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Just for fun here, I don't think I've ever seen a thread under "Other Mysteries" about that greatest of all UK mysteries, the Loch Ness Monster. I visited Loch Ness while on vacation in England and Scotland in 2008 and stayed a night in the village of Drumnadrochit. As a lifelong afficianado of cryptozoology it was a real high point for me. For the record, I did not see Nessie, but nor did I really expect to. I visited the two exhibition centers in the town, and was hoping to meet with famous Nessie hunter Adrian Shine who runs the biggest one, but he was out of town at the time. I went on one of the cruises that are offered on the lake and scanned the water intently with binoculars, noting how even far from shore the air smelled not fishy or seaweedy but like the childrens' barnyard I recalled from county fairs in my youth, due to the large number of sheep pastures that surround the lake. The tour guide turned out to be a non-believer in Nessie, surprisingly, and spent the whole time talking about the non-Nessie related history of the area which involved the Jacobites, William Wallace, etc. It seemed to put the theory that Nessie is a creation of the locals in order to draw tourists in to rest. Yes, there are gift shops that sells Nessie trinkets, but not nearly as much as you would expect for such a well known attraction. I had to walk to the famous Urquhart Castle (having seen it earlier from the boat), a 40-minute walk from the village, and got there 20 minutes after it had closed for the day, but I still got to see it and to gaze out at Urquhart Bay, the most popular spot for Nessie sightings. There were some interesting "trails" that I caught on video through the algae on the surface, but admittedly they were probably made by boats. I wanted to get down to the shoreline, but hesitated at walking across private land. Then some teenagers came along and crawled over the fence I'd been contemplating climbing over myself, asked me if I had a light for their cigarettes, and I asked them if it was ok to cross this land. "Oh yeah, it's all ok," they said. So I made my way down through a sheep pasture, and enjoyed a brief stay at the waterline of Loch Ness and collected a stone and a bottle of water as souvenirs. As I was leaving I saw those kids wading and splashing around in the shallows. If there was a monster around, neither the sheep nor the kids seemed worried. That was basically my Loch Ness experience.
I didn't see Nessie, but I do believe SOMETHING is there. There have just been too many sightings over the years for there to be nothing to it. Theories range from something as amazing as surviving plesiosaurs to merely a population of slightly oversized sturgeon (which Adrian Shine seems to favor). Some of the skeptics' explanations fall laughably short. There was a famous sighting by a couple in a car who saw a huge animal crossing a road before plunging into the loch. I have a book in which the author says they probably saw an otter and exaggerated its size. My reaction- did you not hear them say that the animal they saw spanned the entire road?!!! An otter that big would be just as amazing as a living dinosaur! Then there is the famous 1934 "Surgeon's photograph," which in the early 90s was supposedly revealed as a hoax involving a model attached to a toy submarine, which made millions of suggestible newspaper readers make the huge leap in logic of saying ok then, if that one photo is a fake then there is no Nessie. You hear very little about the holes in the story, about how the material the model was supposedly made of hadn't been invented yet in 1934 and how toy catalogs of the day feature no toy submarine that would have done the job, etc. There's evidence that that hoax claim was itself a hoax. That doesn't automatically make the Surgeon's Photo a shot of a living dinosaur, it just leaves it in the realm of speculation.
While sitting on the shore of Loch Ness and seeing what it was really like, I had to admit to myself- you know all those people who say that if huge creatures lived in this lake they'd be seen way more often? Well-- those people are right. It's not a bunch of plesiosaurs. Can't be. They would indeed be seen all the time and their existence would not be in doubt. But there IS something, there has to be. There are just too many sightings- which yes, have diminished in recent years, but they do still occur. So what about one of the more whymsical theories, that Nessie is something paranormal? Something that is not in solid physical form all the time. Something that shows up on film and on sonar sometimes, but is at other times intangible. Something that in days of yore in old Scotland would have been referred to as a water kelpie or even as a dragon. Scientists shun theories like that, but no more than they shun theories about other subjects featured on this "Other Mysteries" page such as ghosts and UFOs.
I didn't see Nessie, but I do believe SOMETHING is there. There have just been too many sightings over the years for there to be nothing to it. Theories range from something as amazing as surviving plesiosaurs to merely a population of slightly oversized sturgeon (which Adrian Shine seems to favor). Some of the skeptics' explanations fall laughably short. There was a famous sighting by a couple in a car who saw a huge animal crossing a road before plunging into the loch. I have a book in which the author says they probably saw an otter and exaggerated its size. My reaction- did you not hear them say that the animal they saw spanned the entire road?!!! An otter that big would be just as amazing as a living dinosaur! Then there is the famous 1934 "Surgeon's photograph," which in the early 90s was supposedly revealed as a hoax involving a model attached to a toy submarine, which made millions of suggestible newspaper readers make the huge leap in logic of saying ok then, if that one photo is a fake then there is no Nessie. You hear very little about the holes in the story, about how the material the model was supposedly made of hadn't been invented yet in 1934 and how toy catalogs of the day feature no toy submarine that would have done the job, etc. There's evidence that that hoax claim was itself a hoax. That doesn't automatically make the Surgeon's Photo a shot of a living dinosaur, it just leaves it in the realm of speculation.
While sitting on the shore of Loch Ness and seeing what it was really like, I had to admit to myself- you know all those people who say that if huge creatures lived in this lake they'd be seen way more often? Well-- those people are right. It's not a bunch of plesiosaurs. Can't be. They would indeed be seen all the time and their existence would not be in doubt. But there IS something, there has to be. There are just too many sightings- which yes, have diminished in recent years, but they do still occur. So what about one of the more whymsical theories, that Nessie is something paranormal? Something that is not in solid physical form all the time. Something that shows up on film and on sonar sometimes, but is at other times intangible. Something that in days of yore in old Scotland would have been referred to as a water kelpie or even as a dragon. Scientists shun theories like that, but no more than they shun theories about other subjects featured on this "Other Mysteries" page such as ghosts and UFOs.
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