Forbidden History - Loch Ness: History’s Greatest Hoaxes

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Forbidden History presents History's Greatest Hoaxes According to folklore a large sea monster lurks in the depths of Loch Ness in Scotland. Over the years, grainy photographs and inconclusive video footage has emerged to keep the legend alive. Is it a clever hoax or the real thing? Cast List: Dr. Linda Papadopoulos: Author & Psychologist Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Alex Boese: Author, The World's Greatest Hoaxes Darren Naish: Palaeozoologist, University of Southampton Dick Raynor: Loch Ness Investigator Joe Nickell: Paranormal Investigator Steve Feltham: Record Holding Nessie Hunter Marcus Brigstocke: Author & Comedian Roland Watson: Nessie Blogger Adrian Shine: Leader of the Loch Ness Project Craig Wallace: Maritime Engineer Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Since the photograph's sightings at the beginning of the 20th century, folklore has it that a large, possibly prehistoric sea monster lurks beneath the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland. Over the years, grainy photos and even some tantalizing but inconclusive footage has emerged. to keep the legend of Nessie alive.

But are there any real facts to back up the story, or is it all down to clever hoaxers, the public's wishful thinking, and an eager local tourist industry? The myth of Nessie came out of sort of that local mythology, but then was probably co-opted by a need to perpetuate that myth because it brought some sort of notoriety and monetary gain to the area. All I've ever wanted to do is put my own piece of evidence in that jigsaw puzzle, be it a photograph, be it a piece of film, or at worst, just an eyewitness sighting.

And that would be my life's dream. Anybody that has got anything of a naturalist in him, and I am one, would love him to be a Loch Ness monster. I've been to Loch Ness and chose Loch Ness over the others because you never know. Might be there when it pops up. Every decade or so, a new tantalizing piece of evidence emerges from the depths. Is it because the hotel trade is dipping a little bit around Loch Ness and all we need another sighting, let's get another 10 years prosperity? Could be.

I'm not quite that cynical. I think that these sightings tend to happen when some people get together over a drink and think, let's do another Nessie fake. So powerful is Lock Ness as a mystery. that if we could drain the water away from Loch Ness, search it thoroughly, and satisfy ourselves. There was absolutely no incredible monster, and then fill it back up. We would have the monster would reappear within a day or so. So how much of the Loch Ness monster story has been written by mischievous hoaxers?

Could there really be a large sea monster with prehistoric origins living in the freezing lock? Some locals and many of those who've set out to find it are certain there is. Academics, however, are equally sure that it is all down to hoaxers or simple mis-sidings. What's the truth, then, about Scotland's most enduring story? I think the Loch Ness myth has become so enshrined in Scottish culture that not only would they find it difficult to kind of make it disappear, but I don't think they wanted to. You know, it's something that identifies them as a little bit different,

as a little bit quirky, and something that, again, people will flock to see, and that's to their benefit. There have been, you know, over the last hundred years, thousands, about tens of thousands of sightings, not all of which have been reported, of something in the deeps, that occasionally comes to the source, surface, it moves around pretty quickly on the water, and then it disappears again. Now, are all these people just, you know, is their imagination playing tricks? Are they seeing things? And if they're

seeing things, what exactly are they seeing? Is it an otter? Is it a seal that somehow managed to get all the way through? Is it perhaps a bubbling sort of school of salmon that have all come together and are creating the impression of a much larger single creature? There are lots of possibilities what these people can be seeing. The other possibility, of course, is that when you go to Loch Ness, and no matter how cynical and skeptical you are, it's just human nature to look out across that expanse, that vast expanse of water, and just strain your eyes a little bit more than you would do with any other lake in the world.

And when you do that, oh, you know, was that a log? Was that an otter? You know, you just can almost convince yourself, as I say, no matter. matter how rational you are, that maybe there's something there. The problem with saying, is she real or not, is, you know, it's, you can never disprove a negative. You can search Loch Ness up and down, and they've done that. There's been, Lock Ness has probably been searched more than any other body of water out there.

But the Lach Nessie believers are always going to say, well, you searched. here but maybe she was hiding over there. And so you search there and well what if she was there when you could you just can never entirely disprove nest eat as folklore, she's wonderful. But to academics the Loch Ness monster is just a colorful myth. Dr. Darren Naish is a respected paleo zoologist. He's an expert on rare and extinct species. He says that there's no way that the monster of the legend could exist. So Lochness is quite an unusual geological feature.

