In 220 pages, many of the accepted ‘facts’ about the monster are entertainingly challenged, and the book should certainly be read in full by anyone planning an expedition to Loch Ness. Here are a couple of examples of Binns’ and Bell’s well-argued ‘demolition jobs’:
The first concerns the idea, much loved by Nessie’s ‘biographers’, that eyewitness accounts of monster sightings can be traced far back into history. Binns and Bell decided to go back to the original sources of these tales, and what they found convinced them that ‘under scrutiny, the legends of Loch Ness all vanish into thin air’.
For example, a neolithic carved stone found near the loch is said to portray the monster, when in fact it carries a Pictish design common throughout Scotland. Frequently quoted references to sightings in 1520, 1771 and 1885 come from what the authors call ‘an eccentric letter which appeared in The Scotsman on 20 October 1933’. They add that the letter-writer ‘failed to supply either his address or any specific references to the chronicles or publications wherein his weird and wonderful stories could be found’.
References to a Loch Ness monster in the works of a Greek historian called Dio Cassius, who wrote a history of Rome in about A.D. 200, or to an article apparently containing a woodcut of the creature in the Atlanta Constitution for November 1896 turn out not to exist. Even St Columba’s encounter with a ‘water beast’ in the River Ness, reported in a life of the saint written in A.D. 565, is persuasively dismissed on the grounds that the River Ness is some way from the loch and is separated from it by another lake; the ‘water beast’ is merely one of a cast of many obviously mythical creatures introduced into the story to show that Columba possessed magical powers.
The authors’ second target is a man known to generations of monster-seekers. For decades, Alex Campbell was the water bailiff of Loch Ness, employed by the local Fisheries Board. A mesmeric raconteur and therefore much sought-after by television programme makers and journalists, Campbell claimed to have seen the monster no less than eighteen times, and Binns and Bell aptly dub him ‘the self-appointed high priest of the loch’s mysteries, always at hand with advice and inspiration for new devotees of his fabulous beast’.
They reveal that Campbell’s role in the Loch Ness monster story has been under-estimated. Campbell was not only the water bailiff; he was also a part-time journalist, filing stories from the Fort Augustus end of the loch for the two local papers, the Inverness Courier and the Northern Chronicle. The first monster report to capture national attention – the sighting by Mr and Mrs John Mackay of Drumnadrochit in April 1933 – can be traced to his colourful pen.
Binns and Bell point out that it makes curious reading, for the article is strikingly lacking in journalistic objectivity. Indeed, it reads as though it has been written by someone determined to convince his readers that they should share his passionate belief in the existence of the monster.
The authors of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved also express surprise at the sheer number of Campbell’s claimed sightings, their elaborately lurid detail, the fact that he was one of the very few who claimed to have seen Nessie at close range, and that there was a ‘curious absence’ of any objective evidence in the way of photographs to back up his tales. Most telling of all, however, are their revelations about Campbell’s account of his ‘best’ sighting. It was a story he loved to tell, and it duly made the pages of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World:
I heard the sound of two trawlers coming through the canal from the West. Suddenly there was this upsurge of water right in front of the canal entrance. I was stunned. I shut my eyes three times to make sure I was not imagining things – the head and the huge humped body were perfectly clear. I knew right away that the creature was scared because of its behaviour. The head was twisting about frantically.
It was the thud, thud of the engines that was the reason for its upset. As soon as the bow of the first trawler came within my line of vision, that’s when it was in its line of vision too, and it vanished out of sight, gone. I estimated the length of the body as 30 ft at least, the height of the head and neck above water level as 6 ft, and the skin was grey.
Campbell gave several different dates for this episode, which does not help his case, but far more damning is the fact that the loquacious water bailiff apparently explained it away in a letter to his employers in 1933. First, he describes what he saw:
I noticed a strange object on the surface about six hundred yards from where I stood. It seemed to be about 30 feet long, and what I took to be the head was fully 5 feet above the surface of the Loch. The creature, if such it was, and at the time I felt certain of it, seemed to be watching two drifters passing out of the Canal and into Loch Ness; and, whether it was due to imagination or not, I could have sworn that it kept turning its head and also its body very quickly, in much the same way as a cormorant does on rising to the surface. I saw this for fully a minute, then the object vanished as if it had sunk out of sight.
The explanation followed:
Last Friday I was watching the Loch at the same place and about the same time of day. The weather was almost identical – practically calm and the sun shining through a hazy kind of mist. In a short time something very like what I have described came into my line of vision and at roughly the same distance from where I stood.
But the light was improving all the time, and in a matter of seconds I discovered that what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants, and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings, as they often do. The other cormorants, which were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the Monster, as it has been described by various witnesses.
But the most important thing was, that owing to the uncertain light the bodies of the birds were magnified out of proportion to their proper size. This mirage-like effect I have often seen on Loch Ness, although not exactly in the same form as I have just described.
Does it matter that Campbell, in his enthusiasm for his beloved loch and the monster he had done so much to make famous, may have been guilty of the fault, known to many a journalist, of not letting the facts spoil a good story? It may do, for Campbell’s first accounts conditioned visitors to the loch to expect to find evidence of a monster there. Commander Rupert Gould, a noted writer and broadcaster on mysterious phenomena and one of the original investigators of the monster reports in 1933, saw the danger: ‘It is quite true that if you are eagerly on the look-out for something and expect to see it, you are very likely to be misled by anything bearing even a faint resemblance to the thing which you expect to see.’
So how do Binns and Bell interpret the hundreds of monster sightings? Since they believe that no single theory can explain them all, they offer quite a variety, among them swimming deer (‘horned monsters’), otters (at least two of the rare sightings on land turn out to contain, they say, ‘only a marginally exaggerated description of an otter’), floating tar barrels (left over from road improvements), tree trunks (‘single-humped monsters’), and wakes of the many boats that criss-cross the loch. Other sightings they ascribe to mirages.
Alex Campbell was far from being the only person to have seen them: the authoritative six-volume Bathymetrical Survey of the Scottish Fresh-Water Lochs, published in 1910, devotes a special section to mirages seen at Loch Ness. The authors of The Loch Ness Mystery Solved add that the summer of 1933 was particularly fine – ideal mirage conditions.
Binns and Bell were not the only investigators at work. In April 1984 perhaps the most formidable of them all, Steuart Campbell of Edinburgh, published an article in the British Journal of Photography to mark – in a devastatingly back-handed way – the fiftieth anniversary of the taking of one of the most famous of all Loch Ness monster photographs. Known as ‘the surgeon’s picture’, it had been snapped in April 1934 by a London gynaecologist called Robert Kenneth Wilson.