MONSTERSWhy the Search for the Loch Ness Monster (and Other Beasts) Continues 90 Years After That First Blurry Photograph
It’s 90 years since Hugh Gray, in April 1933, took his blurry picture — and the beginning of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness monster. As a paleobiologist, I want to explore whether the type of monster we believe Nessy to be could exist and if we should continue looking.
Hugh Gray was taking his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or three feet from him.
He quickly snapped several pictures of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as “an object of considerable dimensions”.
A few months earlier, in April 1933, local hoteliers Aldie Mackay and her husband had described a whale-like beast to the Inverness Courier. Then, in the summer of 1933, a man called George Spicer stated: “I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life.”
He described a creature between two and three meters long carrying “a lamb or animal of some kind” for its supper.
Since the first sightings, recorded in the latter half of the sixth century, the beast was considered a folk tale. However, when Gray captured the bobbing mass with an animal-like tail it was considered the first photographic proof of “Nessy” and inspired a sort of monster mania.
It’s 90 years since this picture and the beginning of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness monster. As a paleobiologist, I want to explore whether the type of monster we believe Nessy to be could exist and if we should continue looking.
An Elaborate Hoax?
There are a lot of fish in the loch, so there is enough food. There is also lots of space. Loch Ness is huge, with a volume of 7.4 billion cubic meters and a depth of 227m. There is a lot of water to hide in, which accounts for more than all the fresh water in all of the lakes of England and Wales.
Our idea of what the Loch Ness monster looks like is founded on an iconic picture taken a year after Gray’s. This image showed a long neck stretching from the black waters.
It is the source of the idea that the Loch Ness monster is a living relic from the time of the dinosaurs, eking out a lonely existence in the depths. However, this image was not what it claimed to be and was found, decades later, to have been an elaborate hoax.