THE LEGEND
When Nicholas Witchell, a future BBC correspondent, researched the history of the legend for his 1974 book The Loch Ness Story, he found about a dozen pre-20th-century references to large animals in Loch Ness, gradually shifting in character from these clearly mythical accounts to something more like eyewitness descriptions.
But the modern legend of Loch Ness dates from 1933, when a new road was completed along the shore, offering the first clear views of the loch from the northern side. One April afternoon, a local couple was driving home along this road when they spotted "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface." Their account was written up by a correspondent for the Inverness Courier, whose editor used the word "monster" to describe the animal. The Loch Ness Monster has been a media phenomenon ever since.
Public interest built gradually during the spring of 1933, then picked up sharply after a couple reported seeing one of the creatures on land, lumbering across the shore road. By October, several London newspapers had sent correspondents to Scotland, and radio programs were being interrupted to bring listeners the latest news from the loch. A British circus offered a reward of £20,000 for the capture of the beast. Hundreds of boy scouts and outdoorsmen arrived, some venturing out in small boats, others setting up deck chairs and waiting expectantly for the monster to appear.
The excitement over the monster reached a fever pitch in December, when the London Daily Mail hired an actor, film director, and big-game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell to track down the beast. After only a few days at the loch, Wetherell reported finding the fresh footprints of a large, four-toed animal. He estimated it to be 20 feet long. With great fanfare, Wetherell made plaster casts of the footprints and, just before Christmas, sent them off to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis. While the world waited for the museum zoologists to return from holiday, legions of monster hunters descended on Loch Ness, filling the local hotels. Inverness was floodlit for the occasion, and traffic jammed the shoreline roads in both directions.
The bubble burst in early January, when museum zoologists announced that the footprints were those of a hippopotamus. They had been made with a stuffed hippo foot -- the base of an umbrella stand or ashtray. It wasn't clear whether Wetherell was the perpetrator of the hoax or its gullible victim. Either way, the incident tainted the image of the Loch Ness Monster and discouraged serious investigation of the phenomenon. For the next three decades, most scientists scornfully dismissed reports of strange animals in the loch. Those sightings that weren't outright hoaxes, they said, were the result of optical illusions caused by boat wakes, wind slicks, floating logs, otters, ducks, or swimming deer.
Nevertheless, eyewitnesses continued to come forward with accounts of their sightings -- more than 4,000 of them, according to Witchell's estimate. Most of the witnesses described a large creature with one or more humps protruding above the surface like the hull of an upturned boat. Others reported seeing a long neck or flippers. What was most remarkable, however, was that many of the eyewitnesses were sober, level-headed people: lawyers and priests, scientists and school teachers, policemen and fishermen -- even a Nobel Prize winner.
THE INVESTIGATION OF THE LOCH
Long dismissed as fodder for "silly season" press reports, Nessie was finally considered a subject worthy of serious scientific investigation. In the span of a decade, beginning in 1958, four separate expeditions were launched, first by the BBC, then by three respected British universities: Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Birmingham. Rather than scanning the surface with binoculars and cameras, as the amateur investigators had, these expeditions came equipped with sonar, a military technology that used sound to search the underwater environment. Though the expeditions found nothing conclusive, in each case the sonar operators detected large, moving underwater objects they could not explain.
The use of technology to search the loch reached a new level in the 1970s, when a series of expeditions was sponsored by the Boston-based Academy of Applied Science, whose members included many technically skilled people with ties to MIT. The Academy's approach was to set a trap for the monster by combining sonar and underwater photography for the first time. Under the leadership of Robert Rines, a lawyer trained in physics, the team pointed a sophisticated form of sonar, called side scan sonar, out into Loch Ness from a point near the shore. Nearby they placed an underwater camera taking pictures every 45 seconds as a strobe light illuminated the depths with a bright flash. The system paid off one night in 1975. At the same moment the sonar was registering a large, moving object, the underwater camera was taking pictures of an object that looked, after development and computer enhancement, like the flippers of an aquatic creature.
Rines' discovery won the support of two reputable scientists: Harold "Doc" Edgerton, the legendary MIT scientist who had invented side scan sonar and strobe photography; and Sir Peter Scott, one of Britain's most respected naturalists. With Edgerton and Scott behind him, Rines was given an opportunity to present his evidence at a hearing at the House of Commons in London. Never had the possibility of the Loch Ness Monster been taken so seriously.
Almost immediately, however, critics began to raise questions about the evidence. Could the suggestive sonar traces be the result of human error? Had the flipper photos been altered to improve their appearance? Just as damaging to Rines' case was Peter Scott's bold pronouncement about the identity of the creature. Based on the flipper photos and the eyewitness sightings, Scott concluded that Nessie was a plesiosaur, an ancient reptile that was thought to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The idea was just too far-fetched for professional zoologists to take seriously.
In the 65 years since the birth of the modern legend, dozens of people have come forward with photographs purporting to show the monster. Most were quickly dismissed as either outright frauds or images of ordinary objects mistaken for monsters. But one photo stood above the rest. Taken in 1934, it shows what appears to be the slender neck of an animal rising from the surface of the water. From the moment it was published in the London Daily Mail, it became the very image of the Loch Ness Monster and, for many, the strongest evidence that Nessie actually exists.
One reason the photograph had such an impact on the Loch Ness legend was that it came from such a credible source. The photo was sold to the Daily Mail by a London physician named R. Kenneth Wilson, who said he had taken the picture when he noticed a commotion in the water as he was driving up from London to photograph birds with a friend near Inverness. Few believed that such a respected doctor could be party to a deception.
But in 1994, 60 years after the photo was first published, newspapers around the world reported the claim that the "surgeon's photo" was a fake, part of an elaborate plot to dupe the Daily Mail. The man behind the story was a former English art teacher named Alastair Boyd, who had become an avid student of Loch Ness lore after he and his wife had had their own sighting of a large animal in the loch in 1979. Years later, a friend of Boyd's named David Martin discovered an old newspaper clipping in which Ian Wetherell (the son of Marmaduke Wetherell of hippo foot fame) claimed the surgeon's photo was a hoax. The article had attracted little attention when it was published in 1975, but two details caught Boyd's eye.
First, Wetherell said the plot had involved a man named Maurice Chambers -- the very same man that Dr. Wilson said he had driven up from London to visit in 1934. Second, Wetherell mentioned that the surgeon's photograph included the scenery of Loch Ness in the background. In fact, the familiar Nessie photo includes only the protruding neck and the water around it. Boyd knew that the original photo had included a bit of the far shoreline in the background, because he had rediscovered the uncropped version in the late '80s. But that full photo had been published only once, in 1934. So how could Wetherell have known this detail? "Either he had a very long memory, or he took the picture," Boyd says.
Click here for the uncropped photo of "Nessie"
Ian Wetherell had died by the time Boyd and Martin read the article, but they were able to track down his step-brother, Christian Spurling, in the south of England. Spurling, 93 and near death, confessed. Unhappy with the way he was treated by the Daily Mail after the hippo foot fiasco, Duke Wetherell had set out to get his revenge, enlisting his son and step-son in the plot. First Spurling built a model monster by grafting a head and neck onto the conning tower of a toy submarine. Then Wetherell and his son Ian drove up to the loch and staged the photograph, taking care to include the actual Loch Ness scenery in the background. Finally, to conceal his own role in the hoax, Wetherell persuaded Dr. Wilson, through their common friend Chambers, to have the photo developed and sell it to the Daily Mail as his own. The plot worked better than any of them could have imagined.
Click here for the "Fake Nessie" pic
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