It's something like 10 to 15,000 years old, been carved out by a glacier, and then filled in by glacial meltwater. So in geological terms, it's a very young structure. It's not a thing that's been here for tens of millions of years. Now, this idea that if there is a Loch Ness monster, that it is some creature from prehistory, a plesias sort of an animal that's a group of animals that we think went extinct to 60, six million years ago, the idea that those kinds of creatures could persist as relics in the Locke is a complete non-starter.

I think historically we know that people have a fascination with sort of these big undiscovered creatures, so whether it's the abominable snowman or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, there's some people that actually become quite fixated. And interestingly enough, that fixation is sort of self-perpetuating. If I've invested a long time of my life, sort of researching this and believing it, kind of walking away will just punctuate what a waste of time that was.

Do you think people are seeing things that make them think they're seeing monsters, but I don't think we have any good evidence to say that they are seeing unknown species. I think people are seeing known animal species and misidentifying them. And there are all kinds of strange, atmospheric, and lake events that have tricked people

into thinking they've seen unusual things. Loch Ness is a particularly remarkable body of water. I mean it's something like 36 kilometres long and about 2 kilometres wide, so very, very long and very narrow. And we know that the water within it is quite clearly stratified. You have upper layers that are distinct from lower layers, and we have these moving waves within the body of the water. So you have large waves moving the length and from side to side across the lock, which are not always reflected on the surface. Sometimes there is turbulence between these layers, and we do see strange surface effects. effects. There is no compelling scientific evidence for a Loch Ness monster. But I would say

the situation is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that the people today, the trained scientists who are interested in ideas about Lake Monsters and Sea monsters and Loch Ness Monster and so on, there is this growing idea that there's mostly a kind of sociocultural psychological perspective behind these monsters. But despite the academic world and strong opinion that there's nothing even vaguely resembling a monster in the depths of Loch Ness. There are still no shortage of sightings. Dick Rayner was part of the original hunt for the Loch Ness monster back in the 1960s.

He has spent most of his adult life combing its waters, looking for strange creatures, but has never found anything. He agreed to meet with Dr. Darren Nash to review all of the best evidence for the monster collected so far. So the classic Loch Ness Monster image, the famous so-called surgeon's photo of April 1934. Well, I think the story behind this is now quite well known, I would say. From several different sources, it's a prank.

And interestingly, it was supposed to be based on a toy submarine that was adapted by the son, a stepson of Mr. Weatherill. And they made it in London and then drove up. very quickly and photographed it in Loch Ness. The supposed siding took place in 1934, but it was not until 1994 that the man who made the model of Nessie confessed to the hoax. He revealed that two long lines had been attached to the small two-foot model

and then dragged through the waters of Loch Ness. The case for this being a toy submarine with this plastic wood material on top is looking quite strong. The fact that it's from several sources, of several sources, but this I think is the smoking gun, the fact that you can see the wires. I think when you were confronted with a photograph, like this famous photograph taken by the surgeon,

which was supposed to be a sighting of Nasty, it's all about the context within which we see it. We're told that that was taken in a place where there was sighting after sighting for decades of this monster. So your brain is primed to see that. It's primed to see that. It's primed to see within that context, within that story,

what it's been told to look for. If you imagine the situation, say in the 1930s, you've been reading all these reports in the paper about a monster in Loch Ness, and you're a tourist from London, you go up to Loch Ness, and boy, wouldn't it be great if you saw the monster too? So there's some weird disturbance in the water.

Ooh, isn't that the monster? And that's what happened. People's brains just, they'll use the ideas in circulation in society, and they'll project that onto what they're seeing in the actual world. And this happens again and again and again. So we move on to the famous Lackland-Stewart photo of 1951, these three humps, which I think people said

right from the start, that it's obvious they are not in a line, it's not part of an animal. Stuart himself claimed that the animal came charging along the lock and then they had to retreat from the shoreline in fear. It was supposed to be taken on Saturday morning, but if you look at the background of the photograph at the right-hand corner at the top, you can see the sun is facing the camera and the camera's facing west, so that is actually an evening photograph. If it was an evening photograph taken on a Saturday, I doubt very much they could have

got it in the papers on the following morning because that's not the way Sunday papers work. No, wow. We human beings just are drawn to mysteries and some of us want them explained. We can't stand it if you don't let us see the answer. At the same time, some people are inclined not to want the answer. And those people want to keep locked nests or a haunted house, they want to keep them as enduring mysteries. And because of those factors, because of those types of people who want things explained or not explained, you have the media driven to take a mystery and puff it up a bit or

