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HOAXES

  Not surprisingly, hoaxers as well as tourists have been attracted to the purported monster. One hoax involved the appearance of monster tracks curiously resembling those of a hippopotamus. Indeed, they had been produced using a cast made from a hippo’s hoof, apparently taken from an umbrella stand (Nickell 1995, 241–43).

  Hoaxing was also the apparent explanation for the July 2003 discovery on the loch’s shore of a fossil vertebra that was believed to be that of a plesiosaur (an extinct marine reptile). Although the fossil was authentic, it was embedded in a limestone that was not native to the area. National Museum of Scotland paleontologist Lyall Anderson speculated that the fossil had been planted at the loch to suggest that it came from a Nessie skeleton. The total absence of skeletal evidence is a recurring argument against lake monsters’ existence (Radford 2003).

  The tradition of such Loch Ness hoaxes continues to the present day. In 2005, several new Nessie hoaxes surfaced. The most interesting was a reputed monster tooth that was found embedded in a deer carcass along the lakeshore by two American college students. The tooth was reportedly confiscated by a Scottish game official, creating whispers of a conspiracy. The “monster tooth” was later revealed to be part of a deer antler, and the whole thing was just a publicity stunt for a new novel about the loch (Boese 2005).

  Fake photos of the monster abound as well, possibly including the first one, presented in 1933—just six months after the Campbell-reported sighting. It was taken by Hugh Gray, a man described as a “leg-puller,” and it depicts “a blurred and indistinct serpentine shape” (Binns 1984, 98, 209). One pro-Nessie writer, Tim Dinsdale, conceded: “It does not show very much of anything. The print has either been touched up, or light has spoiled the picture. There are other features in it which are peculiar” (quoted in Binns 1984, 99). But what about the most celebrated photograph of the Loch Ness monster?

  THE FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPH

  In April 1934, the quintessential photo of Nessie was allegedly snapped by London gynecologist Robert Wilson (figure 1.3). Known as the “surgeon’s photograph,” it is the most famous depiction of the creature, showing it with a long neck and small head, somewhat resembling a plesiosaur, silhouetted against the sunlit water. A second photo by Wilson was of relatively poor quality.

  Over the years, Wilson seemed to tire of the controversy he had stirred up, telling one journalist that he had never claimed to have photographed a monster and that, moreover, he didn’t believe in the creature. Subsequently, Wilson’s youngest son “bluntly admitted that his father’s pictures were fraudulent” (Binns 1984).

  Then in 1994, two Loch Ness researchers made news when they provided information that the photos were indeed a hoax, that they depicted a model made from a toy submarine to which a neck and head fashioned of wood putty had been affixed (Nickell 1995). The researchers’ source was the late Christian Spurling, who, two years prior to his death in late 1993, told how the prank had been conceived by his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherell, with Dr. Wilson agreeing to take the photos (Genoni 1994).

  Figure 1.3 The famous “surgeon’s photo” of Nessie, taken by London gynecologist Robert Wilson in April 1934, has been revealed as a hoax. (Photo by Robert K. Wilson)

  Subsequently, Richard D. Smith (1995), writing in Fate (a magazine that promotes belief in the paranormal), claimed that the hoax itself was a hoax, that Spurling’s story did not ring true. Smith insisted that the uncropped photograph shows that it was not taken in “an inlet where the tiny ripples would look like full-sized waves,” as alleged, and he raised other objections. For example, he noted that an estimate of the scale based on the presumed size of the ripples argues that the creature was larger than the model Spurling described. He also cited the implausibility of the explanation of why the model no longer exists: “Supposedly because the water bailiff [Alex Campbell] appeared and Wetherell quickly stepped on the toy, sinking it.” Smith’s credibility was not helped by the placement of his article—sandwiched between a testimonial, “My Glimpse of Bigfoot,” and an article suggesting that “alien technology” was responsible for the strange hybrid creatures of Greek mythology.

