Selects: Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster?

and to my sweet wife Umi, Happy birthday. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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. Is that Frankenstein? Is that Frankenstein? Or what? No? You got your arms extended like it is? Oh? Those are arms? Those are flippers. Oh I see I'm a monster. Okay, that was a

groundskeeper Willie clothes. Yeah, that was pretty good. The country are we? Are you doing like a Lochness monster impression? Man, you're good. I used the powers of deduction like Sherlock Holmes did in the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Oh, 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 Nessie

deserved her own space. Let's just go with there. Sure, why not? Right? So? Um, yeah, I went back. I was like, I feel like we definitely did a Lockness episode. But no, it's just a little little passage in the Sea Monster episode. So we'll flesh that out a little bit. Okay, sure, so Chuck, let's go back about ten thousand years. Okay, 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 will add some extra sound effects. So here we are, and we're actually chucking the lamb that will become Scotland in a few thousand years. 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 Mess. That's right.

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 Lachnus is like long and narrow, and it like it was created when an ice sheet gouged the rocky earth in Scotland ten thousand years ago and then the ice melton filled it in basically like I just said. And it was a deep gouge, not very wide, but it's like deeper than the North Sea. Yes, 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 hundred feet, which is staggering. Yeah, it's 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. It is very very fair 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 the lake and it turns the

lake a very very dark color. So it's like it looks mysterious, like you can look at Locknets. I've never been there personally aside from this time now that we're here. Sure, 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 you know, reputed monsters that will do that to you over the years. Yeah,

you know lake lakes in Georgia, I don't. I heard once there's no natural lake in Georgia that every single lake in Georgia is man made by Power Power Company. As far as 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 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 feet. It's not very deep at all, as far as lakes go, and a lot of them have like flooded structures, like they built a dam and like the water built up around it and flooded like towns or whatever. For sure, Like there's a gulf station at um under Lake Lanier, I believe, right, Yeah, I mean there there are 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 forty fifty feet deep, you can just feel everything underneath you imagine what it must be like swimming in a lake and feeling that there's nine hundred 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 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 Picts, and they were a tattoo covered tribe who were fierce warriors, and the Romans named them painted ones I guess because

of their tattoos. And they carved these um I guess they're just like it says, standing stones, but with little carving like clay, like a wall carvings. They're No, they're like, it's a free 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 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. We'll 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, one of the articles we used, was from Nova PBS's Nova series and they basically point out that if you look at all the other carvings that the Picks made, they're immediately identifiable what animal they were

they were drawing. Sure with this particular one called the Picked Beasts, no one has any idea and they're like, oh, okay, well it was the Lockness 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 connects the two episodes today, isn't it. That's right, swimming elephants. Who'd a

thought that one thing? So, the Picks, at least as far as fifteen hundred years ago, 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 lock Nest like they're crazy for him. Yeah, they really are, and they have all sorts of scary um stories behind

them like the water kelpie. Yeah, that was that frightened me reading it at my desk, right where 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, sure, And because all this guy's kids sound like that, And they jump on and they're immediately stuck to the beast, which takes them down to the depths of the lock, and they all drown and then chuck. And then I think you should take it from here.

Why which part their heads become stuck? And they're right, and they drown and die. But then what happens the next day? Oh yeah, this is I'm not quite sure how 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 yeah no. So um that So fifteen hundred years ago,

Lochness Monster possibly with the picks. We fast forward about a thousand years beyond that, there was a saint named Saint Colomba who showed up in Ireland and said, hey, heathens, have you ever seen any pamphlets or brochures about Christianity? I have someone I can give you, and converted the Scots to Christianity in like five sixty five, I think

around that time. And there's a story of Saint Colomba who was going to visit a Pictish king and said, on the way, stopped at the lock and looked out on the lock and there was some Scottish guy swimming and Saint Columba saw a monster swimming toward the guy as if to attack them, and held up his hand 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 Saint Columba's credibility among

the picks. Yeah, and I think we could just end the show right there. There you go, that's the lockness months proven by history, right, and then flash forward again. There was a BBC correspondent name 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, like quit their jobs and this became their job kind of thing. Yeah, like it gets under your skin, yeah,

under your under your lackey beastly skin. And he wrote a book in nineteen seventy four called 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, like the late the second half of the nineteenth century, and there it was sporadic. 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. Nineteen thirty three was the 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 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 at it and eventually see something if you spend enough time there. And in April that happened, mister and Missus McKay were 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 Invernous Courier and they used the 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 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 nineteen thirty three.

