Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, who with his son Walter is chiefly responsible for this explanation of the ‘Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction’, has no doubts about its truth. Twenty-five years ago I dedicated my only non-science-fiction novel, Glide-Path, to Luis and his wartime radiation lab colleagues, with whom I worked in 1942. When I recently updated the Preface, I mentioned that the debate over his theory ‘now rages furiously’. He corrected me at once:
Had you written that sentence a few years ago, I couldn’t disagree. But now, the ball game is over, and everyone who has taken the trouble to examine the evidence is convinced that we were right … Our theory – more accurately our discovery – that the K-T extinction was caused by the impact of a 10-kilometre diameter object is no longer controversial, in the scientific sense of that word.
Certainly controversial, however, is the theory that even a small-scale exchange of nuclear weapons could cause similar ecological effects, so that the whole world, and not merely the target areas, would be devastated by the effects of a ‘nuclear winter’. If this is true, the entire human race is held hostage by the stockpiles of a few nations.
Perhaps evolution is about to repeat itself. It may well be that we mammals would still be scurrying nervously in the undergrowth if a multi-megaton explosion sixty-five million years ago had not eliminated the giant beasts who were then the masters of the earth. Are we about to repeat the scenario – and make way for our successors – the cockroaches?
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4 – Strange Tales from the Lakes
The waves came crashing onto the shore and we both immediately rushed to see what was happening. Only minutes before we had remarked on the stillness of the loch.
There was obviously something very large in the water moving at great speed close to the shore.
Initially, I could see one black hump-like object but it submerged. Then within seconds I could see two objects, one of which I took to be the tail.
I watched spellbound for some time before the creature dived deeply, creating a considerable displacement of water and disappeared.
Thus Mrs Dilys Fisher, a teacher from the south of England, claimed to have spotted the Loch Ness monster in August 1982. At the time of the sighting, Mrs Fisher and her husband were repairing a hired moped in a lay-by on the A82 Inverness to Fort William road. As they tinkered with the engine, they heard ‘a sudden, violent movement’ in the loch.
Four years later, in August 1986, three teenaged girls working for the summer at the Loch Ness Hotel, Drumnad-rochit, were standing near Urquhart Castle, a picturesque ruin on the northern shore. It was near midnight. The loch was quiet. But they claim that when they looked out over the water, they saw a dark shape in the middle of the loch.
‘It had a large hump at one end and a smaller hump at the other,’ said Catriona Murray. ‘At first we thought it was an island, but then we realized there are no islands in that part of Loch Ness.’
Catriona’s companion, Sharon Boulton, was equally astonished. ‘It kept appearing and disappearing,’ she said, ‘and, despite its massive size, we could not hear a sound. It could not have been an illusion because we all saw it.’
The girls tried to rouse the occupants of a nearby house, but no one stirred. Instead, they stopped a passing milk lorry and its driver obligingly shone his headlights over the water. But there was nothing unusual to be seen: just the glinting water, unruffled by humps.
As these stories suggest, public interest in the puzzle of the Loch Ness monster has not declined in recent years. The dedicated hunters have been as active as ever, and so, apparently, has Nessie herself, for eye-witnesses continue to come forward with claimed sightings of the world’s most famous lake monster. Most ambitious of all the recent schemes to find definitive proof of Nessie’s existence came in 1984, when a huge tubular trap, 80 ft (25 m) long and made of fibreglass, was airlifted into the loch.
Despite rising winds, helicopter pilot Jim Wood dropped it precisely on target off Horseshoe Scree near Fort Augustus; and the trap’s designer, a twenty-five-year-old civil servant called Steve Whittle, his sponsors – a vodka company – and the British public, settled down to the kind of wait every fisherman knows is essential to ensure a catch.
Whatever she is [said Whittle] Nessie must be aware of exactly what is going on in the loch, every corner of which she will know as well as you or I know our own living rooms.
For that reason, we have made the trap as flimsy in appearance as possible, and will leave her to get used to it for a couple of weeks. She will undoubtedly be afraid of it at first, but will eventually see salmon and trout swimming through it as they become accustomed to its presence.
Then, hopefully, she will become braver and will not be able to resist the temptation of a concentration of a shoal of 40 salmon in one place.
But patience was not rewarded. The trap – designed merely to detain the monster for photography and examination by a zoologist – was never sprung.
Other researchers took to the air in the Goodyear blimp Europa, but its crew of twenty-five failed to spot anything out of the ordinary as they cruised above the loch at a stately thirty-five miles per hour.
Theories advanced to explain the monster’s elusive nature and its reasons for taking up residence in Loch Ness have become weirder and wilder. ‘Is Nessie a Giant Squid?’ asked a writer in Britain’s journal of strange phenomena, Fortean Times. Meanwhile, in 1983, monster-hunter Eric Beckjord explained his new idea to reporters:
I am beginning to think of it this way: you need a pair of polaroid glasses to see the laminations on your car windscreen.
What if there is a monster and it has quasi- or pseudo-invisibility? The human eye cannot register the whole spectrum of light. We cannot see infra-red.
Maybe Nessie’s coat has some sort of colour that doesn’t show up too good on most people’s retinas. That would explain a lot.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest that little has changed. At Loch Ness the heyday of monster-hunting seems to be over. Ironically, the fiftieth anniversary in 1983 of the first eyewitness claims to receive worldwide attention prompted a resurgence of scepticism, and the idea that an unknown creature may lurk in the loch has been subjected to a number of carefully researched and skilfully argued attacks.
At the same time, the ever-optimistic investigators have set out for lake-shores new in pursuit of creatures which, many believe, have survived in their freshwater fastnesses since prehistoric times.
Reports that a monster had been seen rearing up out of the waters of Lake Hanas, China, were investigated by technicians from Xinjiang University in 1980. They travelled to the lake, which is set deep in thickly forested mountains 500 miles north of Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur region, and laid bait in the water. All they saw, however, was ‘a large red shape’, which approached the bait before disappearing back into the depths.
In Canada, in the 1980s, a weird pair of creatures was said to inhabit Saddle Lake and Christina Lake in Alberta. Ray Makowecki, Director of the region’s Fish and Wildlife Department, told enquirers:
We’ve received so many reports of the creatures at both lakes that we’ve had to take them seriously. There is no obvious and logical explanation.
Besides their heads which are shaped like horses’, and their eyes which are the size of saucers, the most astonishing feature is their hair, something like Bo Derek’s hair-do in the film 10. And all of the reports were from trusted and very credible people.
In 1982 a Polish newspaper, Kurter Polski, described how a student swimming in Zegrzynski Lake near Warsaw claimed he had been confronted by a beast with ‘an enormous slimy black head with rabbit-like ears’. He struck out for the shore at once and when he got there the creature had disappeared, leaving only ‘huge ripples’ to show where it had been.
A Russian writer, Anatoly Pankov, reported on the hunt for a greyish, long-necked creature apparently seen since the 1950s by several witnesses in Lake Labinkir in the province of Yakutia in Siberia. A group of geologists said it made a sound ‘much like a child’s cry’, while some reindeer-hunters claimed they had watched it coil up out of the water and snaffle a passing bird. Pankov tells of another hunter who took ingenious revenge on the monster after it had swallowed his dog. First he made an animal-skin raft and then piled it high with red-hot coals before pushing it out over the water. The monster duly took the bait and dived away, only to reappear a few moments later ‘making terrible sounds’.