  It seemed to me that Smith’s points ranged from the weak to the dubious, but I decided to solicit a more expert opinion. I therefore wrote to Ronald Binns in 1995, and he responded with a detailed three-page letter. He began by conceding that Smith’s perceived faults with Spurling’s story might suggest that the hoax was bogus. However, he noted:

  On the other hand, as Spurling was an old man when he was interviewed maybe he was just confused. After more than half a century anyone’s memory would surely be unreliable. Maybe he was right about how the model was made but wrong about the dimensions. Maybe the model sank accidentally (as did the hugely expensive model monster made for the Billy Wilder film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes).

  Even if the object was 1.2 metres high, so what? It could still have been a model. My own fake Nessie (Plate 3 of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved) was a tiny cardboard cut-out head and neck stuck in the neck of a mineral-water bottle and covered in black plastic from a garbage bag (about 12” out of the water). It took ten minutes to make. I don’t doubt the Wilson model was better constructed. In the Wilson photo the dark shapes to the left and right of the head and neck could very well be the top portion of a toy submarine.

  The second Wilson photograph obviously portrays a different object photographed in different weather conditions (and I suspect from a different angle). It may have been a cruder model, or it may have been a bird. If it is “rarely seen,” as Smith claims, that is because it is a bad photo of a very dubious object. Since it obviously isn’t the object shown in the more famous photo, the obvious question is how did Wilson manage to photograph two monsters?

  Binns (1995) continued:

  Black and white photographs are so much easier to fake than colour photographs, and still photographs are so much easier to fake than home-movie or video film. The fact that the object shown in Wilson’s photograph is very close to the shore is itself very suspicious, as this is just what one would expect from a model thrown into the loch. There is also almost what amounts to a basic rule about Nessie photos and films. The photos, being fakes and/or models, are always of an object relatively close to the photographer. The movie film, being genuine footage of an object which is not a monster, is always too far away to be properly identifiable.

  Richard D. Smith is wrong about the object not being photographed in an inlet. The part of the loch where Wilson said he took his photo consists of a series of inlets and there is no reason to suppose it wasn’t photographed in one of these inlets (the promontories of which would not have shown in the Wilson photo). Now that we have most of the original print what is surely striking is how the object photographed is more or less dead centre—rather too neatly and well composed for what is alleged to be an animal photographed by chance.

  Lastly, there is the curious anomaly of the date. Wilson told the Daily Mail he took the photograph on April 19th (1934). However, in Rupert Gould’s book The Loch Ness Monster (1934) the date is given as April 1st. Perhaps this was a misprint, or perhaps the information came from Wilson and was his way of signalling that the photo was a leg-pull (since in Britain April 1st is “All Fool’s Day” when leg-pulling and practical jokes are the order of the day and even the newspapers carry deliberately bogus stories as a joke).

  Binns concluded with some philosophical thoughts:

  I suspect after all this time we are never going to find out the full facts of the Wilson photo. The telling case against this and all the other Nessie photos is that in later years no one has ever managed to film the objects shown in either colour film, on a home-movie or on a video. The only photographic evidence from the loch which is at all intriguing is the Raynor film of 1967, and that, in my opinion, shows an otter or otters.

  I was interested to read in the last edition of Nicholas Witchell’s The Loch Ness Story that he had discovered that the famous Lachlan Stuart pho
tograph was a hoax involving bales of hay covered in tarpaulin. What has probably been lost sight of over the years is the impact which the Wilson and Stuart photographs had on monster-hunters back in the 1960s and 1970s. In those days we all firmly believed that they were genuine photographs and that the monster was indeed a very big animal with a long giraffe-like neck, capable of transforming itself into a three-humped object.

  My impression from a UK perspective is that interest in Nessie has ebbed in a big way since the 1970s, and nowadays people interested in mysteries are far more likely to go in pursuit of crop circles (which from a sociological perspective has many curious parallels with the Loch Ness monster saga).

