Story of the Loch Ness Monster

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That year was a busy one as another former employee of the Natural History Museum was there in June. His name was Maurice Burton who was on the cusp of becoming a Loch Ness Monster sceptic and would head south to his home in England to write the first sceptical book on the monster. It was titled " The Elusive Monster" and was published the following year as Tim published his very pro-Nessie book, " Loch Ness Monster".

After proving to myself on paper that the Dinsdale film could be a boat, the next step was to go out and get evidence for my theory. I suppose obsession is one way of describing it. But the way I see it, this is such a small country we're living in and we now understand just about every inch of it. Well, this is something we don't have an explanation for. It's inevitable that we have to admit there's something unexplained in Loch Ness. I have to accept that the first thing I film probably isn't going to be the final piece of evidence. I'll carry on until the mystery is solved - until we've got to the bottom of it." Maybe, though, it's more love affair than obsession - one that began when a seven-year-old boy arrived in Loch Ness on a family holiday in 1970. He went to the local exhibition with his father, who bought him a Nessie portfolio as a souvenir. That was all it took. This film offers creditable proof of some large animal living in Loch Ness and was agreed by many experts to be an authentic and convincing series of shots.In the light of all this, fellow sceptic, Steuart Campbell, wrote to him in preparation for his 1986 book, " The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence". Burton gave a fuller account of his alleged trip to O' Connor's location which was summarised by Campbell:

Also, the distortion of the ripples in the picture suggest that it could not have been taken under the claimed conditions, that is, at the distances claimed Heuvelmans, B., 1975. Dans le sillage des monsters marins- Le kraken et le Poulpe Colossal, 2nd edn. Paris: Francois Beauval. Gemmell said the sheer volume of eel DNA surprised him and his team. And, maintaining a straight face, he added: “We don’t know if the eel DNA we are detecting is from a gigantic eel or just many small eels.”On the 6th of June 1963 the LNIB obtained a 16mm film showing a large dark object at over 3 kilometres away, travelling through shallow waters. It stopped and stayed stationary for the duration. Then, on the 13th June, the LNIB captured on film an object floating in the Loch about 1 kilometre away. The film quality was poor, due to a heat haze.

Guide Number for PF5 flashbulb with 200 ASA film (HP3) = 330 @ 1/50th sec. (using feet as distance measurement). Dinsdale, T., 1975. Project Water Horse: True Story of the Monster Quest at Loch Ness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. This was not a hoax. The history of Loch Ness Monster imagery involves a vast quantity of wishful thinking and over-keen desperation, much of it driven by people who already believe in the monster, and want others to be convinced by the evidence too, such as it is. And that’s what happened here. The whole ‘Nessie Flipper’ saga is often described or characterised as ‘a hoax’. But that’s not really what it was. For starters, the key players here – those in the LNIB and AAS – honestly believed that Nessie was real (which is a faulty and naïve starting point, but we all make mistakes). When they got those sonar and photographic records in August 1972, I believe that they honestly thought they’d gathered valuable and compelling evidence. Add in some ‘eye of faith’, a fair bit of desperation that surely some good must come of all this time, equipment, money and people-power, and those concerned managed to convince themselves that they’d succeeded in recording images of flippers in the two relevant photos. Photographic enhancement seemed to boost this conclusion, but the visuals still weren’t impressive enough for those already critical or dismissive of the Loch Ness Monster, so the best course of action (as determined by an unknown perpetrator or perpetrators) was to enhance the ‘flippers’ physically, on the printed photos. Again, I don’t think this was done maliciously or to fool anyone but, rather, to convince them, the thinking being “now YOU can see the flippers too, right?”. A key figure in all of this was a man called Tim Dinsdale. Tim was the man who first filmed a Nessie-like creature in the Loch and in 1960 he appeared on BBC Panorama, unveiling his footage to the world. It made him an overnight celebrity and he was the regular “go‑to” guy for any media monster malarkey. A clue may lie in an article Burton wrote for the Sunday Express on the 2nd August 1959 entitled " Is there really a Loch Ness Monster?". In this article,

IS THIS NESSIE LOOKING AT YOU?

George, D. G., 1993. The Life in the Loch. Project Urquhart: The Scientific Exploration of Loch Ness. Reynoldson, T. B., 1981. A species of North American triclad new to Britain found in Loch Ness, Scotland. Journal of Zoology, 193, 531–539.