show the head and neck of Nessie taken in 1975. Rines felt that the creature had bumped against the underwater rig, but when the team returned to New York they found nothing on the main camera, so there was no rush to develop the film in the back up cameras. Then, one morning, Rines was woken by the telephone at 3am and it was his colleague Charlie Wycoff who said, “My goodness. We’ve got it.”
Rines went over to look at the picture but, much to the team’s consternation, the pictures were leaked before the press conference and were not very well received, with most people saying that it was a stretch of the imagination to say that it showed Nessie’s head and neck, and that it was just the murky, peaty water of the loch, and if you looked hard enough, you could picture any image you fancied, almost like looking at the clouds in the sky.
Rines however, was not dissuaded by this and said: “We’re going to stick to it until we get a definitive enough set of pictures for the so called experts to identify what these animals are and then I think the world will love us.”
It may be that the very equipment we are using to try and track these animals is what is scaring them away, sonar and motor boats etc, so to try and compound this, Rines isn’t going to wait for Nessie to come to him, he is training a pair of dolphins to pursue her.
Certainly not everyone is convinced by the evidence, and in the case of British Zoologist Dr. Maurice Burton it is quite the opposite. Burton began by believing in the Loch Ness Monster and did so for thirty years before he had a change of heart. This was brought about by an incident one sunday afternoon when almost the whole village of Foyers were standing, watching the monster swim in the loch, but Burton had earlier seen a small motor boat set out from the shore and had kept it in view in his binoculars and even taken photographs of it. He later questioned the villagers about what they had seen, and came to the conclusion that what they had been looking at was the same boat, but they were adamant that they had seen Nessie.
Burton now thinks that many sightings could be explained away as motor boats, especially those which are of the monster moving at speed. He says that others could be otters, and points out that an 8ft otter was caught on the Shetland Isles in the last century, but it is difficult to believe that hundreds and thousands of observers, many of them experienced naturalists and fishermen, could be mistaken as to identify an 8ft otter or a small motor boat for a 40ft plus monster with humps and a long neck. He adds that the wash from a vessel can pass up to ten minutes after the vessel itself has passed, and that seals could get in to the loch from the sea or that gaseous rubbish could float up from the bottom of the loch, but could sonar be deceived in the same way or, for that matter, the fish that swim suddenly away?
One of the strongest arguments against there being a monster in Loch Ness is the fact of the loch’s food chain, because despite the size of the loch, for the species to have survived, there would have to be a colony of creatures, and such a colony would deplete the food supply and starve, but it is a fact that there are fresh salmon in the loch. Mature salmon enter the loch from the sea via the River Ness, and more importantly they do so all year round, thus constantly replenishing the food supply.
It is thought that Nessie may also be able to make its way to the sea at will via underground tunnels, and film of underwater caverns would seem to support the possibility. Another idea is put forward by Loren Coleman who says that “There are enough reports of the larger loch creatures being sighted on land for us to assume they can cross from the seas to rivers and lochs.” However, if these monsters do move about, what are they? There would seem to be three possibilities:
- They are genuine creatures which have been misidentified or mistaken.
- They are creatures which are unknown.
- They are creatures which are not extinct as was previously believed.
Along with the plesiosaur was the shark-like ichthyosaurus, and in time they are believed to have been suppressed by the aggressive 40ft long mososaurus. The zeuglodon is also considered by many to be a prime candidate for the role of sea monster, and it is a prehistoric snake-like primitive whale, but the favourite still remains the plesiosaur.
The label “extinct” is not proof positive that a species has died out, but it reflects the currently accepted knowledge, and it is not unheard of for a species, long thought to be extinct, to turn up alive and well. It is not only possible but probable that there are undiscovered species living in the oceans, for example, in 1983 a new breed of porpoise, now named the “Cochito” was found in the Gulf of California. In 1966 a Hawaiian survey ship hauled up its anchor, and along with the anchor came a shark that was so different from other sharks that zoologists had to create an entire new family in order to accommodate it, and it became the third largest known species of its kind, and is now known as “Megamouth.”
As recently as 1983 a new species of killer whale, the Prudes Bay, peculiar to the Antarctic was discovered. More amazing than these though, was a discovery made in 1939 in a trawler’s net. There was a fish in the net which had first existed 300 million years ago and had been thought to have become extinct millions of years ago. That fish was the “Coelocanth” and further living examples were later found swimming in South African waters. As it swam, it was noticed that its fins didn’t move as a fish’s normally would but they actually moved in the order that a land animal would move its legs as it ran over land. It also only used its tail in order to escape from predators or to hunt prey and, like other ancient species, the coelocanth has a primitive, hollow backbone.
Is the coelocanth possible evidence of the prehistoric transition from sea to land animals in the evolutionary ladder? We know that the land dwelling dinosaurs died out very rapidly and fell prey to mass extinctions but we are not so certain about what befell the marine animals of the period, and if the coelocanth has survived through the eons, then how many other ancient species have survived along with it? Could they survive in their environment, or perhaps adapt to life at a greater depth where their environment would be far less likely to be affected by the changes occurring above the surface?