dice it up or expose it. And this was later revealed to be Bales of Hale. wraps in tarpaulin, is that? Yes. A chap called Richard Freer, who lived in Drum the Drocket. He went to visit Lackland Stewart on the business of buying a horse. And although the horse deal fell through, Lackland Stewart actually took him down to the beach

and showed him the bales of hay. Again, I can't really tell from the literature whether people ever really did think that this was meant to be an image of a real animal anyway. It's so strange. As a journalist, there's no doubt. that Nessie makes great copy. And if someone came to me with something pretty damn plausible

that showed that the Loch Ness Monster did exist and it was some kind of dinosaur or plesiosaur, I would think that I had a great story on my hands. I would obviously want to give it as much checking as was possible. If you had a story tomorrow, photo of the Loch Ness Monster, verified not to be a fake, yeah, you would be shifting a lot of newspapers,

And any journalist's name attached that story would be up in lights. Over the past 50 years or so, there have been literally hundreds of sightings of unknown creatures in Loch Ness. They include Peter McNabb's photograph taken in 1955, which appears to show some sort of creature in the lock near the castle. There's also O'Connor's 1960 picture of what looks like an upturned boat in the water. The well-known underwater flipper photo from 1970. And the full-length creature image from 1975, which were taken by the Academy of Applied Science.

That's without mentioning the so-called Muppethead captured in 1977. And the infamous Hugh Gray photo taken in November 1933, which was explained away as a swan. This is the evidence we have, isn't it? This is, we seem to have explained most of it away. These, we've just gone through pretty much all of the, the classic, I mean, there are a few obviously indeterminate photos where we're never going to know what there are ripples in the water and lumps and so on. But all the classic ones, yeah. 80 years and that's all we have. Exactly. Contrary to the scientific views, there are still people that believe that there is something

fascinating living deep in the lock. Steve Feltham is perhaps one of the most well-known Nessie hunters in the world today. He holds the world record for the longest time spent hunting for the creature, having devoted more than two decades to a personal search for the truth about Nessie. He has even built a research facility in his camper van that sits on its banks. I would love it to be a pleasure sore, more than anything, but the odds are so stacked against that. I mean, firstly, you've got 60 million years or 70 million years since the last recorded

plesiasaur. how many ice ages this lark has been through, this lark has formed in that time. You know, it's utterly implausible that we're still looking for plesiosaurs in here. After more than 20 years at the edge of the Loch, Feltham has reached the conclusion that Nessie is most likely to be a Wells Catfish, a species that was introduced to the Loch's waters in Victorian times. Welles catfish are believed to live for at least 50 years, in large freshwater rivers and lakes.

And they can grow up to five meters in length and weigh over 300 kilograms. The catfish is one of the more mundane potential explanations of what we're looking for here. So for that reason alone, I would guess that the scientific community would consider it to be a much nicer prospect than what so many people are still looking for of giant plesiasaws.

and it would be very embarrassing if we all turned out to be right and it was a plesiosaur for them. I think they'd like a catfish to be in here because they'd be justified in not getting excited. It's documented that in the Victorian era, catfish were released for sport in several lakes in England by estates that wanted the fishing. We've got several bigger states on the side of the lark, and it would be in their interest to release a dozen of these Wells catfish into the lark. So Victorian era to 1930s, that's when it reaches maturity. That's when you've got maybe 12 big catfish swimming about in here.

And if they weren't breeding, then in the last 15, 20 years, the numbers would finally reach maturity, drop off and die. That fits with the sightings as well. So that's the best guess as it stands. I think what we're looking at here is sort of conspiracy theory. and theories that aren't grounded necessarily in logic or in science, but rather in the need to believe that something really exciting is out there. And I think that's admirable.

I think the type of person that would do this is probably someone who probably has quite an obsessive element to their personality, right? So once they focus on something, they can't let it go. But also, you've got to remember that once you focus on something and become known as the authority on that, Well, that's very reinforcing, right? So if you're getting invited to speak about these things and to write about these things, you know, you're not going to want to believe that it's not true. Bloaks are much more drawn to this sort of stuff.

There seem to be far fewer women who look at this and go, that I'm going to devote my life to that, to proving that there's a thing here. So quite often blokes, and, you know, if I were being cruel and cynical, which, let's face it is my job. I would say quite lonely, don't quite fit in.

