Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster?

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? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. 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.

(00:22):
Is that Frankenstein? Is that Frankenstein or what? No, you've
got your arms extended like it is. Oh those are arms,
those are flippers. Oh I see, I'm a monster. Okay,
that was the groundskeeper Willie Clothes. Yeah, that was pretty good.
Country are we Are you doing like a Locknus monster impression? Man,

(00:46):
you're good. I used the powers of deduction like Sherlock
Holmes did in the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Look
at that little bit of foreshadowing. By the way, we
covered a bit of this Everyone we Know and Sea
Monsters four years ago. But we felt this monster was
so great that or she perhaps, yeah, maybe Nestie deserved

(01:10):
her own space. Let's just go with their sure, why not?
A right? So um, yeah, I went back. I was like,
I feel like we definitely did a lock Neess episode.
But no, just a little little passage in the Sea
Monster episode. So we'll flesh that out a little bit. Okay,
So Chuck, let's go back about ten thousand years. Okay,

(01:34):
we need a lot of kerosene in the way Back
machine and human 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 way
Back machine. Oh it always did, maybe, Jerry, Well, I
had some extra sound effects. So here we are, and

(02:03):
we're actually chucking the land that will become Scotland in
a few thousand years um. And if you'll look right there,
right there, there's a glacier retreating. It's melting. As it melting,
it's filling up this gouge in the earth. And this gouge,
Chuck is eventually going to be called lock Mass. That's right.

(02:23):
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. It's like so lackness is like
long and narrow, and it is like it was created
when an ice sheet gouged the rocky earth in Scotland
ten thousand years ago and then the ice melting and
filled it in basically like I just said, And it

(02:46):
was a deep gouge not very wide, um, but it's
like deeper than the North Sea around Scotland. It looks
like thirty six kilometers or twenty three miles long. And
then most recently the newest deep its depth is measured
it close to nine feet, which is staggering. Yeah, it's um.

(03:10):
So it's like a thousandth 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 poor lake. It's also
really dark too because the runoff from the land around
it's very peat rich, which is black, and so that
that runoff goes into lake and it turns the lake
a very very dark color. So it's like it looks mysterious.

(03:31):
Like you can look at Lochness. I've never been there
personally aside from this time now that we're here, um,
but from what I understand, it is a like a
nice mysterious looking lake. Yeah, and that I mean I've
always thought it looked creepy, but it's beautiful really. But
there's something about deep dark and uh, you know reputed

(03:54):
monsters that will do that to you over the years. Yeah,
you know, like lakes and Georgia. I don't think I
heard once there's no U natural lake in Georgia that
every single lake in Georgia is man made by power
by power company. That I mean, I don't know as
far as I know that's true. There may be there
may be a natural lake somewhere that I don't know
about in the mountains. But I think they're supposedly all

(04:16):
Georgia power lakes, aren't they. That's that's what I understand.
And every single one of them, I mean, they're they're
no deeper than like thirty forty fifty ft. That's not
very deep at all as far as lakes go. And
a lot of them have like flooded structures, like they
built a damn in like the water built up around
it and flooded like towns or like there's a gulf
station at at Um under Lake Lanear. I believe, right, Yeah,

(04:40):
I mean they're they're yeah, automobiles supposedly an old remnants
of houses under a lot of these lakes. It's like
a brother art though when they've flooded the valley exactly
same thing. So when you're when you're swimming in a
lake in Georgia and it's just like thirty ft deep,
you can just feel everything underneath you. Imagine what it
must be like swimming in a lake and feeling that

(05:02):
there's nine feet between you and the bottom of this
lake and what all is there? Yeah, you could 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 that
there's something in locknets. 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

(05:24):
of years from what we understand. Uh yeah, I mean
this was I had no idea that this went back
that far. But there were these people um way back
in the day called the Picks 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

(05:45):
of their tattoos. And they carved these um I guess
they're just like, uh, it's as standing stones, but with
a little carving like clay like a wall carvings. They're no,
they're like it's a freeze standing 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

(06:07):
used is basically like a canvas, but it's it's a
it's a stone. It's a free standing stone, all right,
Because I saw the pictures, but they were so close
up you couldn't really get that big image. But a
long story short, they 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 Lockness monster.

(06:32):
Let's just go ahead and say it. Yeah, it looks
it looks like kind of a seahorsey kind of thing
or you know. And this article, um, one of the
articles we used was from Nova PBS is Nova series,
and um. They basically point out that if you look
at all the other carvings that the Picks made, there
immediately identifiable what animal they were they were drawing with

(06:55):
this particular one called the Picked Beasts, no one has
any idea. And they're like, okay, well it was a
locknest monster that they drew, right, or an elephant that's
swimming maybe, which, um, well, I don't want to spoil it.
But elephants do swim a long distance. Yeah, that's the
thing that that connects the two episodes today, isn't it.