We have it, 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 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, they offered up a circus,

offered up a reward of twenty thousand pounds. People were camping out and kind of, you know, just kind of waiting for NeSSI to appear. 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 to us. But you know, the show the world party. But the London Daily Mail hired an actor, a director and a big game hunter. This is a great name all rolled

into one. Yeah, Marmaduke weatherell great name and said, listen, dude, you have all these skills. You are a director and actor and 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 ever given. He's like, I know all these things, right, but I appreciate it anyway. So the yeah, the Daily Mail sent them 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'd 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 what I understand, Like super 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. Well, are they

like a tabloid? Oh yeah, yeah for sure? Okay, I mean I always get the those UK rags confused on which ones are like, you know, tabloid in which ones are reputable. They were printing clickbait before computers were around, before they even knew what that was. And they're like, why are we calling it clickbait? Yeah, like what's a mouse? They called it thumbait? 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 like the reader to say, hey, Martha, listen to this. Do we do a show on tabloids? You don't remember? No, we did. It was a good one. Wow, I know it's we should just sit around and listen to old episodes sometime refresh our memory. Yeah, okay, so one of the else shows up to lock Ans among like a lot of pomp and circumstances. The Daily Mail

didn't like just quietly send them 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 locked Ass and he did his measurements because again remember he's a big game tracker, outdoorsman, and he he and an actor, a fit not a not a successful actor. I get the impression that he was like, um, kind

of an Edwood type actor director. Okay, um, but he uh, he calculated that the animal that made these tracks with like I think four toad tracks in the mud was at least twenty feet long. And this happened at December. He took plaster casts and he sent them off to the UM, the Royal Museum, you know, the Natural History Museum in London, to to be analyzed just as Christmas

set in. Yeah. So, even though this was potentially the you know, greatest find zoological find in the world in world history, they were like, we still have to go on break right on holiday. Bob Cratchett commands it. Everyone waited they did come back from holiday and uh, you know, monster hunters were all over London, that are all over Lochness and they were super excited. And then in January

zoologist 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, what's hippopotamus doing there? Right? 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 and went foot here, footprint here, footprint there,

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

don't forget Duke weather Eye he comes back later. Yeah, And not only did they ruin his good name or his mediocre name. At least, the whole incident just sort of put a damper on Nessie for a few decades. Yeah, Yeah, kind of brought out the crackpots and anyone that had any sightings they would 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 just it 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 this whole thing, and then you know it was proved to be a big fraud. So everybody just abandoned the Lochness Monster. Well most people did, anybody who seemed legitimate, especially if you were a scientist. The Lochness Monster was not real. Yeah, But that did not stop just regular human beings and monster hunters to not go

there anymore. They were still into it. I think there was a book in nineteen seventy four that said more than four thousand people, 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. There were scientists and teachers and lawyers and priests, like, it wasn't just a bunch of kooks like you and

I out there. Yeah, there was a guy named doctor 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 was an overturned boat. Maybe. So 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.

And there was this local doctor named Constance White who was 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, 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 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 published the reports along with sketches from the people who had who's made these reports, into a book called More Than a Legend in nineteen fifty seven. And it took the Lochness frivolity and turned it back into a

potentially scientifically studiable thing. Yeah, for sure, it didn't. It's not like it fully legitimized it, but it kind of reminded people like, hey, it's not just a bunch of crackpots out here making stuff up, Like there have been some reputable people who've very similar things, and here they are all collected in one space. So that inspired more people to namely the scientific community, to get involved. Yeah,

and it happened in about a ten year period. 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 sonar, which was a new I guess a newer technology at the time that allows you to use sound to search underwater 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, these what they had right. But then so Constance White. White's book also kind of gave rise to a second wave of Lockness hunters inspired a lot of people. There was the Lochness Investigation Bureau, which set up shop on the shore of the loch and kept watch and led investigations and expeditions for like a decade, I think from sixty two to seventy two. And there's no that's not Bad's pretty spending

ten years looking for the Lockness Monster. I think you've you've established your bona feed, 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 that Constant White book, he was inspired to go hunt for the Lochness Monster, and on his first time out he caught something very weird moving away from him on the loch in on film. Have you seen it? Yeah, I've looked at all this stuff.

