Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster?

Episode Date: December 31, 2022

People have believed something strange lives in Loch Ness for at least 3500 years. Thousands of people have sighted the Loch Ness Monster and dozens of expeditions have been launched. But does the fact that nothing’s been found mean it’s not real? Find out in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Go to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody and happy New Year! It's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen a nice, easy, interesting episode that doesn't require too many brain cells. Just a neat story about the centuries-long hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. Maybe you can listen on New Year's Day when you're on the couch, or to help you unwind from the holidays, or to help you sleep. This one would be good for sleeping.

So sit back, relax, mellow out, and enjoy this episode. Happy New Year to you all, and to my sweet wife, Yumi, happy birthday. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Jerome Rowland over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know. Is that Frankenstein, you nutjob?

Is that Frankenstein, or what? No. You got your arms extended like it is. No, those are arms, those are flippers. Oh, I see. I'm a monster. Oh, okay, that was Groundskeeper Willie? Close.

Yeah, that was pretty good, Josh. Right in country. Are we, are you doing like a Loch Ness monster impression? Man, you're good. I use the powers of deduction, like Sherlock Holmes did in the private life of Sherlock Holmes. Ooh, look at that little bit of foreshadowing. By the way, we covered a bit of this, everyone we know, in Sea Monsters four years ago, but

we felt this monster was so great, or she perhaps. Yeah, maybe. The Nessie deserved her own space. Let's just go with there. Sure, why not? So yeah, I went back, I was like, I feel like we definitely did a Loch Ness episode, but no, it's just a little passage in the Sea Monster episode. So we'll flesh that out a little bit, okay?

Sure. So Chuck, let's go back about 10,000 years. Ooh. Okay. We need a lot of kerosene in the wayback machine. Yeah. And excrement? Farts.

Can I say that? Well, you just did. All right, we'll see if that stays. So human farts and kerosene apparently now power the wayback machine. Oh, it always did. Maybe Jerry will add some extra sound effects. So here we are, and we're actually chucking the land that will become Scotland in a few thousand years.

And if you'll look right there, right there, there's a glacier retreating. It's melting. As it's melting, it's filling up this gouge in the earth, and this gouge, Chuck, is eventually going to be called Loch Ness. That's right. And this gouge, my friend, as you know, is not huge as far as square miles go, but it's very, very deep. It is.

So Loch Ness is long and narrow, and it was created when an ice sheet gouged the rocky earth in Scotland 10,000 years ago, and then the ice melted and filled it in, basically like I just said. And it was a deep gouge, not very wide, but it's deeper than the North Sea, which surrounds Scotland. It looks like 36 kilometers or 23 miles long. And then, most recently, the newest deep, it's depth, is measured at close to 900 feet, which is staggering.

Yeah. So it's like 1,000th the size of Lake Michigan, but it's three and a half times deeper than Lake Erie. Man, that's deep. That is very, very deep. For a lake. It's also really dark, too, because the runoff from the land around it, it's very peat-rich, which is black.

And so that runoff goes into the lake, and it turns the lake a very, very dark color. So it looks mysterious. You can look at Loch Ness. I've never been there personally, aside from this time now that we're here. But from what I understand, it is like a nice, mysterious-looking lake. Yeah. And I mean, I've always thought it looked creepy, but it's beautiful, really, but there's something about deep, dark, and reputed monsters that'll do that to you over the years.

Yeah. Like lakes in Georgia, I heard once that there's no natural lake in Georgia, that every single lake in Georgia is man-made by power company. I mean, as far as I know, that's true. There may be a natural lake somewhere that I don't know about in the mountains, but I think they're supposedly all Georgia power lakes, aren't they? That's what I understand. And every single one of them, I mean, they're no deeper than like 30, 40, 50 feet.

It's not very deep at all as far as lakes go. And a lot of them have like flooded structures. Like they built a dam and like the water built up around it and flooded like towns or whatever. For sure. Like there's a gulf station under Lake Lanier, I believe, right? Yeah. I mean, there are automobiles, supposedly, and old remnants of houses under a lot of these lakes.

It's a brother-in-law art, though, when they flooded the valley. Exactly. Same thing. So when you're swimming in a lake in Georgia and it's just like 30, 40, 50 feet deep, you can just feel everything underneath you. Imagine what it must be like swimming in a lake and feeling that there's 900 feet between you and the bottom of this lake and what all is there. Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like you could probably sense that feeling. Right. So if you put all this together, you can kind of say, well, of course people are saying that there's something in Loch Ness. You can just look at it and think, there's got to be something hiding under there. And apparently that's been the case for many, many thousands of years from what we understand. Yeah.

I mean, this was, I had no idea that this went back that far, but there were these people way back in the day called the PICTS, P-I-C-T-S, and they were a tattoo-covered tribe who were fierce warriors and the Romans named them, painted ones, I guess, because of their tattoos. And they carved these, I guess they're just like, it says standing stones, but like little carving like wall carvings? No, they're like, it's a freestanding carved stone that has like pictures of animals on them.

But is it like a sculpture? No, it's like a flat stone that they used as basically like a canvas. But it's a stone, it's a freestanding stone. All right, because I saw the pictures, but they were so close up, you couldn't really get that big image. But long story short, there were actually, you know, animals and things like everyone else that drew on cave walls, you would draw what's around you and everything can pretty much be explained except for this one.

They carved the Loch Ness monster, we'll just go ahead and say it. Yeah, it looks like kind of a seahorsy kind of thing or, you know, and this article, one of the articles we used was from Nova, PBS's Nova series, and they basically point out that if you look at all the other carvings that the pigs made, they're immediately identifiable what animal they were drawing. With this particular one called the picked beast, no one has any idea. And they're like, oh, okay, well, it was the Loch Ness monster that they drew. Right, or an elephant that's swimming.