(07:17):
That's right, swimming elephants. Who'd have thought that one thing?
So the picks at least as far as years ago. Uh,
we're drawing pictures of sea monsters around Scotland, and there's
a lot of legends of like sea monsters that we
talked about in the sea Monsters episode in Scotland in general,
not just locked nests like they're crazy for him. Yeah,

(07:37):
they really are, and they have all sorts of scary
um stories behind them, like uh, water the water kelpie.
That was that frightened me reading it at my desk, right,
whether the water kelpie will come up and say, hey, kids,
you want to ride on my back through through the lock.
It's gonna be fun, and because all the guttish kids

(07:57):
sound like that, and they jump on and there imediately
stuck to the beast, which takes them down to the
depths of the lock and they all drowned and then
chuck and then I think you should take it from here.
When which part their hats become stuck in there? Right?
And they drowned and die. But then what happens the
next day? Yeah, this is I'm not quite sure how

(08:20):
this happens, but their livers wash ashore the next day.
So I guess the beast likes to eat every 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, which you would think would be delectable.
But no. So um that so years ago Lochness monster,

(08:44):
possibly with the picks. If we fast forward about a
thousand years beyond that, there's a saint named Saint Colomba
who showed up in Ireland and said, hey, Heathen's have
you ever seen any pamphlets or brochures about Christianity? I
have some I can give you, and converted the Scots
to um Christianity, and like five sixty five, I think

(09:06):
around that time, and there's a story of St. Columba
who was going to visit a Pictish king and UM said,
on the way, stopped at the lock and looked out
on the lock and there was some Scottish guy swimming
and St. Columba saw a monster swimming toward the guy,
as if to attack him and held up his hand

(09:28):
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. Columba's credibility among
the pis. Yeah, and I think we could just end
the show right there. There you go. That's the Lockness
months proven by history. Uh. And then flash forward again. Um.

(09:51):
There was a BBC correspondent named Nicholas Witchell. 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, um like quit their jobs and this became
their job kind of thing. Yeah, Like it gets under
your skin, Yeah, under your under your lucky beastly skin. Um.
And he wrote a book in nineteen seventy four called

(10:12):
The Lockness Story, and he ended up digging up about
a dozen or so references pre twentieth 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 nineteenth century, and there it was sporadic.

(10:32):
But the year of the Lochness Monster, the year the
Lochness Monster became part of the public consciousness, was nineteen
thirty three though, for sure, that sounds like a great
place to take a break. Oh boy, okay, let's do
it all right, chuck, So I said. Three was the

(11:09):
year that the Lochness 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 uh the shore on the north side specifically, so
you could all of a sudden you could drive on
this lock and you could look at it and stare

(11:30):
at it and eventually see something if you spend enough
time there. And in April that happened Mr and Mrs McKay,
we're 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

(11:51):
word monster for the first time, And so the Lochness
Monster was officially born. And that whole year, I mean
that was in the 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

(12:14):
there was something else that happened in nineteen thirty three
two 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
and there's like a whole thing about you know this,
that whole forbidden island where King Kong lives, where like
dinosaurs are still alive and stuff like that, And a

(12:36):
lot of people point to, you know, 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 sighting. Supposedly a motorcyclist saw one on like
crossing the road. Supposedly, Uh, they offered up um a
circus offered up a reward of twenty pounds. People were

(12:56):
camping out and kind of you know, just kind of
waiting for Nest two pier. And then finally in December,
the London and this story you're gonna want to listen
closely and then put a pin in it so it'll
come back to haunt us later or not us. But
you know, the show the world party. But the London
Daily Mail hired an actor, a director and a big

(13:19):
game hunter. This is a great name all rolled into one. Yeah.
Marmaduke weather Ll and said, listen, dude, you have all
these skills. You are a director and actor and you
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

(13:42):
ever given. He's like, I know all these things, but
I appreciate it anyway. So the yeah, they the Daily
Mail sent him up there to figure out what was
going on. This was December, did you say, Yeah, December
of thirty three, so um, and again this whole thing
started in April and we'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

(14:03):
what I understand, like super, um, you know what I'm saying,
it's the Daily Mail. I don't really think you have
to put it in any other way. Are they like tabloid?
Oh yeah, yeah for sure. I mean I always get
the those UK rags confused on which ones are like,
you know, tabloid and which ones are reputable. They were

(14:23):
printing clickbait before computers were around, before they even knew
what that was and there, like, why are we calling
it clickbait? Yeah? Like what's a mouse? They called it
thumb bait, right, Actually they called them. Remember we talked
about this in our tabloid episode. They called it like like, hey,
Martha's stories like stories so amazing that they got the

(14:43):
reader to say, hey, Martha, listen to this. Do we
do a show on tabloids? You don't remember we did?
It was a good one. I know it's we should
just sit around and listen to old episodes sometime refresh
our memory. Okay, So, um weather else shows up to
lock An s among like a lot of pomp and

(15:05):
circumstances that Daily Mail didn't like just quietly sent him there.
They really promoted this and he starts searching and within
just a few days he found something. He found tracks
in the mud around Lockness and um, he did his
measurements because again remember he's a big game hunter, tracker, outdoorsman,
and he he and an actor, a fit not a

(15:26):
not a successful actor. I get the impression that he
was like, um, kind of an Edward type actor director. Um,
but he uh he he calculated that the animal that
made these tracks with like I think four toad tracks
in the mud was at least twenty ft long, and
this happened at December. He took plaster casts and he

(15:47):
sent him off to the UM, the Royal Museum, you know,
the Natural History Museum in London, to to be analyzed.
Just as Christmas said in even though this was potentially
the greatest find zoological find in the world hit in
world history, they were like, we still have to go
and break right on holiday, Bob Cratchit commands it. Everyone waited.

