The most widely publicized and most widely believed survivor of the dinosaurs. The first recorded sighting of this animal, possibly a living plesiosaur, was by Saint Columba in 565 C.E. There were a very few further sightings reported until 1933. “Nessie” has since become an international celebrity, being photographed and reported in newspapers and on radio and television across the world, though remaining very elusive. Eminent scientists have lent their support to Nessie’s “incontrovertible existence; well financed and equipped expeditions have pursued it, hoaxers have admitted to their pranks, but the search continues.
Over the years, many photographs, allegedly of the monster, have been produced, none very clear and unambiguous. An expedition in 1972, using an underwater camera, produced photographs that were grainy and indistinct but which, when enhanced by computer, showed a 1.22-meter (3-feet)-long fin. In 1975 two more pictures were published, one showing the monster’s head, neck, and body, and the other showing a close-up of its face. In 1984 Discover magazine accused the 1972 team of having retouched its picture. Adrian Shine, of the Loch Morar Project (which later became the Loch Ness Project), charged that the 1975 head photograph actually showed a tree stump, and Tim Dinsdale, another Nessie researcher, suggested that the photograph was actually of an engine block discarded by a local boatman. (Loch Morar, near Mallaig on the west coast of Scotland, is another landlocked lake. For many years, there were claims of sightings of sea creatures, “Nessie’s cousins,” in Loch Morar; explorations of the two lochs although some 60 kilometers (40 miles) apart were linked. That possible connection seems to have been dropped.) The 1972 expedition also obtained sonar traces of two large objects chasing a school of salmon.