Maybe. Which, well, I don't want to spoil it, but elephants do swim a long distance. Yeah, that's the thing that connects the two episodes today, isn't it? That's right. Swimming elephants, who'd have thought? That one thing. So the pigs, at least as far as 1500 years ago, were drawing pictures of sea monsters around Scotland.

And there's a lot of legends of sea monsters that we talked about in the sea monsters episode in Scotland in general, not just Loch Ness. Yeah, they're crazy for them. Yeah, they really are. And they have all sorts of scary stories behind them, like the Water Kelpie. Yeah, that frightened me reading it at my desk. Right, where the Water Kelpie will come up and say, hey, kids, you want to ride on my back through the Loch?

It's going to be fun. Sure. Right, because all the Scottish kids sound like that, and they jump on and they're immediately stuck to the beast, which takes them down to the depths of the Loch, and they all drown. And then Chuck, then I think you should take it from here. Which part? Their heads become stuck and they're... Right, and they drown and die, but then what happens the next day?

Oh, yeah, this is... I'm not quite sure how this happens, but their livers wash ashore the next day. So I guess the beast likes to eat all of the child except for the liver, which I get. I don't like liver either. No, I don't like liver myself. Especially kid liver. Right. It's gross.

Which you would think would be delectable, but no. So 1,500 years ago, Loch Ness Monster, possibly, with the picks. We fast forward about 1,000 years beyond that. There's a saint named St. Colomba, who showed up in Ireland and said, hey, heathens, have you ever seen any pamphlets or brochures about Christianity? I have some I can give you. And converted the Scots to Christianity in like 565, I think, around that time. And there's a story of St. Colomba who is going to visit a Pictish king and said on

the way, stop at the lock and look down on the lock and there was some Scottish guy swimming and St. Colomba saw a monster swimming toward the guy as if to attack him and held up his hand and said, in the name of God, I command you to turn around and swim away. And apparently the monster did. And this really, I guess, extended St. Colomba's credibility among the Picts. Yeah. And I think we could just end the show right there. There you go.

That's the Loch Ness Monster. Proven by history. And then flash forward again, there was a BBC correspondent named Nicholas Wichel and there are a lot of people who over the years, we'll talk about a lot of them who have really gotten into this, like quit their jobs and this became their job kind of thing. Yeah, like it gets under your skin. Yeah, under your lucky beastly skin. And he wrote a book in 1974 called The Loch Ness Story and he ended up digging up about

a dozen or so references pre-20th century to some sort of monster out there. Yeah. And it really started to pick up weirdly in like the late, the second half of the 19th century. And it was sporadic, but the year of the Loch Ness Monster, the year the Loch Ness Monster became part of the public consciousness was 1933, though, for sure. That sounds like a great place to take a break. Oh boy, okay, let's do it.

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Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So I said 1933 was the year that the Loch Ness Monster kind of hit the global scene, like really made the world party. Yeah. And for a good reason, they finally built a road that went around the shore on the north side specifically.

So all of a sudden you could drive on this lock and you could look at it and stare at it and eventually see something if you spent enough time there. And in April that happened, Mr. and Mrs. McKay were local to the region, they were driving home and they saw what they described as the most extraordinary form of animal rolling and plunging on the surface. That was written up in the Inverness Courier and they used the word monster for the first time and so the Loch Ness Monster was officially born. And that whole year, I mean that was in April, that whole year there were different sightings

and just kind of the fever really hit a fever pitch. The fever hit a fever pitch. It was pretty feverish. Very quickly that year. Yeah. So there was something else that happened in 1933 too that I've seen a lot of people point to is potentially something that kind of kept the media interest going was that King Kong was released basically worldwide in 1933.

There you have it. And there's like a whole thing about this whole forbidden island where King Kong lives where dinosaurs are still alive and stuff like that. And a lot of people point to being exposed to that as kind of keeping this like bringing it to that fever pitch. You know? Yeah. I mean there were more eyewitness sightings supposedly and motorcyclists saw one on like

crossing the road supposedly. They offered up a circus, offered up a reward of 20,000 pounds. People were camping out and kind of just kind of waiting for Nessie to appear. And then finally in December, the London and this story, you're going to want to listen closely and then put a pin in it because it'll come back to haunt us later or not us but you know, the show. It's like a world party. But the London Daily Mail hired an actor, a director and a big game hunter.

This is a great name. All rolled into one. Yeah. Marmaduke Weatherell. Great name. And said, listen dude, you have all these skills. You are a director and actor and you know your way around the forest and the lake. So get out there and see what you can do.

He said that was the most bizarre pep talk anyone's ever given me. He's like, I know all these things, but I appreciate it anyway. So yeah, the Daily Mail sent him up there to figure out what was going on. This was December, did you say? Yeah, December of 33. So and again, this whole thing started in April and you've been building and building and then by the time. So the Daily Mail, they were like, you know, basically like the Daily Mail is now from what

I understand, like super, you know what I'm saying. It's the Daily Mail. I don't really think you have to put it any other way. Are they like a tabloid? Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay. I mean, I always get the, those UK rags confused on which ones are like, you know, tabloid-y

and which ones are reputable. They were printing clickbait before computers were around. Before they even knew what that was. They're like, why are we calling it clickbait? Yeah. Like what's a mouse? They called it thumbbait. Right.

Actually, they called them, remember we talked about this in our tabloid episode. They called it like, like, hey, Martha stories, like stories so amazing that they got the reader to say, hey, Martha, listen to this. Did we do a show on tabloids? You don't remember? No. We did. It was a good one.

Wow. I know it's, we should just sit around and listen to old episodes sometime, refresh our memory. Yeah. Okay. So whether or else shows up to Loch Ness among like a lot of pomp and circumstance, the Daily Mail didn't like just quietly send them there. They really promoted this.