(16:11):
They did come back from holiday and uh, you know,
monster hunters were all over London, that are all over
loch Ness and they were super excited. And then in
January zoologists said, um, 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

(16:33):
what's the hippopotamus doing there? But they said no, no, no,
it was a taxidermy hippopotamus foot and it was probably
like an ashtray or an umbrella. Stand right, somebody just
walks around. I went foot here, footprint here, footprint there,
and whether I fell for it. So I there's a
question of whether he was the perpetrator of the fraud

(16:54):
or whether he was, you know, the victim of this fraud.
But he fell for and he was humiliated. I didn't
see any um, actual like articles, but apparently the Daily Mail,
the paper that sent him up there, said like humiliated
him in their in their coverage of the whole thing.
So he retreated from public view. He was humiliated. And um,

(17:18):
don't forget Duke weather Roll because he comes back later. Yeah.
And not only did they ruin his good name or
his mediocre name, at least he Uh, the whole incident
just sort of put a damper on Nessy for a
few decades. Um, Yeah, kind of brought out the crack
pots and anyone that had any sightings, uh, they would

(17:40):
be dismissed and said, to know, it's an illusion. It
was a duck or a or a log floating or
a swimming deer or something, and it just it's 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 gotten all wrapped up in the
whole thing, and then you know, it was proved to

(18:02):
be a big fraud. So everybody just abandoned the Lockness monster.
Well most people did. Anybody who seemed legitimate, especially if
you're a scientist. The Locknus monster was was not real. Yeah,
but that did not stop just regular human beings and
monster hunters to um to not go there anymore. They
were still into it. I think there was a book

(18:22):
in nineteen seventy four that said more than four thousand people,
uh 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

(18:43):
it wasn't just a bunch of uh kooks like you
and I out there. Yeah. There was a guy named
Dr Richard Cinch. He was a biochemist who won the
Nobel Prize who said he saw something, and like you said,
they kind of bore a similar similarities in these reports,
Like there were humps, at least one or two humps
rising above the surface, like an overturned boat. Maybe it

(19:05):
was an overturned boat, maybe so uh a lot of
people reported something with a long, slender neck and a
small head rising out of the surface, rising out from
the lake. Um. And there was this local doctor named
Constance White who was um. I think she might have
lived in Inverness. She lived around Lochness, and she had
a lot of friends who had come forward and said,

(19:27):
you know, I've seen this, and people just shouted and
laughed at them and 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 really kind
of lends 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 had who's made

(19:49):
these reports, into a book called More Than a Legend
in nineteen fifty seven. And it took the Locknus frivolity
and turned it back into a potentially um scientifically studiable thing.
Yeah for sure, it didn't. Uh, it's not like it
fully legitimized it, but it kind of reminded people like, hey,

(20:14):
it's not just a bunch of crackpots out here um
making stuff up. Like there have been some reputable people
who have 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.
And UH it happened in UM about a ten year period.

(20:38):
There were four different expeditions from Oxford, Cambridge, University of
Birmingham and the BBC that all went out there and
did their own 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

(21:00):
for something, and it basically was a little bit better
than someone sitting in their lawn chair with binoculars for
hours on end, which is what people were mostly doing
I guess in that first wave in the early thirties. UM,
he's what they had, right Uh. But then so so
Constance White White book also UM kind of gave rise

(21:22):
to a second wave of lockness hunters inspired a lot
of people. UM. There was the Lockness Investigation Bureau which
set up shop on the shore of the Loch and
UM kept watch and led investigations and expeditions for like
a decade I think from sixty two to seventy two.
And there's an no that's not. Bed's pretty spending ten

(21:44):
years looking for the Lockness Monster. I think you've you've
established your bona fide, as you know. And then Tim
Dinsdale was a He was an aeronautical engineer and he
became kind of a famous Lockness hunter because on his
after reading more than a legend constant white book, UM,
he was inspired to go hunt for the Lochness Monster,

(22:05):
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.
Do you think I think some of it looks very interesting?
They didn't stale film in particular, looks pretty interesting to
me too. Yeah, I agreed, I'm not gonna go out there. Well,

(22:28):
let's just save I'll save my judgment save it. Um.
But in the like I said, over the years, as
technology got better, UM, they started using this technology in
the nineteen seventies. UM there was in a series of
expeditions UM sponsored by Academy of Applied Science out of
a Boston and they were the first people to combine

(22:50):
sonar because they're all already using that, but sonar and
underwater photography under the leadership of a guy named Robert
Rines who was UH I love this description, A lawyer
trained in physics, and they were using side scan sonar,
which we've talked about before a couple of times over
the years. Yeah, maybe pressure hunting or something or Barbie,

(23:17):
I don't remember one of those. But here here's the
idea there is you combine side scan sonar with UH
in 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 I assume a side

(23:40):
scan sonar dings. Something swims by, well, no side scan sonar,
so it makes it sends out a ping or whatever,
but it gets um echoes back from all the different
stuff that bounces off of at different rates, and it
creates basically like a picture of the floor of the
or of the lake. Yeah. I just meant a ding
to alert you. I was just oh, I got you.

