Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
Loch Ness Monster Explained & Loch Ness Understood: The Co-Founder of the Loch Ness Centre Provides a Personal Perspecti...
Continuing with the footprint fiasco, the Daily Mail fired Marmaduke Wetherell for hoodwinking them, but he vowed to take revenge and that revenge was to be so, so sweet.
His step son, Christian Spurling, made a small model from a material called Plastic Wood [Plastic Wood was a very early resin type product, the forerunner of many epoxy resin products of later years]. This was mounted on a toy submarine, which they then floated out on Loch Ness on a calm day and photographed.
Of course, it was no good Wetherell or one of his relations claiming they had taken the photograph, that would have been far too obvious. They looked around for a stooge. The perfect man was Colonel Kenneth Wilson, a London gynaecologist from just off Harley Street. He was a known practical joker but, better still, he was from a reputable profession. Surely a renowned London surgeon would never produce a Nessie hoax.
Wilson headed for the Highlands, armed with the undeveloped quarter plate photographic slides. He arrived in Inverness, went to Ogston's Chemist shop in Union Street and asked for his film plates to be developed. He was suitably vague about what they may show, but claimed he had photographed "something" in the loch. The rest is history.
The picture at the head of this article, has been the subject of many arguments ever since, but there are a number of obvious clues that it is not genuine.
Firstly, although the picture is very clear, Wilson did not seem to know that he had seen something and could not describe it. He was always very vague about it. Naturally as he had not seen the model nor any photographs (they had not yet been developed) he dare not go into any detail about what he had seen.
Secondly, the full frame (below) shows that the object is very small indeed, nothing like the plesiosaur's neck that some believers would have you think was being photographed.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Thirdly the water surface is glassy meaning that the ripples were very small and the loch calm around the object.
Fourthly you need to envisage what the monster is doing under the surface to create such a shape above the surface. Surely to be at this angle the monster would have to be hanging tail-down in the water ... a most unlikely scenario.
Fifthly the death knell for this picture is the more recently discovered fact that plesiosaurs were unable to lift their necks in this fashion because of the structure of their vertebrae. A plesiosaur, swimming at the surface would appear similar to a snake swimming. Its neck would lie along the surface, not rising above it.
During the nineteen-nineties Adrian Shine set to work a Project member, biologist David Martin, with Alasdair Boyd to try to track down the truth about this classic image. The result of this work was the book, "Nessie ~ the Surgeon's Photograph" which I have mentioned previously. It is a wonderful detective story that I would recommend as absolutely essential reading to anyone with any lingering doubts about this photograph. Congratulations to them both on a wonderful piece of analysis and writing.
What a shame that they had to self-publish owing to lack of interest by the larger publishing companies. This resulted in their book being less easily accessible to the world at large.