And he starts searching and within just a few days he found some of the, he found tracks in the mud around Loch Ness and he did his measurements because again, remember he's a big game hunter or tracker, an outdoorsman and he, he, and an actor, not a, not a successful actor. I get the impression that he was like kind of an Ed Wood type actor director. Oh, okay. And he, he, he calculated that the, the animal that made these tracks was like, I think four towed tracks in the mud was at least 20 feet long.

And this happened at December. He took plaster casts and he sent them off to the, the Royal Museum, no, the Natural History Museum in London to, to be analyzed just as Christmas set in. Yeah. So even though this was potentially the, you know, greatest find, zoological find in the world, in world history, they were like, we still have to go on break on holiday. Bob Cratchit commands it. Everyone waited.

They did come back from holiday and, you know, monster hunters were all over London or all over Loch Ness and they were super excited. And then in January, zoologist said, bad news, not only is this the footprint of a hippopotamus because that would have been pretty amazing in and of itself. Right, right. Yeah. Like what's a hippopotamus doing there? Right.

But they said, no, no, no. It was a taxidermied hippopotamus foot and it was probably like an ashtray or an umbrella stand. Right. Somebody just walks around with foot here, footprint here, footprint there and whether I'll fell for it. So I, there's a question of whether he was the perpetrator of the fraud or whether he was, you know, the victim of this fraud, but he fell for it and he was humiliated.

I didn't see any actual like new articles, but apparently the Daily Mail, the paper that sent him up there humiliated him in there, in their coverage of the whole thing. So he retreated from public view. He was humiliated and don't forget Duke Wetherill because he comes back later. Yeah. And not only did they ruin his good name or his mediocre name at least, he, the whole incident just sort of put a damper on Nessie for a few decades, kind of brought out the crackpots and anyone that had any sightings, they would be dismissed and said, no, it's

an illusion. It was a duck or a, or a log floating or a swimming deer or something. And it just, it sort of put a big dent in this being taken seriously for a long time. The impression that I have is that the world was kind of like, fool me once, you know, like they'd gotten all wrapped up in this whole thing and then, you know, it was proved to be a big fraud. So everybody just abandoned the Loch Ness Monster. Well, most people did.

Anybody who seemed legitimate, especially if you were a scientist, the Loch Ness Monster was, was not real. Yeah. But that did not stop just regular human beings and monster hunters to, to not go there anymore. They were still into it. I think there was a book in 1974 that said more than 4,000 people, you know, have said that they saw something. That's a lot of people.

And not only that, but all of the, or a lot of the eyewitness accounts were really similar and a lot of them were from people that were, you know, there was a Nobel Prize winner. They were scientists and teachers and lawyers and priests. Like it wasn't just a bunch of, of, uh, kooks like you and I out there. Yeah. There was a guy named Dr. Richard Singh. He was a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize who said he saw something. And like you said, they, they kind of bore a similar, the similarities in these reports.

Like there were humps, at least one or two humps rising above the surface, like an overturned boat. Yeah. Maybe it was an overturned boat. Maybe so. A lot of people reported something with a long slender neck and a small head rising out of the surface or rising out from the lake. And there was this local doctor named Constance White who was, um, I think she might have

lived in Inverness. She lived around Loch Ness and she had a lot of friends who had come forward and said, you know, I've seen this and people just shouted and laughed at them and they, they were humiliated themselves. And she said, enough of this. I believe there's something there. I think these, these accounts are similar enough that there's a really kind of lens some credence to this idea.

And she started collecting all these different reports and, and published the reports along with sketches from the people who'd had, who's made these reports into a book called More Than a Legend in 1957. And it took the Loch Ness frivolity and turned it back into a potentially, um, scientifically studyable thing. Yeah. For sure. It, it didn't, uh, it's not like it fully legitimized it, but no, it kind of reminded

people like, Hey, it's not just a bunch of crackpots out here, um, making stuff up. Like there have been some reputable people who've seen very similar things and here they are all collected in one space. So that inspired more people to, um, uh, namely the scientific community to, to get involved. Yeah. And, uh, it happened in, um, about a 10 year period. There were four different, uh, expeditions from Oxford, Cambridge, uh, University of Birmingham and the BBC that all went out there and did their own, uh, expeditions and investigations

with, um, Sonar, which was a new, I guess a newer technology at the time, um, that allows you to use sound to search underwater for something. And it basically was a little bit better than someone sitting in their lawn chair with binoculars per hours on end, which is what people were mostly doing. I guess in that first wave in the early thirties, um, these, what they had, right. Uh, but then so, so Constance White, White's book also, um, kind of gave rise to a second wave of Loch Ness hunters inspired a lot of people. Um, there was the Loch Ness investigation bureau, which set up shop on the shore of the

Loch and, um, kept watch and, and led investigations and expeditions for like a decade, I think from 62 to 72 and there's a, no, that's not bad. It's pretty spending 10 years looking for Loch Ness monster. I think you've, you've established your bonafide age, you know, and then, uh, Tim Dinsdale, uh, was a, he was a aeronautical engineer and he became kind of a famous Loch Ness hunter because on his, after reading more than a legend, that Constance White book, um, he was inspired to go hunt for the Loch Ness monster and on his first time out, he caught something very weird moving away from him on the lock in, on film.

Have you seen it? Yeah. I've looked at all this stuff, you know, I think some of it looks very interesting. Mm hmm. The Dinsdale film in particular looks pretty interesting to me too. Yeah. Uh, I'm not going to go out, well, let's just save, I'll save my judgment. Save it.

