Stuff You Should Know - Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster?
Episode Date: February 12, 2019People have believed something strange lives in Loch Ness for at least 3500 years. Thousands of people have sighted the Loch Ness Monster and dozens of expeditions have been launched. But does the fac...t that nothing’s been found mean it’s not real? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,
David Lasher and Christine Taylor,
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from HowStuffWorks.com.
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.
Rawr!
Is that Frankenstein, you nut job?
Rawr!
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 Groundskeeper Willie?
Close.
Yeah, that was pretty good, Josh.
Right in country.
Are we, are you doing like a Loch Ness monster impression?
Man, you're good.
I use the powers of deduction.
Like Sherlock Holmes did in the private life
of Sherlock Holmes.
Ooh, look at that little bit of foreshadowing.
By the way, we covered a bit of this everyone we know
in Sea Monsters four years ago,
but we felt this monster was so great that,
or she perhaps.
Yeah, maybe.
Nessy deserved her own space.
Well, let's just go with there.
Sure, why not?
All right, so yeah, I went back.
I was like, I feel like we definitely did a Loch Ness episode,
but no, it's just a 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 10,000 years.
Ooh.
Okay, we need a lot of kerosene in the wayback machine.
Yeah, 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 wayback machine.
Oh, it always did.
Maybe Jerry will add some extra sound effects.
So here we are, and we're actually chucking the land
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.
It's melting, it's filling up this gouge in the earth.
And this gouge, Chuck, is eventually gonna be called Loch Ness.
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.
So Loch Ness is long and narrow.
And it was created when an ice sheet gouged
the rocky earth in Scotland 10,000 years ago,
and then the ice melted and filled it in.
Basically, like I just said,
and it was a deep gouge, not very wide,
but it's deeper than the North Sea, which surrounds Scotland.
It looks like 36 kilometers or 23 miles long.
And then most recently, the newest deep,
it's depth is measured at close to 900 feet,
which is staggering.
Yeah, so it's like 1,000th the size of Lake Michigan,
but it's three and a half times deeper than Lake Erie.
Man, that's deep.
That is very, very deep.
For a lake.
It's also really dark too,
because the runoff from the land around it,
it's very peat-rich, which is black.
And so that runoff goes into the lake,
and it turns the lake of very, very dark color.
So it looks mysterious.
Like you can look at Loch Ness.
I've never been there personally,
aside from this time now that we're here.
Sure.
But from what I understand,
it is like a nice, mysterious-looking lake.
Yeah, and I mean, I've always thought it looked creepy,
but it's beautiful, really.
But there's something about deep, dark,
and reputed monsters that'll do that to you over the years.
Yeah, you know, like lakes in Georgia,
I heard once that there's no natural lake in Georgia,
that every single lake in Georgia is man-made
by the power company.
Have you ever heard of that?
As far as I know, that's true.
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 what I understand.
And every single one of them,
I mean, they're no deeper than like 30, 40, 50 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.
There's a gulf station under Lake Lanier, I believe, right?
Yeah, I mean, there are automobiles,
supposedly in old remnants of houses
under a lot of these lakes.
It's like a brother or aunt, though,
when they flooded the valley.
Exactly, same thing.
So when you're swimming in a lake in Georgia,
and it's just like 30, 40, 50 feet deep,
you can just feel everything underneath you.
Imagine what it must be like swimming in a lake
and feeling that there's 900 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 there's something in Loch Ness.
You can just look at it and think,
there's gotta be something hiding under there.
And apparently that's been the case
for many, many thousands of years
from what we understand.
Yeah, I mean, this was,
I had no idea that this went back that far,
but there were these people way back in the day
called the PICTS, P-I-C-T-S.
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,
I guess they're just like, it says standing stones,
but like little carving, like wall carvings?
No, it's a freestanding carved stone
that has pictures of animals on them.
But is it like a sculpture?
No, it's like a flat stone
that they used as basically like a canvas,
but it's a stone, it's a freestanding stone.
All right, because I saw the pictures,
but they were so close up,
you couldn't really get that big image.
But long story short,
there were actually 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 Loch Ness Monster.
We'll just go ahead and say it.