Where 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, agreed, Ye, I'm not going to go out there. Well, 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, 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 sonar because they're all already using that, but sonar and underwater photography under the leadership of a guy named Robert Rines, who was I love this description, a lawyer trained in physics, right, 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, Okay or Barbie, I don't remember one of those. But here here's the idea there is you combine side scan sonar with and time it along with your underwater photography and if you get 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 scan sonar dings something swims by, well, no side scan sonar, so it makes it sends out a ping or whatever, but it gets 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. 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 in June nineteen seventy five or sometime in nineteen seventy five, they had this system going and at the same time that the sonar was showing some at least one very large object moving, they were getting photographs that, when they developed,

showed some very odd stuff. Yeah. And this is this underwater photography. It's got a strobe light that's where so you can you know, see stuff because it is very dark and this thing like if you look at 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 came out of that batch. Yeah,

I mean it all looks different and interesting. 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 and 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, but well,

it looks like a monster of the sea. So so, I mean, this was a big deal when they got these. This was these were respected scientists carrying out a sober, level headed expedition. They were drinking a little bit, let's be honest. There was sober ish, level headed ish expedition. And when they came came with these, uh, these pictures, when they developed them, like they again, the world was like, all right, fool me once, 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 stories should we pay attention to today? The haunted House in Amityville or the Locknet monster photos or the Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, I love the seventies. They 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. So Rins 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 that backed him up. This guy named Harold Doc Edgerton from MIT, 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, so he's like, this is this seems legitimate? 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, and they both got behind Rins, which was a very big deal, so much so that Ryans was actually able to present evidence at the House of Commons in London, and people were

starting to take 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. Yeah, I'm sure there's one in Lake Havasu. Oh, I'm sure there's several. Which is great that we said that, because now we're going to get a million emails telling us to the name of the monster in Lake Havasu. It's the have asous monster. Is that ungrateful to say something like that. I don't

think so. I think it was. I'm gonna take it out right, so I don't. I don't know if he actually presented the findings or not, but they definitely wrote up. Sir Peter Scott and Robert Ryans wrote up a paper, an academic paper. It 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's published in one and it was in the opinions of comments actions. Sure, but Science letter to

the editor, basically the crackpot corner. Yeah, but the the the I mean Nature published it. They could have been like, no, this is ridiculous. And these guys they published this paper. From what I can tell earnestly, like they meant it right. So um, in this paper they gave Nessie its scientific

binomial name. Yeah, and this is after we should say that the naturalist mister Scott said, oh, by the way, not only are we do we believe what Rhymes is doing, but I think that NeSSI is a plessy assur um. This is a marine reptile that we thought when extinct sixty five million years ago. Well, that did not help

the case. No, it didn't. And I think I get the impression that Rhymes 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 Lochness monster turned them off. Yeah. But Nevertheless, they did give it

that name. 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, Yeah, Necesitarists Rambo Terris as the Lochness Monster. Yeah, I think that's

one of the better trivia questions I've ever heard. Right, well, I'll trivia masters out there to take note, use it at will and thank us afterward and direct people to stuff you should know on the iHeart Radio podcast app or you listen to podcasts. Well done, Chuck, I think you're gonna get like a gift card from Target or something for that. 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 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, just in case Nessie's a real thing, let's go ahead and name name this lady. Right So 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.

It's like the Cela canth was thought to be extinct for tens of millions of years before started finding them off of the coast of Africa, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. It wasn't like this guy was like, well it's aliens. Obviously, it's a giant alien.