Um, but in the, like I said, uh, over the years as technology got better, um, they started using this technology, uh, in the 1970s, um, there was a series of expeditions, um, sponsored by Academy of Applied Science out of a Boston and they were the first people to combine sonar because they're all already using that, right, uh, but sonar and underwater photography under the leadership of a guy named Robert Rines, who was, uh, uh, I love this description, a lawyer trained in physics, right. And they were using side scan sonar, which we've talked about before a couple of times over the years.

Have we? Yeah. Maybe like pressure hunting or something or, or Barbie. I don't remember. Right. I don't remember one of those. But here, here's the idea there is you combine side scan sonar with, uh, and time it along with your underwater photography.

And if you get, um, something, a picture snapped at the same time, you get a, let's call it a ding. I don't know what sound it makes, but, uh, I assume a side scan sonar dings if something swims by. Well, no, side scan sonar, so it makes, it sends out a ping or whatever, but it, it, it gets, um, echoes back from all the different stuff that it bounces off of at different rates and it creates basically like a picture of the floor of the, or of the lake. Yeah.

Oh, I just meant to ding to alert you. I was just, oh, I got you. I got you. I see. Like a typewriter, right? For a microwave. Yeah. But the point is, if you have those two things that, uh, like, hey, we got a, a real picture

and then a side scan sonar picture at the same time, then it has a little bit more credibility all of a sudden. Yeah. And I mean, it really did. They, they hit something on, I think in June, 1975 or sometime in 1975, they, they had the system going and at the same time that the sonar was showing some, at least one very large object moving, um, they were getting photographs that, that when they developed showed some very odd stuff.

Yeah. And this is this underwater photography. It's got a strobe light that's, um, or so you can, you know, see stuff because it is very dark. And this thing, like if, if you look at these photos, you know, it looks like a big triangular sort of diamond shaped fin or a flipper, uh, on a big kind of creature, but you know, it's not super detailed, but it does look like something different and interesting. Did you see the other ones that, that came out of that batch?

Yeah. I mean, it all looks different and interesting. Like I'm not saying like, oh my God, look at that monster. Cause I don't know enough about what sort of, you know, weird fish might be in that lake, but it definitely looks weird enough to prompt attention, I think. It looks like a big bellied long necked sea monster to me. That's what it looks like. All right.

You use the word monster. I was trying to avoid that, but. Well, it looks like a monster of the sea. So, so, I mean, this was a big deal when they got these, this was, these were respected scientists carrying out a sober level headed expedition to look for a lot of this monster. I bet they were drinking a little bit. Let's be honest. There's sober ish level headed ish, uh, expedition.

And when they came, came with these, uh, these pictures when they developed them, like they, the, again, the world was like, all right, fool me once, wait a few years, let's go again. That's the, that's the mantra of the world, especially in the seventies. Like I love that this happened in 1975 because world was like, which story should we pay attention to today? The haunted house in Amityville or the Loch Ness monster photos or the Bermuda triangle. Yeah. I love the seventies.

They were the greatest decade ever. It's so great. And then they're like, well, who cares about any of that? Let's go to a key party. Um, so Rines, he had, uh, his distinction on his project was important because he had a couple of, while he was fairly reputable, he had a couple of really reputable scientists that backed him up on this guy named Harold Doc Edgerton, uh, from MIT and he's the inventor of side scan sonar.

So I think he probably totally loved that they were using his equipment. He said, well, at first he was not, he was not on board, which makes his finally coming on board even more legitimate. He was like, no, I think you're a crackpot. And then he saw that. So he's like, this is, this seems legitimate. He said, it looks like a flipper of a monster. He said, it looks like a monster of the sea.

And then this other guy, Sir Peter Scott, who was a naturalist, um, and they both, um, got behind Rines, which was a very big deal, uh, so much so that Rines was actually able to present evidence at the house of commons in London and people were starting to take this like really seriously. Yeah. And here in the States that would be like testifying before Congress about the sea monster that you found in, you know, Lake Havasu or something like that. Yeah.

I'm sure there's one in Lake Havasu. Oh, I'm sure there's several, um, which is great that we said that because now we're going to get a million emails telling us to the name of the monster in Lake Havasu. It's the Havasu monster. Is that ungrateful to say something like that? I don't think so. I think it was. I'm going to take it out.

All right. So, um, the, the, I don't know if he actually presented the findings or not, but they definitely wrote up Sir Peter Scott and Robert Rines wrote up a, um, a paper, uh, an academic paper. It wasn't peer reviewed, but it was published in the journal Nature, which is, I mean, they're two big English language science journals, Science and Nature, and they got theirs published in one and it's, it was in the opinions and comments section. Sure. It's the science.

Letter to the editor. Basically. The crackpot corner. Yeah. But the, the, um, the, I mean, Nature published it. They could have been like, no, this is ridiculous. And these guys, they, they published this paper from what I can tell earnestly, like they meant it, right?

So, um, in this paper, they gave Nessie its, uh, scientific binomial name. Yeah, and this is after we should say that, um, the naturalist, Mr. Scott, uh, said, oh, by the way, not only are we, do we believe what Rines is doing, but I think that Nessie is a plesiosaur, um, this is a marine reptile that we thought went extinct 65 million years ago. So that did not help the case. No, it didn't. And I think I get the impression that Rines was kind of like, uh, we didn't talk about

you saying this publicly, but, um, Scott kind of jumped the gun from what I understand. But he did say that, and that really turned a lot of these, the scientific establishment types that Rines was trying to basically get on board to try to find the Loch Ness monster, turned them off. Yeah. Nevertheless, they did give it that name, um, Nesseterus, uh, Rambo, Terex. Man, if you ever are at a trivia night and they ask you what that is, I will be so ashamed of every single one of you if you miss that.

That would be a tough trivia question though. That's a great one though. Yeah. Nesseterus Rambo Terex is the Loch Ness monster. Yeah. I think that's one of the better trivia questions I've ever heard. All right. Well, uh, I'll trivia masters out there.