Yeah, it looks like kind of a seahorsy 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 pigs made,
they're immediately identifiable
what animal they were drawing.
With this particular one called the Picked Beast,
no one has any idea,
and they're like, oh, okay,
well, it was the Loch Ness Monster that they drew.
Right, or an elephant that's swimming.
Maybe.
Which, 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 have thought?
That one thing.
So the pigs, at least as far as 1,500 years ago,
were drawing pictures of sea monsters around Scotland,
and there's a lot of legends of sea monsters
that we talked about in the Sea Monsters episode
in Scotland in general, not just Loch Ness.
Yeah, they're crazy for them.
Yeah, they really are,
and they have all sorts of scary stories behind them,
like the water kelpie.
Yeah, 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 the lock?
It's going to be fun.
Sure.
And, hey, look, it's all this guy's kid's 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, then I think you should take it from here.
Which part?
Their hands 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 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 no.
So 1500 years ago, Loch Ness Monster, possibly,
with the Picks, we fast forward about a thousand years
beyond that, there's a saint named St. Colombo,
who showed up in Ireland and said,
hey, heathens, have you ever seen any pamphlets
or brochures about Christianity?
I have some I can give you.
And converted the Scots to Christianity,
in like 565, I think, around that time.
And there's a story of St. Colombo,
who was going to visit a Pictish king and said, on the way,
stopped at the lock and looked out in the lock,
and there was some Scottish guy swimming,
and St. Colombo saw a monster swimming toward the guy,
as if to attack him, 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 St. Colombo's credibility
among the Picks.
Yeah, and I think we could just end the show right there.
There you go.
That's the Loch Ness Monster.
Proven by history.
Right.
And then flash forward again,
there was a BBC correspondent named Nicholas Wichel,
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 lucky, beastly skin.
And he wrote a book in 1974 called The Loch Ness Story,
and he ended up digging up about a dozen or so references
pre-20th century to some sort of monster out there.
Yeah, and it really started to pick up weirdly
in like the late, the second half of the 19th century.
And it was sporadic, but the year of the Loch Ness Monster,
the year the Loch Ness Monster became part
of the public consciousness was 1933, though, for sure.
That sounds like a great place to take a break.
Oh boy, okay, let's do it.
No, stuff you should know, stuff you should know.
On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called
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We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,
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We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends
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No, it was hair.
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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,
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["Lackness Monster Theme Song"]
All right, Chuck.
So I said 1933 was the year that the Lackness 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 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 spent enough time there.
And in April, that happened.
Mr. and Mrs. 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 Inverness Courier
and they used the word monster for the first time
until the Lackness Monster was officially born.
And that whole year, I mean, that was 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 1933,
too, 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 1933.
There you have it.
And there's like a whole thing about, you know,
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 sightings,
supposedly a motorcyclist saw one on like crossing the road,
supposedly, they offered up a circus,
offered up a reward of 20,000 pounds.
People were camping out and kind of, you know,
just kind of waiting for Nessie 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 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 me.
He's like, I know all these things,
but I appreciate it anyway.
So yeah, the Daily Mail sent him up there
to figure out what was going on.
This was December, did you say?
Yeah, December of 33.
So, and again, this whole thing started in April
and had 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 any other way.
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-y and which ones are reputable.
They were printing clickbait
before computers were around.
Before they even knew what that was.
They're like, why are we calling it clickbait?
Yeah, like what's a mouse?
They called it thumbbait.
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.
Did 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, whether or else shows up to Loch Ness
among like a lot of pomp and circumstance,
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 Loch Ness.
And he did his measurements.
Cause again, remember he's a big game hunter,
a tracker, an outdoorsman.
And he, and an actor, not a successful actor.
I get the impression that he was like
kind of an Ed Wood type actor director.
Oh, okay.
But he calculated that the animal
that made these tracks with like,
I think four-toed tracks in the mud was at least 20 feet long.
And this happened at December.
He took plaster casts and he sent them off
to the Royal Museum, no, the Natural History Museum
in London to be analyzed just as Christmas set in.
Yes.
Even though this was potentially the greatest find,
zoological find in the world, in world history,
they were like, we still have to go and break.
Right.
