Wilson’s story was that he had been driving along the lochside road early in the morning, when he noticed ‘a considerable commotion on the surface, some distance out from the shore, perhaps two or three hundred yards out. When I watched it for perhaps a minute or so, something broke surface and I saw the head of some strange animal rising out of the water. I hurried to the car for my camera …’ He said he took four photographs, but two of them turned out to be blank when they were developed by the local chemist. One was bought by a newspaper, which published only the section showing the ‘monster’.
Steuart Campbell managed to locate the full print, by then extremely tattered, and looked carefully at both pictures. Wilson had claimed that he had been ‘some hundred feet above the loch’ when the pictures were taken and that the ‘monster’ had been ‘between 150 and 200 yards from the shore’. But using the prints, and calculating the angle from which the pictures must have been taken, Campbell calculated that Wilson had, in fact, been very much nearer the water than he had said. Campbell also showed that the ‘monster’ must be only 28 in (0.70 m) high, observing, ‘That is a rather small monster!’
Finally, Campbell suggested that the photographs probably show an otter. In one – the frame usually published -its tail is visible; in the other, its head. Commented Campbell: ‘It can hardly be an accident that this second picture, which might have revealed the true nature of the object, is out of focus.’ There seemed, in short, to be a distinct element of hoax about the whole thing. This revealing analysis shook one of the main photographic pillars of support for the existence of the Loch Ness monster.
Campbell later moved on to a re-examination of the most famous piece of motion picture evidence, the so-called ‘Dins-dale film’. This was taken on 23 April 1960 by Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer who was on a lone investigation of the monster. On the last morning of his trip, Dinsdale was in his car, rolling down the road near the Foyers Hotel, when he saw a puzzling object about three-quarters of a mile out in the loch.
It was large, dappled, and ‘a distinct mahogany colour’. Dinsdale slammed on the brakes, jumped out and located the object with his binoculars. Now it looked like a living creature – with humps. He started to film, pausing only to rewind the motor of his clockwork cine camera. With only a few feet of film left, he made a desperate dash to the lochside in the hope of a closer shot, but, to his exasperation, by the time he got there the object had disappeared from view.
Shortly afterwards, with good scientific principles in mind, Dinsdale persuaded the owner of the Foyers Hotel to take a dinghy with an outboard motor on to the water and to follow the course taken by the mysterious object. The two sequences could then be compared.
Later, the film was analyzed by experts at JARIC (the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre), a leading British photographic interpretation unit. The centre’s Report Number 66/1 set the seal on the mystery, for the experts opined that the object was not a boat – it had been moving too fast to have been a dinghy with an outboard motor, and was not painted in the bright colours of a power boat. The report’s conclusion brought joy to monster-hunters: ‘One can presumably rule out the idea that it is any sort of submarine vessel for various reasons which leaves the conclusion that it is probably an animate object.’
Some twenty years later, in the Photographic Journal, Steuart Campbell took another look at the report, and discovered what he took to be a crucial flaw. Dinsdale had said that he had not only paused during filming but had also had to stop so that he could wind up his camera. Campbell suggested that he had done this at least twice. This of course meant that the film did not show one continuous sequence. JARIC, however, appeared not to have taken this into account and, by mistakenly contracting the timescale, had reached the wrong conclusion about the speed at which the object had been travelling.
When the pauses between shots had been added to the overall timings, the object and the hotel-owner’s dinghy, which Dinsdale had filmed for comparison, were found to have been moving at a similar rate. Campbell therefore arrived at this no-nonsense verdict: ‘The only mystery about the film is why it should ever have been thought that it showed anything other than a boat, and why JARIC did not reach the right conclusion.’
The arguments, of course, will continue, as they have done now for the past half-century, in the pages of learned journals, in books, in the lochside pubs far into the chilly Highland nights, and on the shores of the great lake itself during long, hopeful vigils. The monster-hunters, assailed as they increasingly are by the carefully researched doubts of the sceptics, can bask in one certainty: the world wants Loch Ness to have a monster. While there is a chance, however faint, that such a creature may exist, the search is sure to go on.
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5 – Of Monsters and Mermaids
The terrors of the deep are genuine enough. In 1985 a large shark was killed in the Gulf of Thailand. In its stomach were the skulls of two men, ‘adults of Caucasian origin’. The same year, sharks, unusually, started taking surfers off the coast of California. The theory emerged that people wearing black wet suits look like seals, one of the sharks’ food sources. In 1986 in Kiribati – once the Gilbert Islands -local fishermen watched in horror as a creature with tentacles grabbed first one and then another of their colleagues and dragged them down to die in the depths.
Recent years have seen some of the mysteries of the deep resolved, others rendered all the more intriguing. Some fears have been allayed. The sea snake, with the deadliest venom in the world, seems to reserve its lethal powers for fellow marine creatures and hardly ever attacks man. Other horrors have been reinforced – not least sharks.
The incident in Kiribati added another makeweight to the balance of evidence which now suggests that there may indeed be truly giant octopuses lurking in the vast biosphere of the sea. There is room enough. Not only does the sea cover nearly three-quarters of the earth’s surface, but its great depths mean that there is perhaps 300 times as much living space than is to be found on the plateaus of earth’s dry land. Reminders of our ignorance are regularly delivered.
In 1984 the fishing vessel Helga netted a megamouth shark off Catalina Island, California – only the second member ever seen of what is now established as an entirely new species. It now floats in a tank of ethanol at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History – a 15-ft (4.5-m) -long symbol of how little we know of the sea. And the marine biologists regularly outline the huge area of darkness in which they operate.
Biologist Malcolm Clarke, studying sperm whales, found in their stomachs not only huge quantities of squid – up to 30,000 squid jaws in one whale’s gut -but species rarely or never caught in the plethora of nets and devices which the scientists use to prospect the sea. Yet the weight of these unknown creatures eaten by whales each year, he calculated, exceeds that of the entire human race put together. The squid, some of them very large to judge by their beaks, must exist in their millions, yet many species rarely fall into the hands of man; there must be many more which man has never seen.
The Giant Octopus
In 1984 a weird series of incidents off the coast of Bermuda gave a hint that the lair of the giant octopus may have been found. It has been clear that this creature is not merely a chimera ever since the day in 1896 when an enormous carcass was washed up on the beach of St Augustine in Florida. The main part of the body weighed around 7 tons and was 18 ft (5.5 m) long by 10 ft (3 m) across. A local naturalist, Dr De Witt Webb, measured two of the tentacles, though he thought they were only stumps, at 23 ft (7 m) and 32 ft (10 m).
His view then was that he was dealing with an octopus of daunting proportions – perhaps 200 ft (60 m) across. His photographs leave no room to doubt the bulk of the animal, but what has sustained modern confidence in the veracity of his attribution was the happy coincidence that a piece of the animal’s flesh was preserved in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. This meant that in 1963 Dr Joseph Gennaro could make a histological analysis. He concluded that the tissue was not from a squid or a whale and was probably from an octopus. But the mystery remains: could such gigantic creatures really exist when the largest octopus otherwise known to man is a mere 23 ft (7 m)?