Take note, use it at will, um, and thank us afterward and direct people to stuff you should know on, uh, the iHeart radio podcast app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well done, Chuck. I think you're going to get like a gift card from Target or something for that. Uh, so they give it this name mainly, it's not like they're like, Hey, let's just name this thing. They did it really because, uh, there was a new conservation law in the UK that said a species won't be protected if it does not have, uh, a by no meal and a common name.

So they said, just to cover ourselves, just in case Nessie is a real thing, let's go ahead and name, uh, name this lady. Right. So, um, the, again, after that, after Sir Peter Scott said, it's a dinosaur, which again, it's not the most farfetched thing in the world. Um, it's like the sealicanth was thought to be extinct for tens of millions of years and they started finding them off of the coast of Africa. So it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

It wasn't like this guy was like, well, it's aliens, obviously it's a giant alien. It's a sea alien. Yeah. Um, like there, there was, from what I understand, they, they were earnest and they were trying to do this legitimately, although one of the MPs, uh, in Scotland pointed out that, uh, Nessiterus romboterics is an anagram for monster hoax by Sir Peter S. Yeah. I thought that was pretty good.

For many years, everybody was like, well, yeah, Scott at least hadn't bought into it, but he responded to this years later with like, do you really think that if I, if I'd wanted to do that, I couldn't have also fit in the COTT and Scott and he didn't really answer the question, but I think the impression that I got from like actual Loch Ness monster hunters is that he was, he was earnest and the anagram was unintended. Yeah. That's pretty, I mean, I don't think that was the deal, but it is pretty interesting that you can form that anagram specifically.

It is pretty interesting. Monster hoax by Sir Peter S. That's pretty specific. But I mean, what a betrayal because Robert Reins was a true believer and if that's what Scott was doing, he was one of the bigger putzes that the British naturalist community ever, ever produced. Which by the way, did you get that email about Yiddish? No.

Apparently putzes is a very bad word. Oh, is it like Fanny in the UK? No, it's just this nice lady wrote us about Yiddish words and sayings and she's like, most people don't realize that schmuck and putz are not the nicest words. What does putz mean in like American English? We'll discuss offline. Okay. I really want to know.

I'm not sure I can wait. That's okay. You can wait. Can you make some hand gestures? I'll give you the initials. So in the 80s, things started to ramp up a little bit more. There were more sonar hits coming around in 1987 and the late 80s, a one million pound, they spent a million bucks for a week long exploration called Operation Deep Scan.

And this was once again, the Loch Ness project who were science-based. What they were doing though, and I thought this was interesting. They weren't like, listen, we're searching for Nessie. They says, what we're going to do is just go search for anomalies with the sonar and see if we can start ruling some things out. Yeah. And they used like 24 boats from what I understand to like sweep in unison using side scan sonar, the whole Loch like at once, they were just going slowly back and forth over the Loch.

And remember that side scan sonar creates like a picture, an image of the lake floor. And so they were really coming up with some good stuff. Most of the stuff they found was stationary objects. So obviously that's not it. But they did find three things that from what I understand to this day have never been fully explained that were obviously moving targets that were large that they just don't, they don't know what they were. They have no idea.

Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. And this carried over of course into the early nineties, another BBC guy named Nicholas Wichel organized project, how do you pronounce that, Urquhart? I was going with Urquhart. Oh, Urquhart. I like that.

I do too. Silent H. Yeah. But also the Qua. Sure. Project Urquhart, which was a real scientific in the first one, scientific extensive study of the biology and geology of the lake itself. Yeah.

And Nicholas Wichel, he was leading this thing and they weren't looking for the monster, but he was one of, he was that guy who wrote that 1974 book about the monster. Yeah. People kind of come and go in this story. It's interesting. It really is. It's got, it's a tight knot of, of like a ball of worms writhing together or something. But he did, while he was doing the, the study of biology and geology, he did find another

underwater moving target, followed it for a few minutes, lost it. And it was just yet another kind of unexplained large moving mass. And there was a sonar expert named Arnie Carr, who was aboard that expedition, who said, I would say that this was biological in nature, obviously it was moving. It was about 15 feet long, about the size of a small whale. Yeah. So, do you think they shouldn't compare it to things? You're like, it sort of looked like an overturned boat.

They're like, all right, well, maybe it was, or the, the fin looked like a large ore. All right. Or a small otter, like stop saying that. All right. All you're doing is making me think, well, yeah, that's probably what it is then. Yeah, but it probably wasn't a small whale. I don't know. Is it a sea monster?

It's a, it's a monster of the sea. Okay. So, again, I don't know if you guys are paying enough attention, but just slowly over the years, people have continued to show up at Loch Ness, launch expeditions, come up with some things that couldn't be explained. And the most recent one happened in 2016 when a group of researchers from Norway showed up to the Loch to explore under an expedition and try to find the Loch Ness monster. And they actually found something using side scan sonar.

Yeah. Plaint. Did you see the picture? Yeah. It looks like a sea monster just kind of laying on the bottom of the lake there. That's exactly what it looked like. So they were, I don't know if they thought, well, geez, I mean, did it die? Is it sleeping?

What's going on with this thing? Cause it wasn't moving. And I don't know how they figured it out, but it turns out that it was a prop from a movie from 1970. Yeah. The private life of Sherlock Holmes, Billy Wilder movie. And if you look at this monster in that movie, it looks like the Loch Ness monster. And when they were done, they just basically let the air out of the humps and sank it.

Yep. And it just laid there for like 50 years. Oh man. But the reason, the reason why it looked like the Loch Ness monster, even so much that just the sonar image of this thing lying on its side at the bottom of the lake, this prop, looked like the Loch Ness monster is because we all have the exact same image of the Loch Ness monster. And what a lot of people don't realize is that that image comes from one specific photograph

that was published in 1934. And we will talk about that after this message break. I'm Mangeh Shatikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Patrick curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. The Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you left us with quite a cliffhanger, the very famous, dare I say infamous photo of Nessie that looks like someone with their finger sticking out of the water in their arm. Really? Is that what it looks like to you?

