Season 07 Episode 03: Under Black Water (Pt.2 of 2)

crew haul in the ship's nets. Just then, his eye is momentarily caught by the sudden appearance of an oddly bluish colored fin amid the thrashing of fish and shark caught in the nets. But with so much work to be done, the captain thinks little more of it as he finishes off his cigarette and heads down to help

his men on the deck. The next morning, Marjorie Courtney Latimer, a curator of natural history at a small museum in the port town of East London on South Africa's Eastern Cape, receives a phone call a local fishing trawler manager wants to know if she is interested in taking a look at a strange fish that has just been brought in an hour or so later, she was stood on the deck of the Nerhine scouring the mound of dead fish and sharks until she spots it, an unusual bluey gray

finn poking out of one of the piles. About one and a half meters long. The fish was heavily scaled, its fins, rough and stocky, almost limb like. One fisher standing nearby tells Courtney Latimer that in more than thirty years of fishing around the world, he's never seen anything like it. In fact, nobody was thought to have ever seen anything like it, since it was the post of gone extinct sixty six million years ago. The fish was

a sealercanth. All that had been founded them prior to then were fossils dating from four hundred to sixty six million years ago, at which point they were assumed to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs. Finding a living one was like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex wandering around your garden. It was a rare instance of what is sometimes called a Lazarus taxon, meaning a taxonomic group that disappeared from

the fossil record, only to mysteriously reappear again. Then, in nineteen fifty two, a second was found near the Comoros Islands, just to the east of Mozambique in Africa, and soon some began to wonder if there were any other unknown species still out there, waiting to be discovered in the deep waters of the world's lonelier corners, lurking under the nose of modern civilization. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm

Richard McLean Smith. In nineteen fifty seven, author Constance White published the book More Than a Legend, The Story of the Lochness Monster. It spoke to the zeitgeist of the emerging times with its renewed fascination in the possible existence of cryptid creatures, fueled by the finding of the second living selacanth. Extant monster sightings were also now being reported. Bigfoot stories were emerging from America, and tales of the

Yeti emerged from the Himalayas. In her book, Constance White cataloged around eighty sightings of the apparent Lochness Monster from multiple witnesses, some corroborated by other observers who had apparently seen the same thing simultaneously from nearby locations. Flat, calm water and hot days were the most favorable conditions, with hot spots for sightings tending to be where rivers ran

into the loch. Temple Pier on the north side of Urkut Bay was the scene of hundreds of reports, while Alexander Ross, the former peer master there, claimed to have seen the creature at least fifteen times himself. On the fourteenth of July nineteen fifty one, local woodsmen Lochland Stewart, was clearing trees one hundred feet above the shore where when he claimed to have spotted a humped object moving

fast up the loch. The picture he got with his box camera showed three angular blackish humps, each about five foot long and three feet out of the water. A long neck with a sheep sized head was then said to have appeared momentarily before it feared away with much splashing.

Constance White took a stab at creating a composite picture of so called NeSSI from the multitude of reports and photographs describing the creature as being anywhere from twenty to fifty feet long, with a bulky body, a dark elephant like skin, up to seven humps, a long snakelike neck, a small flat head which had two horn like structures, a long, blunt ended tail, two pairs of powerful flippers, and the ability to swim at up to thirty miles

per hour. Many people thought it resembled at Plesiosore, mostly on account of the famed surgeon's photo. As documented in the first part of this episode. White postulated that the creature had possibly got into the lock during the melting of the last ice age. The nineteen fifties were a time when most people got their entertainment from the radio

and books. Television was a luxury available to only a few, but with the dawning of the nineteen sixties, small black and white television sets started appearing in more and more homes. Natural history was a popular topic for programming in these changing times. Theories about the Lochness Monster, for those who gave credence to the sightings, began to diverge into two distinct camps, one that believed the creature was some kind of supernatural phenomenon, and the other who preferred to take

a more scientific approach. It was the start of the Easter weekend in April nineteen sixty when Tim Dinsdale arrived at Lochness trained as an aeronautical engineer, but bored in his job at Heathrow Airport. Dinsdale was excited to be on holiday pursuing his true passion, searching for the Lochness Monster. He spent his days driving along the shore road with a Bolex Ciney camera loaded with sixteen millimeter black and

white film, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. That was until the last day of his week long trip. It was some time around eight thirty a m. When Dinsdale spotted a humped object around thirteen hundred year from the shore. Dinsdale filmed the object in bursts, tracking it for about four minutes as it carved a zigzag course across the loch's surface before it disappeared into a patch of dark water. A short time later, Dinsdale screened the film for a gathering of top zoologists at London Zoo,