On holiday.
Cratchet commands it.
Everyone waited.
They did come back from holiday and, you know,
monster hunters were all over London, or all over Loch Ness.
And they were super excited.
And then in January, zoologist said,
bad news, not only is this the footprint
of a hippopotamus, cause that would have been pretty
amazing in and of itself.
Right, right, yeah.
Like what's a hippopotamus doing there?
Right.
But they said, no, no, no, it was the taxidermied
hippopotamus foot.
And it was probably like an ashtray or an umbrella stand.
Right, somebody just walks around with foot here,
footprint here, footprint there,
and whether or not fell for it.
So 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 new articles,
but apparently the Daily Mail,
the paper that sent him up there humiliated him
in their coverage of the whole thing.
So he retreated from public view, he was humiliated,
and don't forget Duke Wetherill,
cause he comes back later.
Yeah, and not only did they ruin his good name,
or his mediocre name, at least,
he, the whole incident just sort of put a damper
on Nessie for a few decades.
It 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 log floating,
or a swimming deer or something.
And it 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'd 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 Loch Ness Monster.
Well, most people did.
Anybody who seemed legitimate,
especially if you were a scientist,
the Loch Ness 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 1974 that said
more than 4,000 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, those are Nobel Prize winner.
They 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 Dr. Richard Sinch.
He was a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize.
He said he saw something.
And like you said, they kind of bore similar,
the similarities in these reports.
Like there were humps, at least one or two humps
rising above the surface, like an overturned boat.
Yeah, 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
or 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 Loch Ness.
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 lend 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 made these reports
into a book called More Than a Legend in 1957.
And it took the Loch Ness frivolity
and turned it back into
a potentially scientifically studyable 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 seen 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.
And it happened in about a 10 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 per hours on in.
Which is what people were mostly doing,
I guess, in that first wave in the early 30s.
They used what they had.
Right, but then, so Constance White's book
also kind of gave rise to a second wave
of Loch Ness hunters.
Inspired a lot of people.
There was the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau,
which set up shop on the shore of the lock
and kept watch and led investigations and expeditions
for like a decade, I think from 62 to 72.
Not bad.
No, that's not bad.
It's pretty, spending 10 years looking
for the Loch Ness monster.
I think you've established your bone of feet age, you know?
And then Tim Dinsdale, he was an aeronautical engineer
and he became kind of a famous Loch Ness hunter
because on his, after reading more than a legend,
that Constance White book,
he was inspired to go hunt for the Loch Ness monster.
And on his first time out,
he caught something very weird moving away from him
on the lock on film.
Have you seen it?
Yeah, I've looked at all this stuff.
What did you think?
I think some of it looks very interesting.
The Dinsdale film in particular
looks pretty interesting to me too.
Yeah, agreed.
I'm not gonna go out, well, let's just save.
I'll save my judgment.
Save it.
But in the, like I said, over the years
as technology got better,
they started using this technology in the 1970s.
There was a series of expeditions sponsored
by Academy of Applied Science out of a Boston.
And they were the first people to combine sonar
because they're already using that.
Right.
But sonar and underwater photography
under the leadership of a guy named Robert Rhines,
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.
Havoy?
Yeah, maybe like.
And on tabloids episode?
Pressure hunting or something.
Oh, okay.
Barbie, I don't remember.
Right.
One of those.
But 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 if 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 it bounces off of at different rates.
And it creates basically like a picture
of the floor of the, or of the lake.
Yeah.
Oh, I just meant a ding to alert you.
I was just kidding.
Oh, I got you.
I got you.
I see.
Like a typewriter, right?
For 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, I think in June, 1975
or sometime in 1975, they had the 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 more 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.
Cause I don't know enough about what sort of, you know,
weird fish might be in that lake,
but it definitely looks weird 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, I mean, this was a big deal when they got these,
this was, these were respected scientists
carrying out a sober level headed expedition
to look for a lot of this monster.
I bet they were drinking a little bit.
Let's be honest.
There's sober ish level headed ish expedition.
And when they came with 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 1975
because world was like,
which story should we pay attention to today?
The haunted house in Amityville
or the Loch Ness monster photos?