Sure. It looks like a monster of the sea to me. It is the most famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster, which is interesting because I think that stuff from 1975 looks way more realistic and potentially provable. Well this was 1934. Give them a break. No, I know, and that's why it took the world by storm because it's the oldest one, I think. And that's if you type in Loch Ness Monster image, this is the first thing that you're

going to see. Yep. Generally. It's what everybody's seen. It's like the first thing they teach you in school is they show everybody a picture of the Loch Ness Monster and say, this is the Loch Ness Monster. Now onto reading. So this picture's origin was it first showed up on the cover of the London Daily Mail in

1934. This was the year after Duke Wetherill had been kind of denounced and humiliated. And I mean, very quickly after that whole thing, this picture appears. And even though people had said like, no, this was not a, this thing's, the Loch Ness Monster's not real. This picture really kind of kept interest going. Like the world didn't just completely walk away from it. Like you said, like everyday people were still interested in it.

And it was largely because of this picture that was published in 1934. Right. So the photo has a pretty good story in and of itself. It was sold to the Daily Mail by a surgeon from London named R. Kenneth Wilson. He said, I took this picture, saw a big commotion out in the water, and I saw a sea monster and I took a photo and everyone was like, this guy's a surgeon. Why would this guy make this thing up? It's got to be real.

Skeptics are like, there's no way this thing's real. Of course it's a hoax. And it took what, 50 years basically, 51 years, until they actually did scientific analysis of this thing. Yeah. A man named Stuart Campbell in an article in the British Journal of Photography, almost hit psychology. Nope.

Photography. It's a little different. He concluded that he looked at it, did a big study and said, all right, this thing looks real, but it's two to three feet long, and I think it's a bird or an otter. And I think that surgeon knew that. Right. But the reason, the whole reason why so many people were like, this is a real picture is because the guy who supposedly took it, R. Kenneth Wilson, right?

Like you said, he was a doctor. And so the whole world was like, well, no, this guy's a doctor. Of course he's believable. Because doctors have never done anything wrong. Right. No one had seen the nick yet. That's good. Thank you.

So finally, even in 1984, when this British Journal of Photography analysis was published, that was mostly kind of like, oh, I knew it, to people who already thought it was a hoax, to the rest of the world, and to a lot of Loch Ness monster hunters, like that did nothing to delegitimize it. Again, because R. Kenneth Wilson was a doctor. So of course he wouldn't have perpetrated a fraud. And then finally, in 1994, there was a guy who is a Loch Ness monster hunter slash fanatic named Alistair Boyd.

And in 1994, he basically dropped a bomb on the world and said, these surgeons photo is a hundred percent fake. And I have this story that explains how, and he basically said, no, it's, even among Loch Ness monster hunters like himself, that the surgeon's photo has been basically debunked by the story that he came up with. Right. So Boyd and his wife, because I'm sure Boyd was like, hey, this is my new crazy passion, so you have to come with me.

She rolled her eyes and said, OK. So they teamed up, and they did have a large animal sighting in 1979, so they were into it. It's not like they were out to debunk this thing. I think they were trying to bunk it. They did some research behind the photo. He came across an old newspaper clipping, and the son of, remember we said to put a pin in Duke Wetherill, Marma Duke, his, who is, remember, famously duped supposedly with

that hippo foot and sold out by the Daily Mail. So they found an old clipping, which his son, Ian, or Ion, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, said that that photo was a hoax. And Boyd was reading this article in 1975, and a couple of very important little details kind of stuck out to him. Yeah. So Ian Wetherill had said that there was a guy named Maurice Chambers involved in the hoax.

And Maurice Chambers is the guy that our Kenneth Wilson said originally when that photo first came out 60 years before, Maurice Chambers was who he was going to visit. So it would be really weird that Ian Wetherill would know who Maurice Chambers was, and that our Kenneth Wilson, Dr. Wilson, would know him as well. That was one thing. And the other thing is the picture he described was a version of that photograph that was only published once, right? Because it's the one that he described showed a little bit of land.

And the picture that we've all seen had the land cropped out. Yeah. Pretty, I mean, it's a detail that not many people would have noticed. But Boyd was like, hey, this thing was only published once in 1934. So this guy either has a freakishly good and weird memory, or he's the one that took the picture to begin with, because that detail no one else would have known. It's not like proof positive or anything like that, but they're pretty good points to kind of start to suspect.

So it was enough to get him to go try to find out more. Because remember, this was the 80s, and the article was from the 70s, and apparently people hadn't paid much attention. So we went to go find Ian Wetherill and found out that he was dead. So he went and found another guy who was mentioned in the article, Christian Sperling, who was Duke Wetherill's stepson, and he had been involved as well. And apparently, according to Alistair Boyd, when he went and tracked down Christian Sperling, Sperling confessed to him.

Yeah, at 93 years old, sounds like a sort of a death bed thing, he was like, it was us the whole time. He's like, also, I have something else to tell you, I hit a person with my car and drove off once. They're like, no, no, no. Who cares? Yeah. Let's talk about this picture.