converting skeptics into believers in the process. Among them was a man named Peter Scott. Scott was the son of famed explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who died in Antarctica in nineteen twelve during a failed expedition to become the first person to reach the South Pole. At the time, Peter Scott was a respected ornithologist and conservationist who would go on to help establish the Worldwide Fund for Nature, among

other notable achievements. In nineteen sixty he was perhaps best known for presenting the BBC's natural life history show called Look. In June, a still from Tim Dinsdale's film was published in the British Daily Mail newspaper, while Dinsdale also appeared on BBC News, and soon after he was introduced to Peter Scott. Having been impressed by Dinsdale, Scott, who was well known to the royal family, visited the Queen and assured her that Dinsdale was onto something. The hunt for

Nessie was back on. One zoologist in particular, decided to go all out for direct proof of Nessie's existence. Retired senior zoologist at London's Natural History Museum, Dr Morris Burton, knew that NeSSI could not be a plesiosaur. According to him, even if some of these cold blooded creatures had somehow survived the mass dinosaur extinctions sixty six million years ago, they would not survive in Lockness's chilly waters. As a first step, Burton brought together a team of scientists who

spent two weeks on the lock in a dinghy. They measured the distances over which eyewitness reports had been made to test whether human visual acuity could match the details relayed. Their analysis of the data revealed that many of the reports were simply beyond the realms of physical possibility. Next, Burton and his team decided to try something altogether more practical.

In previous zoological hunting trips off the coast of Cornwall, in the southwest of England, they'd found that dragging a net containing rotting fish guts seasoned liberally with pilchered oil was wonderfully effective at attracting sharks. How could such a treat, they thought, fail to bring Nessie up from the debts. Despite numerous efforts, however, the supposed monster refused to take

the bait. Burton concluded that in the most part NeSSI was nothing more than rafts of decaying vegetation seen floating on the surface of the loch, but it did little to deter the true believers. In July nineteen sixty two, David James, a former navyman turned politician, launched an expedition for which he enlisted Lieutenant Colonel H. G. Hassler, a hero of British World War II naval operations. The campaign

began in true military style with a scouting expedition. The loch was swept from end to end with a sonar curtain using echo location that spanned its width and plumbed its full depths. Three objects too big to be large fish were discovered under the water, and so on October thirteenth, the full assault began. Urkott Bay, located two thirds of the way up on the lock's northern shore, was selected

as the key point of interest. There, David James and an eighteen strong team set up a number of search lights to rove across the bay after dark. When night descended, the lights were switched on and swept across the black water as the team kept watch for any sign of

unusual activity. Then, on James's signal, sticks of jellyg night were lit and dropped into the water, and moments later they exploded, sending huge plumes of water shooting into the air, the idea being to try and scare anything lurking down there up to the surface. The test was repeated for a number of days, with only a few dead fish and glimpses of familiar terrified living ones to show for it,

but then on October nineteenth, something else was spotted. As the blast from another round of jellignite rang out, one of the search teams spotted a vast shoal of salmon thrashing about on the water's surface, about two hundred yards from Temple Pier on the northern side of the bay, and right behind them was a long, indeterminate shape roughly ten feet in length that appeared to be chasing them. This moment was captured on film by former naval seamen

John Luff. In all his years at sea, Luff said he'd never seen anything like it. The Royal Air Force's own Central Reconnaissance Establishment examined Luff's footage frame by frame, concluding that it showed about eight feet of something dark and glistening, which was not a wave effect, but rather something with solidity. After also examining the evidence, a panel comprised of members of the UK's Royal Society picked by zoologist Peter Scott also concluded that there was indeed something

real there that would require more rigorous study. By then, Scott had also spent some time actively searching for the creature. In nineteen sixty three, he led three gliders in survey flights over the loch, but the pilots failed to spot anything. The same year, in the summer, David James and his retired military helpers returned to the loch for a second time, hoping to collect irrefutable proof of Nessi's existence. This time, the team mounted two thirty five millimeter cameras on opposite

sides of the loch. The night before their mission was due to start, a school teacher reported a convincing Nessy sighting not far from Urkutt Castle, where the team were based. It seemed like a good omen, but no sooner had the cameras been started up, a mist crept across the loch,

limiting visibility to a hundred yards. Over the next six months, there were just fifteen clear days in which David James and his team captured nothing of note, and for the best part of a decade no further credible sightings were reported. One sunny day in June nineteen seventy two, wealthy American lawyer and inventor Robert Rhines was enjoying tea and scones with his friends Winifred and Basil Carey at their home overlooking Urkut Bay. The China cups and saucers clinked daintily