(24:01):
I see like a typewriter, right, or a microwave. Yeah.
But the point is if you have those two things
that like, hey, we got 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 hit something on
I think in June or sometime in Nive They had

(24:26):
this 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 work,
so you can, you know, see stuff because it is
very dark. And this thing, like if you look at

(24:48):
these photos, you know, it looks like a big triangular
sort of diamond shaped fin or a flipper 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.

(25:10):
Like I'm not saying like, oh my god, look at
that monster, because 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,

(25:32):
but well it looks like a monster of the sea.
So so, I mean, this is a big deal. When
they got these, this was these were respected scientists carrying
out a a sober, level headed expedition to that they
were drinking a little bit, let's be honest, sober ish,
level headed ish expedition. And when they came came with these, uh,

(25:54):
these pictures, when they developed them like they again, the
world was like, all right, fool me, why 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 nineteen seventy five because world was like,
which story should we pay attention to today, the haunted
House in Amityville or the Locknez monster photos or the

(26:16):
Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, I love the seventies were the greatest
decade ever, so great and then they're like, who cares
about any of that, Let's go to a key party. Um.
So Ryan's he had 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

(26:38):
that backed him up. Um, this guy named Harold Doc
Edgerton from M I T. 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 stuff. He's like, this is this seems legitimate?

(27:00):
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 rhymes,
which was a very big deal, so much so that
Ryan's was actually able to present evidence at the House
of Commons in London, and people were starting to take

(27:23):
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. 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 gonna get a million emails

(27:43):
telling us to the name of the monster in Lake Havastar.
It's to have asou monster. Is that ungrateful to say
something like that. I don't think so. I think it was.
I'm gonna take it out. So um the the I
don't I don't know if he actually presented the findings
or not, but definitely wrote up. Sir Peter Scott and
Robert Ryan's wrote up a paper, an academic paper. It

(28:07):
wasn't pure viewed, but it was published in the journal Nature,
which is I mean, they're two big English language science
journal Science and Nature, and they got there published in
one and it's it was in the opinions of comments sections. Sure,
but Science letter to the editor basically the crack pop corner.

(28:27):
But the the the 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 it's scientific binomial name. Yeah,

(28:48):
and this is after we should say that. Um the
naturalist Mr Scott uh said, oh, By the way, not
only are are we do we believe what Rhyme's is doing,
but I think that Nessie is a plessy assur um.
This is a marine reptile that we thought when extinct
sixty million years ago, which that did not help the case. No,

(29:13):
it didn't. And I think I get the impression that
Ryan's was kind of like, 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 scientific establishment
types that Ryan's was trying to basically get on board
to try to find the Lockness Monster turned them off. Yeah,

(29:37):
but nevertheless they did give it that name. Um. Necessitarists,
Rombo tereks 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 missed that, that would be a tough tribute question. Though.
That's a great one, though, Necessitarists Ramba tark as the

(30:00):
Lockness Monster. I think that's one of the better trivia
questions I've ever heard. Well, I'll trivia masters out there
take note. Use it. It will um and thank us
afterward and direct people to stuff you should know on
the I Heart Radio podcast app or if you listen
to podcasts, Well done, Chuck. I think you're gonna get

(30:21):
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 a buy no meal and
a common name. So they said, just to cover ourselves

(30:42):
just in case Nessie is a real thing, let's go
ahead and name name this lady. Right. So um again
after that, after Sir Peter Scott said it's a dinosaur,
which again it's not the most far fetched thing in
the world. Um, it's like the Cela canth was thought
to be extinct for tens of millions of years and

(31:03):
started finding them off of the coast of Africa, so
it's not entirely out of the realm and possibility. It
wasn't like this guy was like, well it's aliens. Obviously,
it's a giant alien. It's a sea alien. Um. Like
there there was from what I understand they were earnest
and they were trying to do this legitimately, although one
of the MP's in Scotland pointed out that necessit terroists

(31:27):
ramba tericks is an anagram for monster hoax by Sir
Peter S. And for many years everybody's like, well, yes,
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 had wanted to do that,
I couldn't have also fit in the CEO T T

(31:48):
in Scott And he didn't really answer the question. But
I think the impression that I got from like actual
Lochness monster hunters is that he was he was earnest
in 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 species. Pretty

(32:08):
interesting monster hoax by Sir Peter S. It's pretty specific.
But I mean, what a betrayal because Robert Ryan's was
a true believer and if that's what Scott was doing,
he was one of the bigger puts is the British
naturalist community ever ever produced, which, by the way, did
you get that email about Yiddish? No, huh, apparently puts

(32:29):
is a very bad word. Oh is it like Fanny
in the UK? No, it's just uh that this nice
lady wrote us about Yiddish words and sayings. And she's like,
most people don't realize that schmuck and putts are are
not the nicest words. What does putts mean? And like
American English, we'll discuss offline. Okay, I really want to know.