So here's the deal. He said, because of the way that Duke, I guess, stepped dad, that was a step dad. Yeah, Duke was a step dad. So the way my step dad was treated by the Daily Mail and sold out and made to look foolish, he went out to get even. He really stuck in his craw. And get revenge. So he enlisted his son and myself, when I was a young boy, to go out, build a model

monster onto a toy submarine and stage this photograph, which included, you know, they included the background and part of the, you know, not the zoomed in look. You can't really tell that it's Loch Ness. But in the original photo, like we said, you could see it, and they did that on purpose as proof that it was Loch Ness. Yep. And then they, they got through Boris Chambers, the common friend. They somehow persuaded Dr. Wilson to take the film, have it developed, and then pretend like he had taken the picture and sell it to the Daily Mail, basically act as a front

man to this whole ruse. Again, probably the greatest front man you could have ever gotten, because the whole world for decades was like, nope, this guy wouldn't have been party to a fraud. And he was party to a fraud, and I could not find any explanation for why he would have been. Because, I mean, they call it the surgeons photo rather than the Wilson photo because he really wanted to back away from it, which I think legitimized it more in some people's minds.

Yeah. But he, I have no idea why he joined up on this hoax, but he did. I wonder if he had something on him. Well, a lot of people actually say they still don't buy it. Yeah. They don't buy that it doesn't make sense that Wilson would have been a part of this, that some people even, one guy cited a toy expert that said a submarine toy, a toy submarine from the 30s probably wouldn't have done the trick.

Yeah. That sounds like the worst kind of internet pedant, like actually toy submarines would have looked more like this. But sure, people have tried to poke various holes in the story that it's a fake over the years, which is interesting too. But it's really saying something though also to keep in mind, Alistair Boyd, the guy who told the world the story of how this famous photo of the Loch Ness monster was hoaxed, that does nothing to his belief.

He's like, I'm sure as, I'm more sure than I'm sure of anything that there's something in Loch Ness and I think he said something like, if he were a wealthy man, he would spend the rest of his life trying to catch another glimpse of it because like we said, it kind of gets under your skin when you get into the Loch Ness monster. So in the 1990s, here are some more explanations because here's the deal, you have to prove something exists, not disprove or wait, not prove that it, like the burden of proof should be on people that say this is a thing. Yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof for evidence.

There have been people over the years that have tried to explain it as other things and like maybe people are seeing something, but what they're really seeing is blank. A man named Steve Feltham in the 1990s, he's one of these guys that kind of became a, I don't know about obsessed, I'm not going to say that, but... No, you could call him obsessed. ...became so interested that he quit his job and did this for 30 years, but he said, here's what I think it is. He said, I think it's a Welles catfish and if you look up Welles WELS catfish, these

are, everyone knows catfish can get large, but these are European catfish that they look photoshopped when you look them up online and two or three people holding these things up. In Europe, they get larger. They are huge. Yeah, huge. Like 13 feet long, which by the way, don't forget that one, Robert Rhine expedition found something that was the size of a small whale about 15 feet long.

Yeah. Okay. So, this is a really big point, Steve Feltham is saying this, this guy left his life in the 90s, holds the Guinness record for the longest search for Loch Ness. Which is just dumb. It is, but Guinness, you know... They lost their way a long time ago. They really did.

So, like he's saying, I don't think it's a sea monster, I don't even think it's an undiscovered species, I think it's a giant catfish that lives in the lake. That's a big deal that he's saying that and that seems to be a trend among Loch Ness enthusiasts that it's kind of turned a little more toward, hey, let's use our time and effort and energy to figuring out how it's not a sea monster. Which is a really big change and not just like Loch Ness monster searches, but it says a lot about the world too, you know. Yeah.

And I think this well's catfish would certainly explain all of those unexplained underwater moving side scan sonar images. Like they're not the most detailed things in the world, it's not a photograph. And these things are, I mean, just look up well's catfish, they are tremendous in large. Right. Okay. So, that's a pretty good explanation, a less good explanation that we just have to mention now, is that the elephant thing.

Yeah. There was an historian in 2006 who said, well, you know, I just came across some evidence that circuses traveling through Scotland used to stop and rest at Loch Ness and they would let the animals out to wander around and elephants love to swim, which is the crossover thing between the episodes today, right? Yeah. Elephants love to swim and probably what some of these sightings in the 30s were of the Loch Ness monster or elephant swimming in Loch Ness.

Yeah. Completely away from the rest of the circus and the people that were resting on the shoreline. And then after he finished, he said, and here's the deal with all the supposed evidence over the years, it's, you know, that stone carving, it's manuscripts from pre-medieval times, it's stories like real documentary evidence, but these photos and things, none of them, there's no hard evidence that can all be interpreted as they're explained away as different other things. Yeah.

Right. And also there's like a, there's a, you know, that whole thing developed to where, what was it? Sir Peter Scott said it was a plesiosaur, right? Which is an extinct marine reptile, not a dinosaur, it was a marine reptile. Where people said, no, it was a sauropod, which makes even less sense because a sauropod was a terrestrial dinosaur, which had never taken to water. So what would it be doing in Loch Ness?

But for decades, those were kind of the two conceptions that the Loch Ness monster was a surviving sauropod or a surviving plesiosaur. And there are a lot of problems with those. Number one, both of those, those types of animals went extinct tens of millions of years ago. But stop there had it not been for the sealocanth. Right. But we respect the sealocanth and so we should explore further.

And then you have the problem of the fact that a sauropod is a terrestrial beast that breathes air. So while it could swim, it would have to come up every few seconds and breathe and 10 reports a year over the history of Loch Ness with, you know, close to a half a million people visiting every year. You would see if this thing has to breathe every few seconds, there would be a lot more sightings than that. Yes.

And even if it were a plesiosaur, which again is a marine reptile, they didn't have gills, so they would have to come up for air too. So same thing, right? So the fact that it's actually kind of rare for a Nessie sighting to be reported, that doesn't make any sense because these things would have to come up quite a bit. And we're also, I mean, if it's just one, that means that this thing survived 70 or 60 million years. So it's a 60 million year old animal, which makes zero sense.