Only around a third of the planet’s surface is not covered by water, and if the polar ice caps were to melt, it is estimated that this would halve again. The Pacific Ocean alone is bigger than all of the land areas combined, and at its deepest point it is an amazing seven miles deep. This point is called the “Mariana Trench” which from top to bottom is taller than Mount Everest.
On January 23rd, 1960 Dr. Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant D. Walsh of the U.S. Navy broke the previous record for the deepest dive, which was 245ft by a fisherman in 1865, when they descended into the Mariana Trench to a depth of 35,802ft, and they described the bottom as a “waste of snuff-coloured ooze.”
As our oceans are so vast they could easily conceal many unknown creatures, and to give an idea of the scale of the matter, a trawler will sink its nets to a depth of only about 60ft, and until recently scientists believed that fish couldn’t live at great depths due to the enormous pressure and the total lack of light, but a research vessel has raised a fish from a depth of 26,000ft.
Despite the total lack of light at that depth, the fish still retained two small eyes (possible evidence that its species had once lived nearer to the surface) so it is certainly possible that ancient and prehistoric marine animals still live at great depths. We know that giant creatures, much larger than any today, filled the oceans, such as enormous crabs and giant sea serpents, and in 1930 Dr. Anton Brun caught an eel larva at a depth of 1,000ft that was 6ft long. Based on the assumption that it would mature to 18 times its larval length (though some eels attain 30 times their larval length) this meant that Brun’s eel would have matured to a length of 108ft.
This is fine for a huge sea creature, but what about a monster in a lake? If a prehistoric life form could have survived until the last ice age, then it could possibly have found itself stranded in a lake as the glaciers retreated and the Great Glen fault which divides the Scottish highlands opened up to the sea. This would mean that they would have had to adapt to living in fresh water in a relatively short period of time (in evolutionary terms) but that is by no means impossible.
The argument against Nessie being a plesiosaur is that she seems to spend so little time on the surface. She would have to live in the top 125ft or so, as there would be little or no food below that depth, and the water temperature would be too low for a cold blooded reptile. Also, reptiles have lungs and not gills, so it would have breath fresh air, and in order to do this it would have to surface at regular intervals.
To reproduce it would have to come ashore and lay eggs, and though it has been seen ashore, it has not been seen laying eggs and no traces of nests have been found, or the young making their way into the water. Another argument against Nessie being a reptile can be proven by simple mathematics.
For Nessie to have survived through the years there would have to be a colony of a bare minimum of three creatures at any one time. The loch has a surface area of 45 square metres, that is 15 square metres for each creature. The surface area of the Mediterranean is 20,000 times more at 900,000 square metres and it contains the rare and endangered monk seal, of which there are between 300 and 600, at best one for every 1,500 square metres of water. In other words, 100 times the area for the Loch Ness Monster, yet the monk seals are seen frequently.
Like animals on land, we clearly haven’t identified every species in the sea, so whether or not prehistoric creatures are still surviving, there are unidentified creatures in the oceans, and these would obviously be mistaken for something else or something unusual, and with the vastness of their habitat, there are ample places in which to conceal themselves.
Also similar to land animals, and even Bigfoot, is the fact that a dead or dying sea creature will, more often that not, apart from the few carcasses that are washed up, not even manage to sink to the bottom before one predator or another will get hold of them, and from sharks downwards, the animals in the sea will make an excellent job of disposing of the body, so there is very little, if any, remains to be found by humans, and probably none at all in the case of non-vertebrates.
This is all well and good when you are considering an ocean which takes up such a huge part of the earth’s surface, but what about when we are considering a land locked lake, especially one so small as Ireland’s Lough Nahooin at 100 yards long? It is very difficult to believe that every lake monster claimant is a genuine one, but there are some which are worthy of serious investigation, such as Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan, Champ in Lake Champlain and of course Nessie in Loch Ness.
For a lake to support a monster it must clearly have a well maintained food chain, such as the salmon supply in Loch Ness, and especially if the lake is to support a monster for any length of time, and if reports are to be believed, since AD 565. This is one of those phenomena that are, at first glance, totally unbelievable, but once you begin to look at the evidence you become less and less sure, and the alleged facts of a lake monster sighting can become almost humorous when the case is of the scale as Loch Ness and has become almost a part of the psyche and certainly become a great tourist attraction.
Once a case achieves this kind of status, the people of the area then find themselves with a vested interest, and possibly from that point onward, the case must be taken with a pinch of salt, no matter how convincing the evidence might be. There is another possibility however, that is far more deep rooted than a mere trip to a lakeside in the hope of catching a glimpse of the monster within, and that is human nature. It is almost as if man has some inherent need to have something to fear, be it belief in Gods and Deities, catastrophes such as calamitous floods or creatures such as fire breathing dragons or monsters in seas and lakes.
Whatever the reason for this and, after considering all of the evidence on both sides, it seems that there is only one conclusion that one can realistically come to in the case of sea and lake monsters, and that is summed up perfectly by Arthur C. Clarke. He said that he “could believe a dinosaur in, say, the Matto Gross, but not in Central Park or Kensington Gardens” and that he wouldn’t take lake monsters seriously if it weren’t for Loch Ness. “The evidence for something in the Loch is overwhelming; whether it is an animal new to science is another matter. If you want my personal opinion - on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I believe in Nessie.”
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