(32:53):
I'm not sure. I can wait. That's okay, you can wait.
So can you make some hand justus be the initials.
So in the eighties, UM things started to ramp up
a little bit more. UM. There were more sonar hits
coming around UH. In N seven in the late eighties,
a one million pound they spent a million bucks for

(33:18):
a week long exploration called Operation Deep Scan UM. And
this was once again the UM Luckness 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 gonna do is just go search
for UH anomalies with the sonar and see if we

(33:39):
can start ruling some things out. Yeah. Then they used
like twenty four boats from what I understand to like
sweep in unison using side side scan sowar the whole
lock like at once. They were just going slowly back
and forth over the lock. And remember that side scan
sonar creates like a picture and image of the of
the the lake floor. And so they were really coming

(34:04):
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 we're um,
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. Uh. And this carried over, of course

(34:26):
into the early nineties. Another BBC guy named Nicholas Witchell
Um organized project Uh how do you pronounce that Urquhart.
I was going with er Quart er Quart. I like
that I do too, silent h. But also the Qua
Sure project erquart, which was a real scientific in the

(34:49):
first one um scientific extensive study of the biology and
geology of the lake itself. Yeah, Nicholas Witchell, he was
leading this thing. They weren't looking for the monster but
he was one of He was that guy who wrote
that nineteen seventy four book about the monster. Yeah, people
kind of come and go in this story is interesting,
it really is. It's got it's a tight knot of

(35:10):
of like a ball of worms writhing together or something.
But he did while he was doing the study of
biology and geology, he did find another underwater moving target,
followed it for a few minutes, lost it. But it
was just yet another kind of unexplained large moving mass.

(35:30):
And there was a sonar expert name Arnie Carr, who
was a board that expedition, who said, I would say
that this was biological in nature. Obviously was moving. It
was about fifteen ft long, about the size of a
small whale, so we shouldn't compare it to things. They're like,
it sort of looked like an overton turned boat, and
they're like, all right, well maybe it was, or the

(35:53):
the fin looked like a large ore, all right, or
a small otter Like stop saying that, right, All doing
is making me think, well, yeah, that's probably what it is.
Then 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 um again. I don't know

(36:13):
if you guys are paying enough attention, but just slowly
over the years, people have continued to uh show up
at lock nests launch expeditions come up with some things
that couldn't be explained. And the most recent one happened
in two thousand six team when a group of researchers
from Norway showed up to the lock to Um Explore
under an expedition and try to find the Locknest monster,

(36:36):
and they actually found something using side scan sonar plate.
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, jeez,
I mean, did it die? Is it sleeping? What's going
on with this thing? Because it wasn't moving And I
don't know how they figured it out, but it turns

(36:58):
out that it was a prop from a movie from
nine seventy, The Private Life of Sherlock Colums Billy Wilder movie.
And if you look at this monster in that movie,
it looks like the Lockness monster. And when they were done,
they just basically let the air out of the humps
and sun kid yep, and it just laid there for
like fifty years. Oh man. But the reason, the reason

(37:22):
why it looked like the Lockness 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 Lockness Monster is because we all have
the exact same image of the Lockness Monster. And what
a lot of people don't realize is that that image
comes from one specific photograph that was published in and

(37:47):
we will talk about that after this message break. M

(38:10):
all right, So you left us with quite a cliffhanger.
The very famous dare I say infamous, uh photo of
NeSSI that looks like a someone with her finger sticking
out of the water and 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

(38:32):
most famous picture of the Lockness Monster, which is interesting
because I think that stuff from looks way more realistic
and you know, potentially provable. Well, this was give him
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 Lochness Monster image, this

(38:52):
is the first thing that you're gonna see, and it's
it's why everybody's seen. It's like the first thing they
teach you in school is they show every buddy a
picture of the Lochness monsters. Say this is the Lochness Monster.
Now onto reading, you know. So the this picture's origin
was um. It first showed up on the cover of
the London Daily Mail in ninety four. This was the

(39:15):
year after Duke wetherell Um had 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 this thing's of um, the
Locknus Monster is not real. Um, this picture really kind
of kept interested going, Like the world didn't just completely

(39:38):
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 into right. So the
photo has a pretty good story in and of itself. Um.
It was sold to the Daily Mail by a surgeon
from London name Ar Kenneth Wilson. He said, I took
this picture. I saw a big commotion out in the water,

(39:59):
and I saw a semon stir and it 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 is real.
Of course, it's a hoax. Uh. And it took what
fifty years, basically fifty one years until they actually did
scientific analysis of this thing. A man named Stuart campbell