Or the Bermuda Triangle.
Yeah.
I love the seventies.
They were the greatest decade ever.
It's so great.
And then they're like, well, who cares about any of that?
Let's go to a key party.
So, Rhines, 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, I think you're a crackpot.
And then he saw that stuff.
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 Rhines,
which was a very big deal,
so much so that Rhines was actually able to present evidence
at the House of Commons in London.
And people were starting to take this really seriously.
Yeah, and here in the States,
that would be like testifying before Congress
about the sea monster that you found
in Lake Havasu or something like that.
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 gonna get a million emails
telling us the name of the monster in Lake Havasu.
It's the Havasu monster.
Is that ungrateful to say something like that?
I don't think so.
I think it was, I'm gonna take it out.
All right.
So, I don't know if he actually presented the findings
or not, but they definitely wrote up,
Sir Peter Scott and Robert Rhines wrote up a paper,
an academic paper.
It wasn't peer reviewed,
but it was published in the journal Nature,
which is, I mean, they're two big English language
science journals, Science and Nature.
And they got theirs published in one.
And it was in the opinions and comments section, sure.
But science-
Letter to the editor.
Basically, the crackpot corner.
Yeah.
But 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 in this paper, they gave Nessie
its scientific binomial name.
Yeah.
And this is after we should say that the naturalist,
Mr. Scott said, oh, by the way,
not only do we believe what Rhines is doing,
but I think that Nessie is a Plesiosaur.
This is a marine reptile
that we thought went extinct 65 million years ago.
So that did not help the case.
No, it didn't.
And I think I get the impression that Rhines was kind of like,
we didn't talk about you saying this publicly,
but 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 Rhines was trying to basically get on board
to try to find the Loch Ness monster, turned them off.
Yeah, but nevertheless, they did give it that name,
Nessiterus rhomboterics.
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 miss that.
That would be a tough trivia question though.
That's a great one though.
Nessiterus rhomboterics is the Loch Ness monster.
I think that's one of the better trivia questions
I've ever heard.
All right, well, I'll trivia masters out there,
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 wherever 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 bi-nomial 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 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 celacanth was thought to be extinct
for tens of millions of years,
and they 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.
Like there was, from what I understand,
they were earnest and they were trying
to do this legitimately.
Although one of the MPs in Scotland pointed out
that Nesseteris rhomboterics is an anagram
for monster hoax by Sir Peter S.
I thought that was pretty good.
For many years, everybody was 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 wanted to do that,
I couldn't have also fit in the COTT and Scott?
And he didn't really answer the question,
but I think the impression that I got
from like actual Loch Ness monster hunters
is that 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 specifically.
It is pretty interesting.
Monster hoax by Sir Peter S.
That's pretty specific.
But I mean, what a betrayal,
because Robert Reins was a true believer.
And if that's what Scott was doing,
he was one of the bigger putzes
that the British naturalist community ever produced.
Which by the way,
did you get that email about Yiddish?
No, apparently putz is a very bad word.
Oh, is it like Fanny in the UK?
No, it's just this nice lady wrote us
about Yiddish words and sayings.
And she's like, most people don't realize
that schmuck and putz are not the nicest words.
What does putz mean in like American English?
We'll discuss offline.
Okay, I really wanna know.
I'm not sure I can wait.
That's okay, you can wait.
Can you make some hand gestures?
I'll give you the initials.
Okay.
So in the 80s,
things started to ramp up a little bit more.
There were more sonar hits coming around.
In 1987, in the late 80s,
a one million pound,
they spent a million bucks
for a week long exploration called Operation Deep Scan.
And this was, once again, the Loch Ness 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 24 boats
from what I understand to like sweep in unison
using side scan sonar, 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, an 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 were obviously moving targets that were large
that they just don't, they don't know what they were.
They have no idea.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Yep.
And this carried over, of course, into the early 90s.
Another BBC guy named Nicholas Wichel organized project.
How do you pronounce that, Urquhart?
I was going with Urquhart.
Oh, Urquhart, I like that.
I do too.
Silent H.
But also the Qua.
Sure, Project Urquhart, which was a real scientific
and the first one scientific extensive study
of the biology and geology of the lake itself.