It's a sea alien. Yeah, like there was From what I understand, they were ernest and they were trying to do this legitimate, although one of the MP's in Scotland pointed out that necessitarists ramba terics is an anagram for monster hoax by Sir Peter s and for pretty good for many years, everybody's like, well, yeah, 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 Cott 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 and 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 spec It is pretty interesting. Monster hoax by Sir Peter s that's pretty specific. But I mean, what a betrayal, because Robert Ryans 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 putts is a very bad word. Oh oh is

it like Fanny in the UK? Now, it's just uh, this nice lady wrote us about Yiddish words and sayings and she's like, most people don't realize that schmunk and putts are not the nicest words. What does putts mean? And like American English, we'll discuss offline. Okay, I really want to know. I'm not sure. I can wait. That's okay, you can wait. So can you make some hand gestures. I'll give you the initials. Okay. So in the eighties

things started to ramp up a little bit more. There were more sonar hits coming around in nineteen eighty seven and the late eighties a one million pound they spent a million bucks for a week long exploration called Operation Deep scam In and this was once again the Lockness 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 anomalies with the sonar and see if we can start ruling some things out. Yeah, and they used like twenty four boats from what I understand to like sweep in unison, using side sidescans owner 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 lake floor, and so they were really coming 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 obviously moving targets that were large that they just don't they don't know they were, They have no idea. Yeah, pretty interesting, yep, and this carried over, of course, into the early nineties. Another BBC guy named Nicholas Witchell organized project how do

you pronounce that Urquhart? I was going with er Quart. Oh Erquart, I like that, I do too, silent h. But also the Qua Sure project Erquart, which was a real scientific in the first one 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 the He was that guy who wrote that nineteen seventy four book about the monster. Yeah.

People kind of come and go in this story. It's interesting, h. It really is. It's got it's a tight knot of 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 to our get followed it for a few minutes, lost it. But it was just yet another kind of unexplained large

moving mass. And there was a sonar expert named 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 feet long about the size of a small whale. Yeah, so we shouldn't compare it to things. They're like, it sort of looked like an over turned boat, and they're like, all right, well maybe it was, or the the fin looked like a large ore, all right,

or a small otter. Like stop saying that, right, all you're doing is making me think, well, yeah, that's probably what it is. Then, Yeah, but 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 if you guys are paying enough attention, but just slowly over the years, people have continued to show up at lock nests launch expeditions come up with some things that couldn't be explained, and the most recent one happened in twenty sixteen when a group of researchers from Norway showed up to the lock to explore under an expedition and try to find the Locknest monster,

and they actually found something using side scan sonar. Yeah, 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 out that it was a prop from a movie from nineteen seventy eight, Yeah, the Private Life of Sherlock Holms Billy Wilder movie. And if you look at this monster in that movie, it looks like the Locknest Monster. And when they were done, they just basically let the air out of the humps and sank it. Yep, and it

just laid there for like fifty years. Oh man. But the reason, the reason why it looked like the Lochness 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 Lochness Monster is because we all have the exact same image of the Lochness Monster. And what a lot of people don't realize is that that image comes from one specific photograph that was published in nineteen thirty four, and we will talk

about that after this message break. All right, So you left us with quite a cliffhanger. The very famous dare I say infamous 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 most famous picture of the Lochness Monster, which is interesting because I think that stuff from nineteen

seventy five looks way more realistic and you know, potentially provable. Well, this was nineteen thirty four. 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 is the first thing that you're gonna see. Yeah, and it's it's why everybody's seen. It's like the first thing they teach you in school is they show everybody a picture of

the Lochness monsters. Say this is the Lochness Monster. Yeah, now onto reading, you know. So this picture's origin was it first showed up on the cover of the London

Daily Mail in nineteen thirty four. This was the year after Duke Wetherell 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 a this thing's the lockness, monsters not real, this picture really kind of kept interesting going, like the world didn't just completely 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 in nineteen thirty four, right, So the photo has a pretty good story in and of itself. It was sold to the Daily Mail by a surgeon from London named Ark Kenneth Wilson. He said, I took this picture, saw a big commotion out in the water, and I saw a sea monster, 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's real. Of course it's a hoax. And it took what fifty years, basically fifty one years until they actually did scientific analysis of this thing. Yeah, a man named Stuart Campbell and an article in the British Journal of Photography almost a psychology, Nope, photography, it's