(40:23):
Um and an article in the British Journal of Photography
almost a psychology, Nope, photography, it's a little different. He
concluded that, uh, he looked at it, did a big
study and said, all right, this thing looks real, but
it's two to three ft long, and I think it's
a bird or an otter. And I think that surgeon

(40:46):
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, um are
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. Apparently no one had seen

(41:08):
the nick yet, thank you, so. Um. Finally, uh, even
in nine eighty four when this British Journal 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 Lochness Hunt monster hunters like that, that did nothing

(41:31):
to de legitimize it. Again because our Kenneth um Wilson
was a doctor, so of course he wouldn't have perpetrated
a fraud. And then finally, in uh, there was a
guy who is a Lochness monster hunter slash fanatic named
Alistair Boyd and uh in he basically dropped a bomb

(41:53):
on the world and said, the surgeon's photo is a
hundred percent fake and I have this story that ex
Blaine's how and he basically said, no, it's even among
Lockness monster hunters like himself. The surgeon's photo has been
basically debunked by this story that he came up with. Right,
So Boyd and his wife, uh, because you know, I'm

(42:17):
sure Boyd was like, Hey, this is my new crazy passion,
so you have to come with me. She rolled her
eyes and said okay. So they teamed up, uh, and
they did have a large animal sighting in nine. So
they were into it. It's not like they're out to
debunk this thing. I think they were trying to bunk it. Um.
They did some research behind the photo. He came across

(42:39):
an old newspaper clipping and the son of remember we
said to put a pen and Duke weather All, Marmaduke
his who was remember famously duped um supposedly with that
hippo foot and sold out by the Daily Mail. So
they found an old clipping which his son Ian or Ian,
I'm not sure he pronounces it, said that that photo

(43:01):
was a hoax. And Boyd was reading this article, uh
in nineteen and a couple of very important little details
kind of stuck out to him. Yeah, the so Ian
Wetherill had said that there was a guy named Maurice
Chambers involved in the hoax, and Maurice Chambers is the
guy that are Kenneth Wilson said originally when the first

(43:23):
that photo first came out, sixty years before, Maurice Chambers
was who he was going to visit. So it would
be really weird that Ian weather All would know who
Maurice Chambers was, and that our Kenneth Wilson. Dr Wilson
would know him as well. That was one thing. Then
the other thing is the picture he described was a
version of that photograph that was only published once, right,

(43:44):
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
for so this guy either has a freakishly good and
weird memory or he's the one that took the picture

(44:06):
to begin with. Because that detailed no one else would
have known. It's not it's not like proof positive or
anything like that, but it's they're pretty pretty good points
to 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 eighties and the article
was from the seventies, and apparently people hadn't paid Munch attention.
So we went to go find Ian weather All and

(44:28):
found out that he was dead. So he went and
found another guy who was mentioned in the article, Christian Spurling,
who was Duke weather All's stepson, and he had been
involved as well, and apparently, according to Alistair Boyd, when
he went and tracked down Christian Spurling, Spurling confessed to him, Yeah,
ninety three years old. Uh, it sounds like a sort

(44:50):
of a deathbed thing. He was like, it was us
the whole time. He's like, also, I have something else
to tell you. I I hit a person with my
car and drove off. While they're like, no, no no, no,
who cares, Let's talk about this picture. Um. So here's
the deal, uh, he said, because of the way that Duke, Um,

(45:11):
I guess step stepdad. That was a stepdad. Yeah, Duke
was a stepdad. So the way my stepdad was treated
by the Daily Mail and sold out and made to
look foolish. Uh, he went out to get even it
really stuck in his cross and get revenge. So he
enlisted his son and and myself when I was a
young boy, to go out build a model monster onto

(45:33):
a toy submarine and staged this photograph with which included
you know, they included the background and part of the
you know that not the zoomed in look. You can't
really tell that it's locked nests. But in the original photo,
like we said, you could see it and they did
that on purpose as proof that it was Locknets. Yeah,
and then they got through Bor's chambers the Common Friend,

(45:55):
they somehow persuaded Dr Wilson to take the film Habit
of Eloped 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

(46:16):
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 Surgeon's 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.
But he I have no idea why he joined up

(46:39):
on this, 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. He still don't
buy that. That that 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 said, a submarine
toy toy submarine from the thirties. Probably he wouldn't have

(47:00):
have have you know, done the trick. Yeah, that sounds
like the worst kind of internet pet ant case. Close.
Actually toy submarines would have looked more like this, right. Um,
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 that Also
to keep in mind, Alistair Boyd, the guy who who

(47:24):
told the world the story of how this this famous
photo of lock the Lockness Monster was hoaxed, He's like,
that does nothing to his belief. He's like, I'm sure
as yeah, I'm more sure of than I'm sure of
anything that there's a something in lockness. And I think
he said something like he would if he were a
wealthy man, who would spend the rest of his life
trying to catch another glimpse of it, because like we said,

(47:47):
you know, it kind of gets under your skin when
when when you like get into the Lockness monster. So
in the nineteen nineties, Um, here are some more explanations,
because here's the deal. Like they're like, you have to
prove something exists, not disprove or wait, not prove that.