Yeah, Nicholas Wichel, he was leading this thing.
They weren't looking for the monster,
but he was that guy who wrote that 1974 book
about the monster.
Yeah, people kind of come and go in this story.
It's interesting.
It really is.
It's a tight knot 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 target,
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 aboard that expedition who said,
I would say that this was biological in nature.
Obviously, it was moving.
It was about 15 feet long,
about the size of a small whale.
Yeah.
So, do you think they shouldn't compare it to things?
You're like, it sort of looked like an overturned boat.
And they're like, all right, well, maybe it was.
Or the fin looked like a large ore.
Or a small otter, like stop saying that.
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 monster of the sea.
Okay.
So, 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 Loch Ness,
launch expeditions, come up with some things
that couldn't be explained.
And the most recent one happened in 2016,
when a group of researchers from Norway showed up
to the Loch to explore under an expedition
and try to find the Loch Ness monster.
And they actually found something using side scan sonar.
Yeah.
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, geez, I mean, did it die?
Is it sleeping?
What's going on with this thing?
Cause 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 1970.
Yeah, the private life of Sherlock Holmes,
Billy Wilder movie.
And if you look at this monster in that movie,
it looks like the Loch Ness 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 50 years.
Oh man.
But the reason why it looked like the Loch Ness 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 Loch Ness monster
is because we all have the exact same image
of the Loch Ness monster.
And what a lot of people don't realize
is that that image comes from one specific photograph
that was published in 1934.
And we will talk about that after this message break.
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All right, so you left us with quite a cliffhanger,
the very famous, dare I say, infamous photo of Nessie
that looks like someone with their finger sticking
out of the water in 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 Loch Ness Monster,
which is interesting because I think that stuff from 1975
looks way more realistic and potentially provable.
Well, this was 1934.
Give them a break.
No, I know.
And that's why it took the world by storm
because it's the oldest one, I think.
And if you type in Loch Ness Monster image,
this is the first thing that you're going to see.
Yep, generally.
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 Loch Ness Monster
and say, this is the Loch Ness Monster.
Now on to reading, you know?
So this picture's origin was it first
showed up on the cover of the London Daily Mail in 1934.
This was the year after Duke Wetherill had been denounced
and humiliated.
And I mean, very quickly after that whole thing,
this picture appears.
And even though people had said, no, the Loch Ness Monster's
not real, this picture really kind of kept interest going.
The world didn't just completely walk away from it.
Like you said, everyday people were still interested in it.
And it was largely because of this picture that
was published in 1934.
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 R. 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, 50 years, basically, 51 years,
until they actually did scientific analysis of this thing.
A man named Stuart Campbell, and an article in the British
Journal of Photography, almost said 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 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, even in 1984, when this British Journal
of 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 Loch Ness monster
hunters, 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 1994, there was a guy
who is a Loch Ness monster hunter slash fanatic named
Aleister Boyd.
And in 1994, he basically dropped a bomb on the world
and said, these surgeons' photo is 100% fake.
And I have this story that explains how.
And he basically said, no, even among Loch Ness monster
hunters like himself, the surgeon's photo
has been basically debunked by the story
that he came up with.
Right.
So Boyd and his wife, because 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, OK.
So they teamed up.
And they did have a large animal sighting in 1979.
So they were into it.
It's not like they were 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 pen in Duke
Wetherill, Marmaduke, his, who is, 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 Ion,
I'm not sure how he pronounces it, said that that photo was a hoax.
And Boyd was reading this article in 1975
and a couple of very important little details
kind of stuck out to him.
Yeah, so Ian Wetherill had said that there was a guy named
Maurice Chambers involved in the hoax.
And Maurice Chambers is the guy that our Kenneth Wilson said
originally when the first, that photo first came out 60 years
before, Maurice Chambers was who he was going to visit.
So it would be really weird that Ian Wetherill would know
who Maurice Chambers was and that our Kenneth Wilson,
Dr. Wilson, would know him as well.
That was one thing.
And 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 1934.
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 detail no one else would have known.
It's not like proof positive or anything like that,
but they're 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 80s and the article was
from the 70s and apparently people hadn't paid much attention.