a little different. He concluded that he looked at it did a big study and said, all right, this thing looks real, but it's two to three feet long, and I think it's a bird or an otter, and I think that surgeon 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, R. 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 the nick yet, thank you. So finally been in nineteen 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 did nothing to delegitimize it again because R. Kenneth Wilson was a doctor, so

of course he wouldn't have perpetrated a fraud. And then finally, in nineteen ninety four, there was a guy who is a Lochness monster hunter slash fanatic named Alistair Boyd, and in nineteen ninety four he basically dropped a bomb on the world and said, the surgeon's photo is a hundred percent fake, and I have this story that explains 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, because you know, I'm 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, and they did have a large animal sighting in nineteen seventy 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.

They did some research behind the photo. He came across an old newspaper clipping and the son of remember we said to put a pin and Duke Weatherill Marmaduke who was remember famously duped 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 was a hoax. And Boyd was reading this article in nineteen seventy five and a couple of very important little details kind of

stuck out to him. Yeah, the so Ian Weatherell had said that there was a guy named Maurice Chambers involved in the hoax. And Maurice Chambers is the guy that R. Kenneth Wilson said originally when the first 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 Weatherall would know who Maurice Chambers was, and that our Kenneth Wilson, doctor 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, 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 in nineteen thirty four, So this guy either has a freakishly good and weird memory, or he's the one that took the picture to begin with, because that detailed no one else would have known. It's not that's not like proof positive or anything like that, but it's they're pretty pretty good points 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 much attention. So we went to go find Ian Weatherall and found out that he was dead. So he went and found another guy who was mentioned in the article, Christian Spurling, who was Duke Weatherall's stepson. He had been involved as well, and apparently, according to Alister Boyd, when he went and tracked down Christian Spurling,

Spurling confessed to him, Yeah, ninety three years old. It sounds like a sort 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 hit a person with my car and drove off. Once They're like no, no no, no, who cares. Yeah, let's talk about this picture. So here's the deal, he said, because of the way that Duke, I guess step stepdad that was a step dad. Yeah,

Duke was a step dad. So the way my stepdad was by the Daily Mail and sold out and made to look foolish, he went out to get even it really stuck in his cross and get revenge. So he enlisted his son and myself when I was a young boy, to go out build a model monster onto a toy submarine and staged this photograph which included you know, they included the background and part of the you know, not the zoomed in look. You can't really tell that it's

lock NEETs. 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 Boor's chambers the Common Friend. They somehow persuaded doctor Wilson to take the film, have it developed 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 got, because the whole world for decades was like, Nope, this guy 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. Yeah, but he I have no idea why he joined up 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. They 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, Yeah said a submarine toy toy submarine from the thirties

probably wouldn't have have, you know, done the trick. Yeah, that sounds like the worst kind of internet pet ant, right, Chase 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 year, which is interesting too, but it's really saying something though. Also to keep in mind, Alistair Boyd, the guy who who told the world the story of how this this famous

photo of 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 then 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, he would spend the rest of his life trying to catch another glimpse of it. Yeah, because like we said, 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 weight, not prove that it. Like the burden of proof should be on people that say this is a thing. Yeah, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Yeah,

so it is. There have been people over the years that have tried to explain it as other things, like maybe people are seeing something, but what they're really seeing is blank. A man named Steve Feltham in the nineteen nineties. He's one of these guys that you know kind of became a monitor but obsessed. I'm not going to say that, but no, you could call him upssed 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 Ls catfish, these 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 to yeah, huge, like thirteen feet long, which, by the way, don't forget that one Robert Ryan expedition found something that was the size of a small whale

about fifteen feet long. Yeah, 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 longest search for Lochness, 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 seems to be a trend among Lochness 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, which is a really big change and not just like Lochness monster searches. But it says a lot about the world too, you know. Yeah, And I think this Wells catfish would certainly explain all

of those unexplained underwater moving side scan sonar images. Like they're not the most detailed things in the world. It's not a photograph, right, 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. A less good explanation that we just have to mention though, is that the

elephant thing. Yeah, there's a Storian in two thousand and six who said, well, you know, I just came across some evidence that circuses traveling through Scotland used to stop and rest at Lochness and they would let the animals out to wander around. And elephants love to swim, which is the crossover thing between the episodes today, right, Yeah, elephants love to swim. And probably what some of these sightings in the thirties were of the Lochness Monster were