(48:10):
Like the burden of proof should be on people that
say this is a thing. Yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Yeah.
There have been people over the years that have tried
to explain it as other things and like baby, people
are seeing something, but what they're really seeing is blank. Uh.
A man named Steve Feltham in the nineteen nineties. He's

(48:31):
one of these guys that you know, kind of became
a monitor but obsessed. I'm not gonna say that, but no,
you could call him upset. I came so interested that
he quit his job and did this for thirty years.
But he said, here's what I think it is. He said,
I think it's a It's a Wells catfish. And if
you look up Wells w E l S catfish, these

(48:51):
are you know, everyone knows catfish can get large, but
these are European catfish that they look photoshops when you
look them up online and two or three people holding
these things up in Europe, they get larger. They are huge,
like up the huge, like thirteen feet long, which, by

(49:11):
the way, you don't forget that one. Robert Ryan expedition
found something that was the size of a small whale
about fifteen feet long. Ye okay, so this is what
But this is a This is a really big point
that Steve Feltham is saying this. This guy left his
life in the nineties, holds the Guinness record for the

(49:33):
longest um search for lockness, which is just dumb. It
is Guinness. You know, they lost their way a long
time ago. They really did so. Um, Like he's saying,
I don't think it's a 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. Um.
That's a big deal that he's saying that, And that

(49:55):
seems to be a trend among Lockness UM enthusiasts that
it's kind of turned a little more toward Hey, let's
let's use our time and effort and energy to figuring
out how it's not a sea monster um, which is
a really big change and not just like lockness monster searches.
But it says a lot about the world too, you know. Yeah,

(50:19):
And I think this wells catfish would certainly explain all
of those unexplained underwater moving side scan sonar images. Um,
like they're not the most detailed things in the world.
It's not a photograph, right, Uh. And those these things
are I mean, just look up Wells catfish. They are
tremendous and large. Right. Okay, So that's a pretty good explanation.

(50:43):
A less good explanation that we just have to mention though,
is that the elephant thing. Yeah, there's a Storian in
two thousand six who said, well, you know, I just
came across some evidence that circuses traveling through Scotland used
to stop and rest at at loch Ness and they
would let the animals out to wander around. And elephants

(51:04):
love to swim, which is the crossover thing between the
episodes today, right, Um, elephants love to swim, and probably
what some of these sightings in the thirties were of
the Lochness Monster were elephants swimming and Lockness. Yeah, completely
away from the rest of the circus, right, and the

(51:25):
people that were resting on the shoreline. And then after
after he finished, he said, but uh, 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 um stories, like real documentary evidence that these photos

(51:46):
and things, none of them there's no hard evidence. They
can all be interpreted as they're explained away as different
other things. Yeah, right, And also there's like there's a
you know, that whole thing developed where Uh what was that?
Sir Peter Scott said it was a plesiosaur, right um,
which is an extinct marine reptile, not a dinosaur. It

(52:09):
was a marine reptile. Other people said, no, it's a
sore pod, which makes even less sense because a sore
pod was a terrestrial um dinosaur which had never taken
to water, so what would it be doing in loch nests?
But for decades those were the kind of the two
conceptions that the Lochness monster was a surviving sore pod
or a surviving plesiosaur. And there are a lot of

(52:32):
problems with those. Number one, both of those those um
types of animals when extinct tens of millions of years ago. Yeah,
you could stop there had it not been for the
cela can't, right, But we respect the sela can't and
so we should explore further. Uh. And then you have
the problem of the fact that a sauropod is a

(52:53):
terrestrial beast that breathes air, so while it could swim,
it would have to come up every few seconds and breathe.
And ten reports a year over the history of of
loch Ness with you know, close to a half a
million people visiting every year, right, you would see if
this thing has to breathe every few seconds, there would

(53:13):
be a lot more sightings than that. Yes, and even
if it were a pleasi asaur, 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 nest sighting to be reported, Um, 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

(53:37):
just one, that means that this thing survived seventy or
sixty million years, So it's a sixty 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

(53:57):
sustain probably even one pleasius or a one sore of
pod um let alone that I think Sir Peter Scott
and Robert Ryan's in their paper estimated that you'd have
to have about thirty breeding individuals to continue a line
um I guess in in the lake, and there's just

(54:18):
not enough food. There's something like twenty two tons of
biomass or fish for them to eat, and that just
would not be nearly enough. Yeah, that's uh So if
you have like, let's say thirty of these that are
mating and breeding, creating more little nesties over the years,
and a lake that small and now it's deep, but
it is a pretty small lake that if you have

(54:38):
thirty of these things, let's say conservatively, and they all
have to come up and breathe every few seconds, you'd
see little 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 something washed up on the shore. And
that's never happened. Yeah, and that's a big problem. I'm

