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...
The Loch Ness Phenomenon (or Phenomena) Investigation Bureau/LNI/LNIB/LNPIB was established by the naturalist Richard Fitter, Sir Peter Scott, David James MP and the author of More Than A Legend, Constance Whyte.
They had been impressed by the growing weight of evidence suggesting that something unusual might be living in the loch.
Expeditions by Birmingham and Cambridge universities had produced interesting results using sonar so that, together with the various surface photographs which had been obtained by individuals and the large number of eye witnesses who had come forward, it seemed logical and worthwhile to pursue surface observation. The final impetus was given by the screening of the Dinsdale film.
Surface observation was undertaken in a methodical way. Giant telephoto lenses were mounted on 35mm motion picture cameras. These were positioned at the base camp at Achnahannet (below and at top of page). Another unit was set up on the top of a resident's garage at Strone Point near Urquhart Castle.
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Vehicles, usually Bedford vans, would take up additional locations during the long daylight hours of the summer months. Camera rigs were mounted on their roofs.
The first thrust was therefore to be surface observation. The cameras were crewed by teams of volunteers, often students enjoying their vacation and coupling it with some Nessie spotting too.
A likely but never proven rumour tells that on more than one occasion the camera rig on the Strone garage was unmanned while the crew enjoyed their fresh air summer of love, unobservable in their raised location. How often Nessie swam by, head and neck appropriately erect, observing these frolicking individuals enjoying the sexual freedom of the sixties, is not a matter of record.
The variety of surface photographs which had appeared up to the sixties indicated that the monster must surface with at least a modicum of frequency. If that was how it or they behaved then these powerful camera lenses should be able to capture worthwhile film sequences. Hopes were high. The war of attrition, as Adrian Shine later called it, began.
Several sequences of film were obtained, but none showed anything like the detail obtained in the classic Nessie photographs. The finest sequence was obtained by Dick Raynor in 1967. He spotted a disturbance near Dores, about a mile away from his mobile location and close to the opposite shore. He began filming.
These large cameras were not single-lens-reflex and so Dick could not see exactly what he was filming. The viewfinder only provided a very small image and it was important for the object to be kept as central as possible during filming or it could easily drift out of the field of view of the giant lens. Dick had mounted binoculars on top of the viewfinder so that he could see a little more detail in the object being filmed.
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