elephants swimming and locknests. Yeah, completely away from the rest of the circus, right, and the people that were resting on the shoreline. And then after after he finished, he said, but 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 stories, like real documentary evidence that these photos and things, none of them there's no hard evidence. They can all be interpreted as they

were explained away as different other things. Yeah, right. And also there's like a there's a you know, that whole thing developed where what was it? Sir Peter Scott said it was a plesiosaur, yeah, right, which is an extinct marine reptile, not a dinosaur. It 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 dinosaur which had never taken to water, so what would

it be doing in Lochness. But for decades, those were kind of the two conceptions that the Lochness monster was a surviving sore pod or a surviving pleasiasaur. And there are a lot of problems with those. Number one, both of those those types of animals when extinct tens of millions of years ago. Yeah, you could stop there had it not been for the cela canth, right, But we

respect the celacanth and so we should explore further. And then you have the problem of the fact that a sauropod is a 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 Lochness, 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 be a lot more sightings than that. Yes, And even if it were a pleasaur, 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 nesti sighting to be reported. 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 just one, that means that the 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 sustain probably even one pleasiosaur or one sore pod let alone that I think Sir Peter Scott and Robert Ryan's in their nineteen seventy five paper estimated that you'd have to have about thirty breeding individuals to continue a line. I guess the lake. So there's just 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 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 thirty of these things, let's say conservatively, and they all have to come up and breathe, right, 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 mean, 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, my money on figuring this out. Last summer in twenty eighteen, researchers finally took samples of environmental DNA DNA and this will tell you. In fact, it did yield about five hundred million individual DNA sequences. This will tell you basically anything that has lived in this lake. Right, maybe not forever, or is it forever? I don't know how far back it would go. As long as it had viable DNA. Okay, it hadn't hadn't deteriorated yet, so it could be like a whatever,

a scale of this monster. And this has worked before, I believe it. You'll lit evidence of unknown life when they discovered in human species called the denis Ovans. Yeah, this works. They have these five hundred 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, a snapshot of all of the DNA 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's not a plesiosaur or not a sauropod or as 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 don't know about yet. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, when the dinosaurs were swimming around and they could have found their way into Lockness, and as as as the sea levels lowered and Lochness was separated from the sea, they got trapped there. Because Lochness didn't exist until it was gouged out of the earth by the glaciers during the Last ice Age ten thousand years ago.

It's just too young for something like that. Too young, 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, if found, the people finding it can take a DNA sample and they have to release it and they have to make sure that it survives. They have to protect it. Pretty neat. It is neat. So do you think, real quick, do

you think there's anything in there? No, so nothing we don't know about. You don't think there's anything in there. Well, it depends on if you count a giant catfish. It's something we don't know about. I 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 if you've been in the sea monsters one, I bet. But that's the Werner Hurtzog 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, it's a making of a making 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 Vana Hutzog, right, it's great. We have a vase of making it talk. Yeah, exactly. 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? Nope, If you want to know more about lockness, Monster Lockness, or Scotland or anything like that, go onto the internet. It's a really wide and deep resource, deeper than lockness even. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, 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, this group nonprofit

called co ed Cooperative for Education. They invited us to go to Guatemala, which we did, you me and Jerry, Yes, 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. 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 kind of 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 stop going to school because they need to work and help support their family. Yep.

So they're about halfway to that goal. Everyone to keep a thousand girls from dropping out of school in Guatemala and forty one of the stuff you should know Army sponsored a student last year and that's great, but we need more of you in Guatemala. It is he started the school year and there are still a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored. Sponsoring a student costs eighty dollars a month, or co ED will pay you with someone else if you can have sponsor someone at forty

dollars a month. And to meet the students who need sponsors, which you can actually do online. Pretty powerful stuff. Just go to Cooperative for Education dot org. Yep. You've seen it with our own eyes that they do really good work, so we can vouch for them. And 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 know very much see it with your own eyeballs and it's very very good program and it's helping 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 touch with us, you can go to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links. And if you want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry and Me, you can address it to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.