But some people say, well, no, no, you could have like a continuous line of these things. Could you though? Probably not. And the reason why you couldn't is because the lock is just too small to sustain probably even one plesiosaur or one sauropod, let alone that I think Sir Peter Scott and Robert Rines in their 1975 paper estimated that you'd have to have about 30 breeding individuals to continue a line, I guess, in the lake, so there's just not enough food. There's something like 22 tons of biomass or fish for them to eat, and that just would

not be nearly enough. So if you have like, let's say 30 of these that are mating and breeding, creating more little messes over the years, and a lake that small, I know it's deep, but it is a pretty small lake, that if you have 30 of these things, let's say conservatively, and they all have to come up and breathe every few seconds, you'd see little fingers popping up out of the water all over the place. And at some point, there would be a bone or a scale or a tooth or a whole body washed up on the shore, and that's never happened.

Yeah, and that's a big problem. I mean, despite thousands of people saying, I saw something, and some of their stuff kind of bearing some similarities to one another, despite the films and the photographs and all that, there's not any actual hard evidence, like you said, like a bone or a tooth or something like that, that shows there's something in the lake that is real. Yeah, my money on figuring this out, last summer in 2018, researchers finally took samples of environmental DNA, EDNA, and this will tell you, in fact, it did yield about 500 million individual DNA sequences.

This will tell you basically anything that has lived in this lake. Maybe not forever, or is it forever? I don't know how far back it would go, as long as it had viable DNA, like it hadn't deteriorated yet. So it could be like a whatever, a scale of this monster. And this has worked before, I believe it yielded evidence of unknown life when they discovered in a human species called the Denisovans. So this works, they have these 500 million sequences, and now they're just plowing through

them basically. Yeah, now they have to analyze them and see if anything that hasn't been identified before turns up. It's pretty smart, it's amazing, it's like they took a photograph, a snapshot of all of the DNA that's in Loch Ness right now. It's a great idea. Yeah, and then they're going to sort through it. It could yield something who knows, like I'm not saying, like just saying that the thing's

not a plesiosaur or not a sauropod, or is not even a giant catfish or something like that. It doesn't mean that there's not, it's not possible there's something there that we don't know about yet. But if this doesn't show anything, then it should, well it never will close the case entirely, but it will for a lot more people, I think. And then there's one other really big explanation against, especially with the whole like surviving dinosaur thing.

The Loch Ness is only 10,000 years old. It's not like it was around before when the dinosaurs were swimming around and they could have found their way into Loch Ness and as the sea levels lowered and Loch Ness was separated from the sea, they got trapped there because Loch Ness didn't exist until it was gouged out of the earth by the glaciers during the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. It's just too young for something like that. Too young. Too young.

But Chuck, if they ever do find it, it will enjoy protection because they drew up like a protective order basically that says that any new species found in the lake, including the Loch Ness monster, if found, the people finding it can take a DNA sample and they have to release it and they have to make sure that it survives. They have to protect it. Pretty neat. It is neat. Do you think, real quick, do you think there's anything in there?

No. So, nothing we don't know about. You don't think there's anything in there? Well, it depends on if you count a giant catfish as something we don't know about. I would say we know about that. Yeah. I think it can be explained. Okay.

Have you seen incident at Loch Ness? No. We talked about it in another podcast, I believe. Oh, really? Yeah, another episode. I don't remember when, but yeah, we talked about it. I wonder what that would have been about. It may have been in the sea monsters one.

I bet, but that's the Werner Herzog. It's worth watching because Werner Herzog is on screen and any time you can get him talking or on screen, just watch, but it is a mockumentary about Werner Herzog going to make a documentary about Loch Ness and then while they're there, it's a making of a making of and while they're there, they see and explain things. It's good though, huh? It's a fun Friday night watch. All right.

It's not high cinema, but just to listen to Werner Herzog, it's great. We have a vase of making you talk. Yeah, exactly. So is it on Netflix, do you know, or Amazon Prime? Yeah, I have no idea. Well, we'll find out. All right. Well, if you want to know more about Loch Ness, you got anything else?

Nope. If you want to know more about Loch Ness, Monster, Loch Ness, or Scotland, or anything like that, go on to the internet. It's a really wide and deep resource, deeper than Loch Ness even. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. This is a Listener Mail by way of our old friends at Coed. Awesome. We heard from Ann, our friends, as a reminder, many years ago when we were just a fledgling

podcast, this group, a nonprofit called Coed, Cooperative for Education, they invited us to go to Guatemala, which we did, you, me, and Jerry, which was a crazy, fun trip. It was. And we learned a lot, and it was very eye-opening in many ways, and we've been kind of working with them unofficially since then. So they have a new drive going on. They are on a mission right now to keep a thousand girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala.

And as a reminder, their kind of whole jam is to break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala. And the way to do this is through education, because if not for education, then kids at a very young age stop going to school because they need to work and help support their family. Yep. So they're about halfway to that goal, everyone, to keep a thousand girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala. And 41 of the stuff you should know Army sponsored a student last year, and that's great. But we need more of you.

In Guatemala, it is the start of the school year, and there are still a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored. Sponsoring a student costs $80 a month, or co-ed will pair you with someone else. If you can half sponsor someone at $40 a month, and to meet the students who need sponsors, which you can actually do online, pretty powerful stuff, just go to cooperativeforeducation.org. Yep. And we've seen it with our own eyes that they do really good work, so we can vouch for them, and it's money well donated for sure.

Yeah, or if you want to go down there like we did, they still take groups down there twice a year, and you can kind of, you know, very much see it with your own eyeballs. And it's a very, very good program, and it's helping the whole population, but especially the young women of Guatemala. Yep, and give them the website again, Chuck. It is cooperativeforeducation.org. Okay, so go check it out, everybody, and in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links, and if you

want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry, and me, you can address it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the

White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.