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.
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So, we have seen how the famous flipper photographs and accompanying sonar trace were nothing to do with Nessie. The photographs were retouched, apparently with a paintbrush, and the sonar experiment incompetently mismanaged and then misinterpreted. Also, in recent years Dick Raynor (image at top in the tour boat he operates these days) has managed to reproduce the unenhanced flipper photographs just by photographing the silt under specific lighting conditions and so we are left with nothing of any value whatsoever.
The next great fiasco of the Academy of Applied Science was in 1975.
New sonar-triggered cameras had been brought to the loch and mounted on the bottom. The principle involved was fairly simple, but the technology was not yet tested and I, in no way, wish to disparage the objectives.
Each camera housing contained a camera and a sonar machine. The camera looked out through a flat Perspex plate. All the arguments about distortion in photographing through flat glass underwater are again valid, but this was a first attempt and so although the lack of attention to detail is puzzling, a little forgiveness is warranted. The sonar transducer came out of one side of the cylinder and there was a long arm to hold the strobe flash so as to create as much stereo distance as possible between the flash and the image obtained.
The sonar would send out regular pulses and if a return echo was detected it would trigger a rapid series of photographs, hopefully of whatever had entered the sonar beam.
None of the film exposed by these cameras showed anything other than clouds of silt which Dr Rines claimed might have been stirred up by the large unidentified animals which had caused the sonar to be triggered in the first place.
There may have been a more logical explanation as we shall see shortly. The old Edgerton elapse-time camera and strobe had been brought along on the 1975 expedition as an "old faithful" back-up. Dr Rines was in the habit of attaching sentimental names to some of his equipment in this way.
It was mounted 40 feet beneath a boat which, as can be seen from the diagram, was moored in 80 feet of water. Once again an Academy of Applied Science experimental diagram is inaccurate as the sonar triggered cameras looked nothing like those shown, but for now we are interested in the suspended rig, not the loch bed rig. Is the diagram correct in this regard?
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Anything photographed by the suspended unit, if positioned as shown in the diagram, must be in mid-water.
We know that logs and other types of débris do not normally float around in mid-water in Loch Ness, except very rarely in temperature layers during or after the Autumn equinoctial gales. This experiment was taking place in summer and so the Academy could be pretty confident that if the cameras were in mid-water, anything photographed would be very likely to be alive.
A number of photographs were obtained. The first of these, encountered on playback by Charlie Wyckoff, was described by him as "like the surface of the moon". An interesting description of what should only be part of an animal.