  In addition to Binns’s review, another critique of the Spurling story comes from an excellent book, Bizarre Beliefs, written by Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson (the latter is Skeptical Inquirer magazine’s official and indefatigable representative in the United Kingdom). Citing arguments against Spurling’s account—for example, that the toy submarine would have been unable to carry the weight of the neck and head and the lead ballast strip used to keep the model stable—Hoggart and Hutchinson (1995) state: “given an explanation which fits virtually all the facts, and meshes in so neatly with what we know of Duke Wetherell (and the gullibility of tabloid newspaper editors) it seems positively perverse not to accept the Spurling account.” (Wetherell had perpetrated the previously mentioned hoax involving a set of “monster tracks” made by a hippo hoof.) Hoggart and Hutchinson point out that, in all probability, “The dark patch in front of the neck, often described as a ‘flipper,’ was in fact the deck of the [toy] submarine.” Aside from the Spurling claim, the authors of Bizarre Beliefs go on to say:

  To be fair, very few people who have examined the Loch Ness legend, with the exception of the most dedicated believers, ever doubted that this picture was a hoax—or at least that it showed something other than a monster. There were many possible explanations: the shape of the head and neck had been cut out and stuck to a bottle which had been floated on the loch; perhaps it could have been a log, a bird or an otter’s tail. In any event, though there was nothing else in the picture to judge how big the object was, it was clear that the size of the ripples around the neck didn’t match the bulk of a full-size monster. These ripples were also consistent with something which had been dropped into the water rather than one which had risen up from underneath. It was pretty clear to reasonable observers that if there was a monster, its most famous portrait was of something else. (Hoggart and Hutchinson 1995)

  OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS

  The many other apparently hoaxed photographs of Nessie include one taken in 19 51 of a three-humped monster—or, rather, three misaligned and unnatural-looking humps. The monster they supposedly belonged to was unseen and left no wake.

  Another photo showing two humps of different sizes was taken in the water beside Urquhart Castle in 1955, but there are two versions of the photograph, prompting monster-hunting professor Roy Mackal to ask: “If the object did, indeed, appear on the water in the original negative exposed of the scene, why was it necessary to rephotograph the ‘original’ print, with the resulting two different versions?” (quoted in Binns 1984, 99–100, 102).

  And then there are the photographs of the Loch Ness monster and other lake denizens attributed to Tony “Doc” Shiels. Here, perhaps, we must consider the source: Shiels, a magician, self-described “psychic entertainer,” and professional Punch and Judy man, is also the author of books on successful hoaxing techniques. He told one magazine, “I am sure Nessie appeared as a result of my psychic powers” (Nickell 1994; Chorvinsky 1993). Shiels has also offered photos of the “Lough Leane aquatic monster,” allegedly made near Killarney Island in 1981, and of a sea serpent named Morgawr. Unfortunately, these two double-humped, long-necked creatures are “strikingly similar,” possibly, according to one researcher, “shot using the same technique, that of a sculpted plasticine monster stuck onto a pane of glass in front of the camera” (Chorvinsky 1993).

  Still other Nessie photos may not be hoaxes but depict some natural object, such as driftwood or a swimming deer. A motion picture film taken in 1960 by monster hunter Tim Dinsdale was analyzed by the Royal Air Force’s Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center, which concluded that the moving object, seen from a mile away, could be a motorboat. Indeed, Dinsdale reported that the object was a reddish brown color, to which Binns responded in The Loch Ness Mystery Solved: “An object which appears reddish brown at such a distance is clearly something which is relatively brightly coloured. Reddish brown is a reasonable color for a motor boat, but an unusual one for a Loch Ness monster” (Binns 1984, 107–25).

  UNDERWATER SEARCHES

  An underwater photo taken in 1972 by Robert Rines and a crew from his Academy of Applied Science garnered considerable media attention for its supposed depiction of a “flipper” from an unknown creature. As it happens, the computer-enhanced picture was found to have been “significantly altered to give the impression of the flipperlike objects that appear in the published version” (Razdan and Kielar, 1984–85). The unaltered picture could depict virtually anything (figure 1.4). In addition, the academy’s sonar evidence, which Rines cited as supporting his interpretation of the “flipper” photograph, was discredited by an expert review (Razdan and Kielar, 1984–85).