(55:00):
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 it that is real. Yeah,

(55:22):
my money on figuring this out. Um. Last summer in
two thousand eighteen, researchers finally took samples of environmental d
n A E d n A and this will tell you. Uh.
In fact, it did yield about five million individual DNA sequences.
This will tell you basically anything that has lived in

(55:44):
this lake. Right, maybe not forever, where is it forever?
I don't know how far back it would go, as
long as it had viable DNA, like it hadn't hadn't
deteriorated yet, so it could be like a whatever, a
scale of this monster. Um. And this has worked before.
I believe that you'll lit evidence of unknown life when

(56:06):
they discovered in human species called the dennis Ovans. Yeah,
this works. They have these five million sequences and now
they're just plowing through them basically. Yeah, now they have
to they have to analyze them and see if anything
that hasn't been identified before it turns up. It's pretty smart,
it's pretty it's amazing. It's like they took a photograph,

(56:27):
a snapshot of all of the d n a that's
in Locknest 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 is not a plesiosaur or not a sora
pod 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 we don't know about yet.

(56:50):
But if 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 Lockness is only ten
thousand years old. It's not like it was around before,

(57:11):
you know, when the dinosaurs were swimming around and they
could have found their way into Lochness and as the
as um As as the sea levels uh lowered and
Lockness was separated from the sea, they got trapped there.
Because Lockness didn't exist until it was gouged out of
the earth by the um glaciers during the Last Ice

(57:32):
Age ten thousand years ago. It's just too young for
something like that. 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 Lochness monster um,
if found, the people finding it can take a DNA

(57:54):
sample and they have to release it and they have
to make sure that it survives. They have to checked
it pretty neat. It is neat. So do you think
real quick, do you think there's anything in there? Uh? No,
so nothing we don't know about. You don't think there's
anything in that? Well, it depends on if you kind
a giant catfish is something we don't know about. I

(58:16):
would say we know about that. Yeah, I think it.
I think it's can be explained. Okay, Um, have you
seen incident at Lochness? No, we talked about it in
another another podcast, I believe. Oh really, yeah, another episode.
I can't remember when, but yeah, we talked about it.
I wonder what that would have been about. I've been

(58:36):
in the monster, I bet. But that's the Verner hurt
Zog like it's worth watching because Verner Hurtzog is on
screen and anytime you can get him talking or on screen,
just just watch. But it is Uh, it is a
mockumentary about Verner Hurtzog going to make a documentary about
Lochness and then while they're there to making of them

(59:00):
aking of and while they're there they see unexplained things.
It's good though, Huh, it's it's a fun Friday night
watch all right Friday. But just to listen to Zock, right,
it's great. Uh, we have a vase of making it talk. Yeah, exactly.

(59:20):
So is it on Netflix? Do you know? Or Amazon Prime?
I have no idea. Well we'll find out, all right. Well,
if you want to know more about locking you got
anything else? If you want to know more about Lockness,
Monster Lockness, or Scotland or anything like that, go on
to the internet. It's a really wide and deep resource,
deeper than Lockness even. And since I said that, it's

(59:41):
time for a listener mail. Uh. This is a listener
mail by way of our old friends at co ed Awesome.
We heard from Anne our friends as a reminder many
years ago, when we were just a fledgling podcast. Um
this group nonprofit called co ed Cooperative for Education. UH.

(01:00:01):
They invited us to go to Guatemala, which we did
you UH Me and Jerry, which was a crazy fun trip.
It was and we learned a lot and it was
very eye opening them any ways, and we've been kind
of working with them unofficially since then, so they have
a new drive going on. UM. They are on a
mission right now to keep eight thousand girls from dropping
out of school in Guatemala. And as a reminder, they're

(01:00:23):
they're kind of the 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 stopped going to school
because they need to work and help support their family.
So they're about halfway to that goal. Everyone to keep
a thousand girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala.

(01:00:46):
And UH forty one of the stuff you should know
army UH sponsored a student last year and that's great,
but we need more of you UM in Guatemala. It
is he started the school year and there are still
a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored. Sponsor ring
a student costs eighty dollars a month or co ED
will pair you with someone else if you can have
sponsor someone at forty dollars a month. Uh, and to

(01:01:08):
meet the students who need sponsors, which you can actually
do online. Pretty powerful stuff. Just go to Cooperative for
Education dot org yep. And we've seen it with our
own eyes that they do really good work, so we
can vouch for them. And uh, it's money well 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

(01:01:29):
know very much see it with your own eyeballs and uh,
it's very very good program and it's helping the uh,
the whole population, but especially the young women of Guatemala yep.
And give them the website again, Chuck. It is Cooperative
for Education dot org. Okay, so go check it out, everybody.
And in the meantime, if you want to get in

(01:01:50):
touch with us, you can go to uh stuff you
should know dot com and check out our social links.
I've got a website too, called the Josh Clarkway dot com.
And if you want to send an email to Chuck,
Jerry and Me, you can address it to Stuff Podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com for more on this

(01:02:11):
and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works
dot com mhm