It was either that or a life in stand-up. You know? I am that close to being a full-time Nessie Hunter. I'm just a lone Nessie Hunter with big pair of binoculars, 35-mill camera with a 400 lens on it, and a video camera. And I'm like a coiled spring

ready for Nessie when it comes. up, it's just two and a half decades of being a coiled spring waiting for that sighting. Given that we've had all sorts of pinger devices going up and down that lock, looking for Nessie, no sign whatsoever. Is it time to give up and say that actually there isn't a lock Ness Monster? All I'm currently saying is that looking at all the evidence, talking to all the eyewitnesses, the most likely solution is a thing called a Wells Catfish. I'm not saying that's the answer I'm not saying the mystery solved for one minute

and I'm not saying I'm about to stop I'm still looking for a better explanation than that Why do seemingly rational people believe that there are these monsters out there Maybe these kind of monsters out there represent the dark corners of our subconscious which we're projecting out onto the world Or maybe in this kind of modern,

civilized world where we seem to have tamed nature so much and domesticated everything, maybe there's an enormous appeal to think that these fantastic, untamed wild bits of prehistory still somehow exist out there. I think there is something absolutely splendid about people like Steve Felton and I say frankly good on him. I think anybody who decides to abandon a just a normal humdrum life, sell their house and dedicate their life to sitting on the side of a lake in Scotland with a pair of binoculars and trying to spy the Loch Nose monster, then great. You know, the world needs eccentrics like that. Is he enjoying himself? Is he having fun? Does he entertain us? Does he teach us in some way something about, you know, that human desire to know the

unnerable? Yes, he does. And, you know, good on him. But Steve Feldham isn't the only obsessive Nessie Hunter still keeping a close watch from the waters of the lock. Roland Watson is a prominent Nessie blogger who believes, despite the doubters, that it really has been seen by many local people over the years. He also believes that he will capture the Loch Ness monster on camera. It's just a question of time. Watson has set up motion-activated cameras around the edge of the lock. I get my motion detection camera out.

On and off, I've been using it for maybe three years now. I guess I'm interesting pictures of cormorants, herons, canoes, boats, people looking at the camera and there, no monsters yet. You like it, you want to get the background in to prove it was taken at Loch Ness. And then you want something which gets as much as lit over the front in as well because waves tend to trigger the motion detection. So it's a kind of halfway house between not too high, not too low for these factors. This range is limited because, as I said, it's 60 feet.

So probably the odds are getting something big passing you at that range. And remember the lock is about 27 square miles. There's a lot of room to not appear in front of this camera. I do believe there's creatures here. I'm intrigued by the... mystery and the romance of it as well, the fact that in a body of water, there's four hour drives from my house there's claims of a large 30-foot creature swimming just below the surface here.

And that's attracted thousands of people in the past. Many people come up searching for it. They just want to be the person who gets that definitive picture, that a bit of footage which who will convince those who don't believe there's anything in here. The central appeal of the Loch Ness monster is this idea of a prehistoric creature still alive in the present day world. Recently, one researcher pointed out the extraordinary coincidence that just a few weeks before the first major sightings of Nessie in 1933, what movie has a movie happened to open, but King Kong, which had a scene in it where people are attacked by a giant

dinosaur. So you have this history of this fascination with the idea that what if dinosaurs, this fascination with dinosaurs and what if they were still alive in the present world? If we try and imagine how the lockness animal could hypothetically be discovered, it is not going to be some person chasing it on a boat and hooking the monster by the tail. If this creature is real, it's either so elusive or it's so powerful that those aren't really possibilities on the cards. It's going to be through somebody discovering some biological trace of the creature. Now, we tend to think, if I mentioned biological traces, we think of like a dead body, a rotting body. But of course, today, the state we're out with science now is we can detect the existence

of animals by their DNA in the water, the skin that they sloth off their body, their waste products, this is called eDNA, environmental DNA. People have discovered, documented many species that they've never seen, but they found their DNA in seawater and lake water. Well, at the moment, there are no indications at Loch Ness that there is the DNA of any unknown, weird animal here. Despite their differences of opinion, boat captain Dick Rayner agreed to take Roland Watson out onto the lock.

