No monster in history has
been pursued as actively as Nessie, the creature that is said to inhabit the
depths of Loch Ness in Scotland.
Since 1936, there have been 27 recorded films taken of “Nessie” and hundreds of
officially recorded sightings. Although hundreds of photographs of the Loch
Ness Monster have been taken and alleged to be authentic, all but a very few
have been easily explained by scientists as ripples in the lake’s surface,
floating debris, or deliberate hoaxes.
A new controversy regarding
the authenticity of a series of photographs of Nessie arose in September
2002 when Roy Johnston, a
retired printer, released four photographs to the media that showed a large
snakelike creature arching out of the water and withdrawing beneath the surface
of the lake with a splash.
While some photographic
experts declared the pictures to be genuine, others scoffed and argued that the
images were not taken in sequence, as Johnston
had said they were.
In 2001 Janet McBain,
curator of the Scottish Screen Archive, found the original 16mm film that first
launched the Nessie craze. Made on September 22, 1936, by Glasgow filmmaker Macolm Irvine for the
Scottish Film Productions
Company, the film had become nearly as legendary as the lake monster that it
depicted. McBain said that while the existence of the Irvine newsreel was well documented, it was
thought to have been destroyed and lost. According to eyewitness accounts, Irvine had first sighted
the creature in 1933, but his camera jammed. Three years later, Irvine and his film crew
spent three weeks at the lakeside before he got the footage he wanted. On the
footage, which lasts about one minute, the creature’s head and neck appear
above the surface of the water, then its two humps, one behind the other, and
finally what appears to be a tail, thrashing behind from side to side. The area
near the ruins of UrquhartCastle at Drumnadrochit
is still the most common vantage point for Nessie sightings and is said to
attract more than 200,000 visitors per year.
