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Early Sightings
 Mackenzie spotted what looked to him like a overturned boat ‘wriggling and churning up the water.’ Eight years later two separate groups of people reported a sighting and described what the modern day world envisions ‘Nessie’ looks like - a large gray beast with a small horse-like head at the end of a large neck, large flippers, and two humps on its back. These were the first recorded sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. To date there have been well over 10,000 reported sightings of Nessie who lives in the largest fresh water lake in the world. Loch Ness, over 20 miles long, 1 ½ miles wide, and 1000 feet deep is know the world over.
Scientific Theories
Researchers believe there may actually be several of these creatures living in the Loch Ness lake. The most common theory is that the animals are holdovers from the days of the dinosaurs - a surviving plesiosaurs that became trapped in the Loch’s murky waters when the water formation was first formed. This very plausible explanation combined with photographs, films, and sonar recordings give this strange anomaly much credibility.
Hugh Gray Photo
The first photo of Nessie, taken by Hugh Gray in 1933, is generally regarded as authentic. It shows the body of a large animal with a long neck extending out of the water, swimming in the Loch. This photo, along with the famous ‘surgeons’ photograph (taken by Lt. Col. Robert Kenneth Wilson) give us extremely accurate depiction’s of the creature’s appearance.
Conclusive Evidence?
What should have been regarded as the final conclusive evidence of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, still failed to convince some scientists. In 1972, the Academy of Applied Sciences took the first underwater photos of the creature. After suddenly picking up two large objects on sonar, cameras were dispatched to record underwater photos of the objects. The undeveloped film was rushed to the head office of Eastman Kodak in the United States. The developed photo showed what looked like a large flipper attached to the right side of an apparent body. Other photos clearly showed the long neck and bulky body.
Some of the detail of the creature was obscured due to the peat-sogged murky waters of he Loch. For this reason, the photos were brought to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where state-of-the-art photo enhancements could be performed. Much of the graininess of the originals was successfully removed. The pictures that appeared in Nature magazine and elsewhere, were these cleared up versions, not the grainy originals. Skeptics quickly atoned the ‘doctored’ photos crushing their potential impact, even though the original untouched photos still clearly showed the creature’s details.
The Academy team produced even more astounding photos in 1975 but were still unable to win over skeptics who continually referred to the incident of the doctored photos three years earlier. The mystery of the Loch Ness Monster remains… |