Roland, what we're going to do just now is to head out across to Urquhart Castle, the scene of the McNabb photograph. And then after that we'll head over across the lock to the other side over the deepest part of the lock. We've had a couple of well-known photographs taken here. I think proportionally we see a lot of stuff here. We read in the past old newspaper reports that made themselves the ways into books and such things. This is in some sense as an important part of the lock for the Nessie story.

purely because it's so wide open. So many people visit the castle, they stop here, they look out in the lock. And just because of that, people are going to see more stuff on the surface, whether it's real or not. People see what they expect to see. So whether it's the face of your favorite deity and your potato chips because you're particularly religious, or whether it's a giant monster in a lock,

because you really want it to be true. The fact that a lot of people, see it doesn't necessarily make it more true, but we think it makes it more true. I think this is one of the other idiosyncrasies of hoaxes and how people formulate beliefs. We tend to believe what most people believe. Expectant attention explains a lot at Loch Ness. That is to say, we bring to Loch Ness our expectations and our attention to look at, something that might fit that.

So, no matter what we see, it might be, it might be a wave, it might be a piece of floating driftwood, it might be three or four ducks. It could be a very incredible-looking creature that does look pretty much like the myth says. Whatever it is, your mind is already set to see Nessie. So one of the things we can say quite confidently

about the way people behave is that no, person is a blank slate. Nobody will come to Loch Ness and not be thinking of the monster. Everyone will have in their mind this kind of image of what it's meant to look like. People come to Loch Ness with a Loch Ness monster bias. And I think this explains why some, well, why there are so many sightings, but also why so many of the sightings are really kind of vague and unsatisfactory. If someone said to you they saw a surging wave or a little dark hump on the water, many other places around the world, you wouldn't pay any attention to it. It would just be dismissed as well that was a, you know, a fish or a lump in the

water. At Loch Ness people will see that and they will automatically fixate on it being a monster. They will specifically identify it as a monster. So it's almost true to say that people do see Loch Ness monsters but they're not seeing an unknown giant animal. They're seeing their kind of projections on natural phenomena and other animal species. Adrian Schein is very much the godfather of Loch Ness. He's been searching for the truth for over 40 years and today runs the most popular museum in the area. He is now convinced, however, that there is nothing to be discovered. We've been looking at the Loch Ness question for quite a long time now, and I would say

that Loch Ness is not Jurassic Park. In the sort of paleontological realm, I don't think that there is a Loch Ness monster. People sometimes ask me, do I deeply resent the hoaxes? Well, the answer is that a lot of the subject is founded within hoaxes. The surgeon's picture being perhaps one of the best examples, the flipper picture on another level is another one because they have had enormous popular appeal. To understand what's happening with hoaxes and forgeries and the like, we have to sort of define the word gullible because it's a very natural thing to be interested in something

new. Reasonable people should appreciate hearing of about new discoveries and the like. The problem is, gullible people, gullibility means that you persist even when you shouldn't. When someone has warned you, this is very unlikely. There are warning signs here at the point, and the person persists.

Then we call that person gullible. And that is not a good thing, and that's when the people who perpetrate hoaxes like to make fun of them or realize they can make money from them. We are in a golden age of hoaxes thanks to the internet. I think the idea that somehow we could train ourselves to be immune to hoaxes is absurd. There's always going to be fallibility.

There's just no way around it. And in fact, one, perhaps the first step to resisting hoax is to accept how fallible we are and how accept the kind of biases and the way that our brains don't assess evidence rationally. I once looked for Loch Ness monsters. I am now looking for what it is that people are seeing. And actually, what it is about Loch Ness, which generates monsters, because there are some rather strange things and counterintuitive things. things that do happen here which actually create the forms of illusion that then

confirm the cultural stereotypes of what you might expect to see here. Shine knew years ago that the surgeon's photo was a hoax and even had a modern version of the remote control Nessie that caused such a stir at the time. One last small thing in relation to the surgeon's picture and it is actually a small thing. It is something that I've had some success with in reconstructing the surgeon's picture. It can be quite convincing when filmed in black and white on a calm surface because those waves around the surgeon's picture are not big waves.

You can all tell. They're just oily little ripples. The skepticism of the scientificity community hasn't held back projects on the lock and discovering what, if anything, lies beneath its waters. One setup operation employs a two million pound URV or underwater remote vehicle to scan the hidden depths of the lock. So the mission we've run was a general overview assessment. The primary aim was to assess the real seafloor and where the bank meets that real seafloor. So the sonar is capable of visualizing

actually the water column, so it sends out this energy, and it looks between the fish, our vehicle, and the seafloor, and we look for anything in that water column. You'll see schools of fish, you'll see salmon sturgeon, some people even claim that sturgeon come into the loch, so you'd be able to see that. And as small as maybe 30 centimetre fish, you'd be capable of identifying.