So we went to go find Ian Wetherill and found out that
he was dead.
So he went and found another guy who was mentioned
in the article, Christian Sperling,
who was Duke Wetherill's stepson and he had been
involved as well.
And apparently, according to Aleister Boyd,
when he went and tracked down Christian Sperling,
Sperling confessed to him.
Yeah, at 93 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, who cares?
Let's talk about this picture.
So here's the deal.
He said, because of the way that Duke,
I guess, stepdad, that was a stepdad.
Yeah, Duke was a stepdad.
So the way my stepdad was treated by the Daily Mail
and sold out and made to look foolish,
he went out to get even.
He really stuck in his craw.
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 stage this photograph, which included,
they included the background and part of the zoomed in look.
You can't really tell that it's Loch Ness,
but in the original photo, like we said,
you could see it and they did that on purpose
as proof that it was Loch Ness.
Yeah, and then they got through Boris Chambers,
the common friend.
They somehow persuaded Dr. 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 gotten.
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.
But I have no idea why he joined up on 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 it doesn't make sense
that Wilson would have been a part of this,
that some people even, one guy cited a toy expert
that said a toy submarine from the 30s
probably wouldn't have done the trick.
Yeah, that sounds like the worst kind of internet pedant.
Case closed.
Actually, toy submarines would have looked more like this.
But sure, people have tried to poke various holes
in the story that it's a fake over the years,
which is interesting too.
But it's really saying something though also to keep in mind,
Aleister Boyd, the guy who told the world
the story of how this famous photo
of the Loch Ness monster was hoaxed.
Like that does nothing to his belief.
He's like, I'm sure is, I'm more sure than I'm sure
of anything that there's something in Loch Ness.
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.
Cause like we said, it kind of gets under your skin
when you get into the Loch Ness monster.
So in the 1990s, here's some more explanations
because here's the deal, you have to prove something
exists, not disprove or wait, 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 there have been people over the years
that have tried to explain it as other things.
I'm like, maybe people are seeing something,
but what they're really seeing is blank.
The man named Steve Feltham in the 1990s,
he's one of these guys that kind of became a monotone
about obsess, I'm not gonna say that, but.
No, you could call him obsess.
He became so interested that he quit his job
and did this for 30 years.
But he said, here's what I think it is.
He said, I think it's a Welles catfish.
And if you look up Welles WELS catfish,
these are, you know, everyone knows catfish can get large,
but these are European catfish
that they look photoshopped when you look them up online
and two or three people holding these things up.
In Europe, they get larger.
They are huge.
Yeah, like up to.
Yeah, huge.
Like 13 feet long, which by the way,
don't forget that one Robert Rhine expedition
found something that was the size of a small whale
about 15 feet long.
Yeah.
Okay.
So this is what, but this is a really big point.
Steve Feltham is saying this.
This guy left his life in the 90s,
holds the Guinness record for the longest search
for Loch Ness.
Which is just dumb.
It is, but Guinness, you know.
They lost their way a long time ago.
They really did.
So like he's saying, 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.
That's a big deal that he's saying that.
And that seems to be a trend among Loch Ness enthusiasts
that it's kind of turned a little more toward,
hey, 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 Loch Ness monster searches,
but it says a lot about the world too, you know.
Yeah, and I think this Welles 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 things are, I mean, just look up Welles catfish.
They are tremendous in 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 was an historian in 2006 who said,
well, you know, I just came across some evidence
that circuses traveling through Scotland
used to stop and rest at Loch Ness.
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 30s
were of the Loch Ness monster
were elephant swimming in Loch Ness.
Yeah, completely away from the rest of the circus.
Right.
And the people that were resting on the shoreline.
And then after he finished, he said, butemtch.
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're explained away
as different other things.
Yeah, right.
And also there's like a, there's a, you know,
that whole thing developed to where,
what was it?
Sir Peter Scott said it was a palaeosaur, right?
Yeah.
Which is an extinct marine reptile.
Not a dinosaur, it was a marine reptile.
Other people said, no, it was a sauropod,
which makes even less sense,
because a sauropod was a terrestrial dinosaur,
which had never taken to water.
So what would it be doing in Loch Ness?