  Figure 1.4 Underwater picture supposedly of a monster's flipper, made in 1972 by Robert Rines (above), was heavily enhanced. The unenhanced picture (below) isn’t proof of anything. (Photos courtesy of the Academy of Applied Science)

  Defensively, Rines told 60 Minutes II (December 5, 2001): “I’m crazy, I’m crazy. You know Christopher Columbus; I’m nowhere near the great man he was, and he was told by all the people who knew everything about science, everything about geography, ‘Don’t go Chris, you’re gonna drop off the end of the flat earth.’” He added, “Sometimes too much knowledge prevents you from even looking.”

  In 2003, a team sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) surveyed the entire loch “using 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology.” The team speculated on how a marine reptile like the plesiosaur, which became extinct with the dinosaurs, might have survived in Loch Ness’s cold waters. The researchers studied the habits of such marine reptiles as leatherback turtles and crocodiles to determine how a plesiosaur might have behaved. According to a press release (BBC 2003), “They hoped the instruments aboard their search boat would pick up the air in Nessie’s lungs as it reflected a distorted signal back to the sonar sensors.” Although the team did locate a submerged buoy used to test the equipment’s capacity, they found no trace of the fabled monster. Reported one of the searchers, “We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one, we have covered everything in this loch and we saw no signs of any large living animal in the loch.” A colleague added, “We got some good clear data of the loch, steep sided, flat bottomed—nothing unusual I’m afraid. There was an anticipation that we would come up with a large sonar anomaly that could have been a monster—but it wasn’t to be” (BBC 2003).

  To test people’s perceptions, the BBC team secretly raised a fence post in front of a group of tourists. Although most later said that they had seen a squarish object, several who were asked to make sketches drew “monster-shaped heads” (BBC 2003).

  Another search was conducted later that year by Lloyd Scott, who completed a twenty-six-mile, twelve-day walk along the loch’s bottom to raise money for children suffering from leukemia. Wearing an old-fashioned diving suit from the 1940s, fitted with a metal helmet that weighed forty pounds, Scott reported not a single sighting of Nessie, instead describing the experience as “very cold and very lonely” (Loch Ness 2003).

  CONCLUSION

  Despite these and other extensive searches over the years, no authentic trace of the monster has ever been discovered. As Time magazine once reported, there would have to be at least twenty animals in a “breeding herd” for the species to continue rep
roducing over the centuries (Myth 1972).

  REFERENCES

  Barr, Robert. 2001. Tremors get credit for Nessie. Albuquerque Journal, June 28.

  BBC “proves” Nessie does not exist. 2003. Release from BBC News. http://news vote.bbc.co.uk.

  Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness mystery solved. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  _____. 1995. Letter to Joe Nickell, December 11. Quoted in Nickell 1996.

  Boese, Alex. 2005. Loch Ness monster tooth. Museum of Hoaxes Web site. www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/forum/forum_comments/2964/.

  Chorvinsky, Mark. 1993. Our strange world: The Lough Leane monster photograph investigation. Fate (March): 31–35, (April): 31–34.

  Genoni, Tom. 1994. After 60 years, the most famous of all the “Nessie” photos is revealed as a hoax. Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 4 (summer): 338–40.

  Gould, Rupert T. 1934. The Loch Ness monster. London: Geoffrey Bles. Reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976.

  Hoggart, Simon, and Mike Hutchinson. 1995. Bizarre beliefs. London: Richard Cohen Books, 196–99.

  Loch Ness is cold at the bottom. 2003. Albuquerque Tribune, November 10.

  Myth or monster. 1972. Time 20:66.

  Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a miracle. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  _____. 1994. Camera clues: A handbook for photographic investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 170–71.

  _____. 1995. Entities: Angels, spirits, demons, and other alien beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  _____. 1996. Nessie hoax redux. Skeptical Briefs 6, no. 1 (March): 1–2.

  Radford, Benjamin. 2003. Extensive Loch Ness search by BBC team yields no monster. Skeptical Inquirer 27, no. 6 (November–December): 7–8.

  Razdan, R., and A. Kielar. 1984–85. Sonar and photographic searches for the Loch Ness monster. Skeptical Inquirer 9, no. 2 (winter): 147–58.

  Smith, Richard D. 1995. The classic Wilson Nessie photo: Is the hoax a hoax? Fate (November): 42–44.