on the terrace as Winifred poured out the tea. When suddenly there was a disturbance in the water about half a mile off shore. Basil hurried to fetch his brass telescope, through which they all in turn observed a darkish hump about twenty feet long gliding through the water. The American Robert Rhines was transfixed. From that day on he became

obsessed with the possibility of the Loch ness Monster. The following year, he returned to the loch, this time with a hundred thousand dollars of equipment, which included two fully start vessels, a sixteen millimeter underwater camera, and most crucially, a sonar unit which would alert the team if a

large object passed in front of the camera lens. Rhines the equipment positioned on an underwater ridge just off Temple Pier, where frequent sightings of NeSSI had been reported, while his two vessels, the Nan and the Narwal, hunted for the creature on the surface. At one thirty am on August eighth, nineteen seventy three, the waters were deathly still as Peter Davis, captain of the Narwal, fought to stay awake on the

night watch. Ten minutes later, he was jolted from semi sleep when the water's surface began to boil with turbulence. Shining his torch over the side, Davis could just make out the thrashing and leaping bodies of a large run of salmon dashing past the boat. Davis rushed to the bridge and checked the sonar. The fish appeared as pinpoints, rapidly turning into flashing streaks as they sped away like a storm of shooting stars. Then something else, much larger

and denser, began to take form. Davis felt a surge of excitement at the sheer size of it. The excitement soon turned to fear, however, when he climbed into the Narwal's small tender boat to alert the crew of the Nan who controlled the underwater camera. With the prospect of a very large animal moving about in the water just thirty feet below him, with trembling hands, he cast off

and began to row. Before long, he'd made it the forty meters across to the Nan, and the cameras were promptly turned on Later that morning, the film was recovered and sent to New York to be developed. Meanwhile, Rhines and his team were left to pore over the sonar traces, concluding that the large, dense object was an aquatic animal estimated to be between twenty to thirty feet long, with

appendages as much as ten feet long. When the photos came back from New York, Robert Ryanes was disappointed to find that almost two thousand frames of the developed footage showed nothing but blackness. But then on four of the frames was the hazy outline of something large and solid. Encouraged by the images, Ryans had the frames sent to a contact who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. There they ran the images through the same computerized enhancement

that NASA used on images from space missions. The result was four high definition black and white images which seemed to show the clear outline of a massive object under the water. Ryanes and his team were most excited by the fourth image, which appeared to show a diamond shaped, mottled thing with a central rib estimated to be six feet long and two feet across. It looked like a giant flipper. Unlike that of any known living aquatic animal.

With this sensational piece of new evidence to hand, Rhyanes had the images published in the American news magazine Time and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies in house journal Technology Review. In nineteen seventy five, Ryanes met naturalist Peter Scott, by which time he'd collected even more images of the supposed creature. One frame depicted a long, slender structure curving up from

a bulbous shape which had two angular flipperlike protuberances. A second showed a seemingly organic man pock marked with deep shadows with two peculiar stalklike projections for an ecstatic rhymes. The first image was clearly the creature's torso, and the second was the creature's face looking straight at the camera,

the deepest pool of shadow apparently its open mouth. Peter Scott was intrigued, but soon afterwards five senior scientists from the Natural History Museum in London, including experts in zoology, fish, paleontology and fossil reptiles, concluded there was nothing to suggest there really was an unknown giant animal in the photographs.

The apparent torso, they said, was more likely to be a large log or a swarm of midge lava appearing as a solid mass, while the apparent image of the creature's head was more likely that of a dead horse. By then, Peter Scott had become the president of the World Wildlife Fund. Despite the debunking of the so called NeSSI evidence by most in mainstream science, Scott was so convinced the creature existed that he proposed the WWF adopt NeSSI as a real creature and even use it as

their new logo. After all, if it were real, it would prove to be a prime example of a previously undiscovered species poised on the brink of extinction, the perfect emblem for endangered animals across the globe. Scott also proposed a scientific name for it, Nessiterus Rombopteryx NeSSI, from loch ness Terras meaning marvel, rombo meaning diamond shape, and terix meaning wing or fin. A paper by Scott and Rhines dis describing the creature was even published by the journal Nature.