But for decades, those were kind of the two conceptions
that the Loch Ness monster was a surviving sauropod
or a surviving plesiosaur.
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 sealocanth.
Right.
But we respect the sealocanth,
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 10 reports a year over the history of Loch Ness
with close to a half a million people visiting every year,
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 plesiosaur,
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 Nessie 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 this thing survived 70 or 60 million years.
So it's a 60 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 plesiosaur or one sauropod,
let alone that I think Sir Peter Scott and Robert Rines
in their 1975 paper estimated
that you'd have to have about 30 breeding individuals
to continue a line, I guess, in the lake.
So there's just not enough food.
There's something like 22 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 30 of these
that are mating and breeding,
creating more little messes over the years,
and a lake that small, I know it's deep,
but it is a pretty small lake,
that if you have 30 of these things,
let's say conservatively,
and they all have to come up and breathe every few seconds,
you'd see 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 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 is real.
Yeah, my money on figuring this out,
last summer in 2018, researchers finally took samples
of environmental DNA, E-DNA,
and this will tell you, in fact,
it did yield about 500 million individual DNA sequences.
This will tell you basically anything
that has lived in this lake, maybe not forever,
or is it forever?
I don't know how far back it would go,
as long as it had viable DNA,
like it hadn't deteriorated yet.
So it could be like a whatever, a scale of this monster.
And this has worked before.
I believe it yielded evidence of unknown life
when they discovered in a human species
called the Denisovans.
So this works, they have these 500 million sequences,
and now they're just plowing through them basically.
Yeah, now they have to analyze them
and see if anything that hasn't been identified
before it turns up.
It's pretty smart, it's amazing.
It's like they took a photograph, a snapshot
of all of the DNA that's in Loch Ness right now.
It's a great idea.
Yeah, and then they're gonna 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 is 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.
But 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.
And then there's one other really big explanation against,
especially with the whole like surviving dinosaur thing.
The Loch Ness is only 10,000 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 Loch Ness
and as the sea levels lowered
and Loch Ness was separated from the sea,
they got trapped there because Loch Ness didn't exist
until it was gouged out of the earth by the glaciers
during the last ice age, 10,000 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 Loch Ness 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
as something we don't know about.
I would say we know about that.
Yeah, I think it can be explained.
Okay.
Have you seen incident at Loch Ness?
No, we talked about it in 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.
It may have been in the sea monsters one.
I bet, but that's the Werner Herzog.
Like it's worth watching because Werner Herzog
is on screen and anytime you can get him talking
or on screen, just watch.
But it is a mockumentary about Werner Herzog
going to make a documentary about Loch Ness.
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 a fun Friday night watch.
All right, Friday night's coming up.
But just to listen to Werner Herzog, it's great.
We have a vase of making you 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 wanna know more about Loch,
you got anything else?
Nope.
If you wanna know more about Loch Ness Monster,
Loch Ness, or Scotland, or anything like that,
go on to the internet.
It's a really wide and deep resource,
deeper than Loch Ness even.
And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.
This is a Listener Mail by way of our old friends at Coed.
Awesome.
We heard from Anne, our friends,
as a reminder, many years ago,
when we were just a fledgling podcast,
this group, a nonprofit called Coed,
Cooperative for Education.
They invited us to go to Guatemala,
which we did, you, me, and Jerry.
Yes.
It was a crazy, fun trip.
It was.
And we learned a lot, and it was very eye-opening
in many 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 a thousand girls
from dropping out of school in Guatemala.
And as a reminder, their 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 41 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 the start of the school year,
and there are still a few dozen kids waiting to be sponsored.
Sponsoring a student costs $80 a month,
or Coed will pair you with someone else.
If you can half sponsor someone at $40 a month
and to meet the students who need sponsors,
which you can actually do online, pretty powerful stuff,
just go to cooperativeforeducation.org.
Yep, and we've seen it with our own eyes
that they do really good work, so we can vouch for them,
and it's money 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 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 cooperativeforeducation.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 stuffyoushouldknow.com
and check out our social links.
I've got a website too called thejoshclarkway.com,
and if you want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry, and me,
you can address it to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit howstuffworks.com.
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