Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Reports of sightings made in 1520, 1771, and 1885 first came to light in a letter published in the October 20, 1933, issue of the Scotsman. The letter was from one D. Murray Rose, who “failed to supply either his address or any specific references to the chronicles or publications wherein his weird and wonderful stories could be found” (Binns 1984, p. 51). No one has ever been able to find any other reference than Rose’s letter to these alleged sightings.

The city of Inverness lies a few miles northeast of Loch Ness, and the first recorded report of the monster appeared in the Inverness Courier of May 2, 1933, written by one Alex Campbell. The witnesses were Mr. and Mrs. John Mackay, a local couple who were driving along the lake. Campbell’s report of what the Mackays saw is greatly exaggerated. He states, for example, that “the creature disported itself, rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale” (quoted in Binns 1984, p. 10). In fact, Mr. Mackay, the driver, saw nothing and Mrs. Mackay saw “a violent commotion in the water which seemed to be caused ‘by two ducks fighting’” (p. 12).

It turns out that this classic first sighting of the monster was a hoax. It was dreamed up by a couple of publicity agents who had taken on the job of drumming up publicity for several local hotels. This was revealed by Bauer (1986) in a book that is generally favorable to the idea that there is something truly unusual in Loch Ness. Bauer argues, rather unconvincingly it seems to me, that sometimes a hoax such as this is necessary for a true mysterious phenomenon to be noticed. Nonetheless, Bauer’s book is very valuable for its detailed listing of sightings and reports of the monster and an extremely detailed bibliography.

Since 1933 numerous reports of the monster have been made. What prompts them? Loch Ness is a large, long, and deep lake where natural phenomena—like ducks fighting—can provide the stimulus for perception to construct a monster where none exists. For example, the lake contains numerous salmon. On rare occasions, they come to the surface in groups, causing a considerable disturbance. Captain John Macdonald, who had sailed the lake for more than fifty years without ever seeing anything resembling a monster, suggested this type of event as an explanation for the Mackay sighting a few days after Campbell’s story was published (Binns 1984). There are also otter in the lake, which run an average of about four feet in length. When playing together, with several swimming in line, one diving, the next surfacing, and so forth, a group of otter could easily simulate the snakelike aspect that the monster is sometimes said to have. Further, otter are rather rare and so unfamiliar to most people. Otter have been mistaken for “monsters” in other Scottish lakes, as Binns notes. Deer are common around the lake and have been known to swim across it. A deer swimming in a lake is not something most people expect to see and so, if the lake happens to have the reputation of housing a monster, a monster will likely be perceived. Binns reports one case in which enlargement of a photograph of the monster revealed a swimming deer. Floating logs and bizarrely shaped pieces of driftwood can also be mistaken for a monster, if that is what one is half-expecting to see. And who could go to Loch Ness without at least half hoping to get a good view of the monster? Lehn (1979) has demonstrated that atmospheric refraction, associated with a temperature inversion layer (cold air near the surface of the lake, warmer air above), can produce striking illusions in which otherwise well-known objects are visually disorted, both in shape and size. The perfect conditions for such illusion-creating temperature inversions exist at Loch Ness and many other lakes where monsters are occasionally reported.

Photographs exist that are said to show the monster and, here again, the parallel between monsters and UFOs is striking. Many of the photographs show nothing other than indistinct shapes in the water. They could be anything, and probably are. Further, some of the photos don’t include any shoreline in the image and could have been taken anywhere—in a pond in the photographer’s backyard, for instance. Given the number of people toting cameras and video recorders around it is astonishing that more and better monster photos don’t exist, if the monster does. Fraud has also played a role in monster photographs. Photos taken in 1934 by R. A. Wilson that show a reasonably clear dinosaur-like shape are now known to be fakes (Binns 1984).

The most famous Loch Ness photographs—actually a film—were taken by Tim Dinsdale in the spring of 1960. The film was analyzed by the Royal Air Force Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center in 1966. The center reported that the moving object in the film was “probably an animate object” (quoted in Binns 1984, p. 109). This report has received much publicity, but Binns shows that it faces real problems as proof of the existence of the monster. A careful reading of the report shows that the object’s appearance is equivalent to that of a rather fast motorboat. This explanation is rejected because such boats are “normally painted in such a way as to be photo visible at any time” (quoted in Binns 1984, p. 123), and Dinsdale said it wasn’t a motorboat. On the day the film was taken, Dinsdale, an ardent believer in the existence of the monster, was greatly fatigued and had already mistaken a floating tree trunk for the monster. The report, then, actually shows that the object could have been a motorboat that was painted an unusual (i.e., dull as opposed to bright) color.

Loch Ness in the 1970s was the site of enormous efforts to obtain, once and for all, proof positive of the monster’s existence. Round-the-clock surveillance was maintained for months. Sensitive sonar scanned the lake and sensitive cameras were lowered into it. (One of the problems facing underwater photography in the lake is that the water is extremely murky.) A small underwater submarine spent 250 hours in the lake. The results of all this? Nothing: no surface sightings, no surface photographs, no sonar tracings of a monster, no monster skeletons found on the bottom of the loch, and only one photograph, obtained from an underwater camera in the summer of 1972, that showed a clear image of what appeared to be the large flipper of an unknown species. Was this proof at last? Robert Rines, who set up the camera that took the photograph, felt that it did establish the existence of the monster (Rines, Edgerton, Wyckoff, and Klein 1975–76). The original photograph was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for computer enhancement, a technique used to clarify photographs such as those beamed back to Earth from space by interplanetary probes. It was allegedly the computer-enhanced photo that was published in the article by Rines et al. (1975–76) and reproduced widely throughout the world. But the published photo was not the computer-enhanced photo. The published photo had been greatly retouched and appears much more obviously to show a flipper, while the actual computer-enhanced photograph could be of almost anything. An investigation by Razdan and Kielar (1984–85) revealed the true nature of the photograph in this case. Razdan and Kielar also point to serious shortcomings in the sonar evidence that Rines et al. argue supports their interpretation of the photograph.

The Loch Ness monster has been the object of much searching for almost seventy years. In all that time and with all that effort using some of the most technologically sophisticated devices available, no trace of conclusive evidence has been uncovered that the monster exists. It is most instructive to compare this situation to another where a creature, if by no means a monster, was actually found alive, in spite of the fact that the scientific world believed that it had been extinct for 200 million years. The creature is a fish called a coelacanth, which runs to about five feet in length and lives in the Indian Ocean. In 1938 a single specimen was caught, arousing considerable interest among scientists (Smith 1956). The story of the discovery of the coelacanth has been very well told more recently by Thomson (1991) and Weinberg (2000). In the next few years following 1938, the interest of scientists turned up some additional specimens of this “living fossil.” Compare the Loch Ness monster and the coelacanth. The monster is said to be a very large creature living in a lake in a rather heavily populated and traveled area, which is a favorite summer vacation spot with a highway running along it. In the nearly seventy years that people have so diligently looked for the monster, no satisfactory evidence for its existence has ever been found. The coelacanth, on the other hand, is a relatively small fish living in a vast ocean. When it was discovered in 1938, the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean were largely primitive colonial states. And yet in just a few years several more examples of the fish were found. It strains credulity to argue that if the coelacanth was found so rapidly and under such unfavorable conditions, the Loch Ness monster has somehow managed to evade its much more persistent and sophisticated searchers for so long.