Within months, however, Ryan's images reached a wider audience and a strong consensusubmerged among the experts that its creature was nothing more than a collection of inanimate objects. Nature was eventually forced to publish a retraction. In May nineteen seventy seven, the self described wizard, psychic magician, and monster watcher Anthony Dock Shields arrived at Lochness with members of a group

known as Psychic seven International. Together, they stripped off their clothes and stood by the locke, chanting for the apparent monster to reveal itself, though nothing happened. A short time later, as they trushed back to their cars, Shields and some other men members of the group reportedly saw three humps gliding through the water towards Fort Augustus at the southern end of the loch. Shields had a reputation for being a prankster and would later create a series of hoax

photographs of the loch Ness Monster. He insisted, however, that this first sighting was genuine, as an advocate of the theory that the monster was some kind of supernatural entity inadvertently brought to the lock by Aleister Crowley's unfinished a cult ritual back in eighteen ninety nine, it came as little surprised to him that soon after his first apparent sighting, he and his family had a run of bad luck.

Shields himself was set upon by a mob while in Plymouth, where his beard was later somehow accidentally set on fire. One daughter was thrown off a horse, while the other was stricken with abdominal pains, and his son was involved in a motorbike crash. Soon after, perhaps partially due to shields hoax photographs, interest and the Lochness Monster began to wane once again. Then, in the mid nineteen nineties, the apparent monster's existence was struck another giant blow when a

man called Maurice Chambers died. Maurice Chambers had been a good friend of Marmaduke weather Or, actor and big game hunter hired by The Daily Mail back in nineteen thirty four to hunt NeSSI. He'd even accompanied weather All on that trip, where the hunter not only failed to find the monster but presented fake footprints of the creature. After

Maurice Chambers's death, his personal papers came to light. They contained a stunning revelation about the most famous Nessy image of all, the so called Surgeon's photograph from nineteen thirty four. As it transpired. According to Maurice Chambers's papers, Marmaduke whether All had been badly hurt by the ridicule and humiliation he suffered at the hands of the Daily Mail in the wake of his flimsy efforts to convince the world he'd found evidence of the Lochness Monster, and he wanted revenge.

At some point in nineteen thirty three, Marmaduke whether All persuaded his step son, Christian Spurling, who happened to be a sculptor, to help him construct a believable model of the monster. More than happy to play along, Spurling first bought a toy submarine, then, after fashioning a long necked beast out of putty, he placed it on top of the sub so that its head neck protruded thirty centimeters

above the water. Whether All then placed the model in a quiet cove and photographed it from a convincing distance. For the last step in the ruse. Whether All then passed the fake photos to a surgeon friend of his, Robert Kenneth Wilson. Knowing that Wilson's status as a physician would lend credibility to the story. A keen, practical joker himself, Wilson agreed to act as the hoaxes. Respectable but anonymous frontman. The rest was history, and all the men had been

prepared to take their secret to the grave. Were it not for the discovery of Chambers's papers, the truth about the pictures might have forever remained unknown. A few years after the truth about the Surgeons photo came to light, twenty first century science would deliver a seemingly final, crushing blow to the existence of NeSSI. The rapidly evolving techniques of DNA analysis now means that unknown creatures can be

identified by more than just blood and bones. In the early two thousands, Brian Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, found a way to extract and analyze DNA from hair samples, which he applied to alleged Bigfoot and Yetty hair collected across North America and Asia. The DNA evidence showed only wild and domestic animals, already well known and local to the sites where the hair samples

had been found. In twenty nineteen, genetics professor Neil Gemmel from New Zealand's University of Otago announced the results of genetically profiling two hundred and fifty one water samples taken from the Edges Centre and very depths of Lochness. His team's analysis of this so called environmental DNA showed all the fish and other freshwater species that you'd expect to find there, along with the DNA from familiar land based

animals that lived around the loch. There was no evidence of an unknown species or a giant sturgeon, the most often quoted likely cause of Lockness Monster reports. But what the team did find was eel DNA in abundance. To date, the largest eel ever found measured no more than ten

feet long. But in Professor Gemmill's conclusions, he stated, we can't discount the possibility that there maybe giant eels in Lochness, adding as a geneticist, I think about mutations and natural variation a lot, and it seems not impossible that something

could grow to an unusual size. Tantalizingly, Gemmel made one final remark, given the vast volume of water in Lochness and that environmental DNA signals in water dissipate quickly, there remains the possibility there is something present that we did not detect. Nonetheless, sightings that the Lockness Monster continue as recently as June seventeenth, twenty twenty three, a French pharmacist from Leon, holidaying by Lockness, photographed what looked like a mysterious, long,

shadowy shape moving through the water. What continues to cause such sightings remains unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard mc lain smith. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard mc lean smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mc lean smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy world wide. You can purchase

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