The problem is, of course, we're flying quite low, so there's always a chance there's something big above us. I think if some more money's put into the investigation, as technology improves. If for example we investigate the bottom of the lock and look for carcasses, bones, that kind of thing could definitively prove that there was a monster there and possibly there still is.

Now got quite a few studies on the ecology of the lock that demonstrate the biological productivity here is so low. Yes, you can support fish. Yes, you can have a few birds that eat waterweed and small fish, but it seems that there is not the content here, the nutrient productivity, to allow the survival of any animal any bigger than like a salmon. We know there are salmon and char and pike here and so on. There is not the possibility of a persistent population of large animals, which remember,

Lachnese Aficionados tell us these creatures have been here for not just decades, but centuries, even hundreds of thousands of years, that is not plausible. The loch is so huge, it's one of the largest freshwater bodies in Europe, and to be able to survey it simultaneously, it's simply cost prohibitive. You would need 10 of these vehicles all on the surface, all to sail the whole lock at the exact same time. And in addition to that, because of the steep contours, there's every possibility that there's hidden channels,

caves, subsea caves, there could be any form of subsea network. So there's always the possibility that she's hiding there somewhere. The underwater remote vehicle, Munin, picked up an unidentified mass on the bottom of the lock. Closer analysis revealed there was something quite unexpected. The mass appeared to be monster-shaped. This discovery by Adrian Schein and his Norwegian crew of actual Nessie, right on the floor of the lock, is exciting. Not the least of which is because it actually is the Ness Monster faked.

It's some kind of model or contraption from an early movie and is sunk. It will have zero effect in debunking the Ness legend. People will say, well, okay, there's a counterfeit monster, so that doesn't tell us there's not a real monster because what people were seeing quite clearly in many cases was not a contraption. So did the Nessie of legend ever exist? Or have the hoaxes merely combined

with a keen local knack for publicity? So I think this massive amount of variation that people say they see within Loch Ness monsters reflects the fact that these are not encounters with a single unknown animal. These are encounters with all manner of natural phenomena. There certainly is not a core of reports that have anatomical consistency and would make a scientific person think that, yes, those do sound like good descriptions of a real unknown animal. What we see is often culturally informed.

If you see something you don't understand or immediately identify in Loch Ness, then your processor will search for what should be in Loughness and what should there be in Loughness, but a Loughness monster. It's not kind of inconceivable to assume there was some clever sort of hotel owners that decided, well, here's a great story to say. So Edinburgh has all those great ghost stories. What we need here is something a little bit different. little bit different. How about a Loch Ness monster? And decades and decades after that, people still,

if you're going that way, if you're going up north in Scotland, you're going to pass by and see that lock just in case. I've heard a figure that Lachnesi is responsible for over 60 million pounds and revenue annually for the Scottish tourism industry. Certainly the hotel industry up there is in no hurry to debunk Nessi. On the other hand, you can say that it's a harmless legend, maybe, maybe it just adds. Maybe people who are visiting don't really believe, but it's, you know, they think maybe we'll see Nessi,

maybe they won't. So is it really hurting anybody? I'm not sure, I don't know. I think any tourist who goes to Loch Ness, whether they're from Milwaukee, or whether they're from Johannesburg, or whether they're from Taiwan, goes there with a secret expectation that they are going to see the Loch Ness monster, and better still, they might even video or photograph it. And so when you go to Loughness, now which one of us isn't going to think,

I just wonder whether I'm going to see something. And when you look out across that water, you think, that little change of light is that something emerging? You know, that twig is that the dorsal fin of some terrific monster that's been there for millions of years? So, of course, it's human nature, yeah, and you get caught up, and it is like a kind of mass psychosis. It is like a kind of collective delusion.

The locals have different ideas. They have different motives. Some genuinely believe some have seen something. Others see it more as a financial opportunity, a tourist trade thing. Because this is an ongoing debate, there's no final explanation or solution on the table here. Being a skeptic is not the same thing as being a debunker or a dismissor because I want to be wrong. I want to be able to see a Loch Ness monster.

All the time we've been here, I've been looking out of the lock and taking photographs of things. I haven't seen anything yet that really amaze me. But I do not dismiss out of hand the possibility I could be wrong at any moment. My conclusions are based on my understanding of the evidence as it stands right now. The fact is, despite many eyewitness sightings or final conclusive photographs, no physical proof has yet to be seen. So, happily for all, the Nessie legend lives on.