Stuff You Should Know - Could There Be A Loch Ness Monster?

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

People 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.
Starting point is 00:00:17 We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass
Starting point is 00:00:37 and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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.
Starting point is 00:01:22 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.
Starting point is 00:01:36 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.
Starting point is 00:01:52 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.
Starting point is 00:02:12 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?
Starting point is 00:02:30 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.
Starting point is 00:02:48 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,
Starting point is 00:03:15 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.
Starting point is 00:03:36 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.
Starting point is 00:03:57 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.
Starting point is 00:04:21 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.
Starting point is 00:04:36 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,
Starting point is 00:04:54 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
Starting point is 00:05:16 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.
Starting point is 00:05:33 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,
Starting point is 00:05:51 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
Starting point is 00:06:09 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.
Starting point is 00:06:24 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
Starting point is 00:06:43 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.
Starting point is 00:07:07 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,
Starting point is 00:07:23 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,
Starting point is 00:07:44 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,
Starting point is 00:08:02 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?
Starting point is 00:08:20 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.
Starting point is 00:08:39 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.
Starting point is 00:08:57 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...
Starting point is 00:09:16 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.
Starting point is 00:09:36 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
Starting point is 00:10:00 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,
Starting point is 00:10:24 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.
Starting point is 00:10:45 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
Starting point is 00:11:02 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
Starting point is 00:11:28 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
Starting point is 00:12:03 David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends
Starting point is 00:12:21 to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.
Starting point is 00:12:37 Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in
Starting point is 00:12:51 as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,
Starting point is 00:13:10 or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.
Starting point is 00:13:23 Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.
Starting point is 00:13:34 And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,
Starting point is 00:13:54 so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Lackness Monster Theme Song"] All right, Chuck. So I said 1933 was the year that the Lackness Monster kind of hit the global scene,
Starting point is 00:14:19 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.
Starting point is 00:14:45 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
Starting point is 00:15:10 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,
Starting point is 00:15:32 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?
Starting point is 00:15:50 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
Starting point is 00:16:13 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.
Starting point is 00:16:30 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.
Starting point is 00:16:49 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.
Starting point is 00:17:03 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.
Starting point is 00:17:21 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?
Starting point is 00:17:38 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?
Starting point is 00:17:55 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
Starting point is 00:18:09 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,
Starting point is 00:18:28 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.
Starting point is 00:18:51 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.
Starting point is 00:19:12 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,
Starting point is 00:19:31 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.
Starting point is 00:19:46 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.
Starting point is 00:20:08 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,
Starting point is 00:20:32 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.
Starting point is 00:20:54 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.
Starting point is 00:21:13 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,
Starting point is 00:21:34 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
Starting point is 00:21:53 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.
Starting point is 00:22:11 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.
Starting point is 00:22:30 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.
Starting point is 00:22:49 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.
Starting point is 00:23:14 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,
Starting point is 00:23:36 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
Starting point is 00:24:06 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
Starting point is 00:24:26 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.
Starting point is 00:24:48 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,
Starting point is 00:25:09 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.
Starting point is 00:25:28 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,
Starting point is 00:25:43 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,
Starting point is 00:26:05 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.
Starting point is 00:26:19 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.
Starting point is 00:26:37 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.
Starting point is 00:27:00 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.
Starting point is 00:27:10 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.
Starting point is 00:27:25 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.
Starting point is 00:27:48 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?
Starting point is 00:28:14 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.
Starting point is 00:28:35 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
Starting point is 00:28:52 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.
Starting point is 00:29:09 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.
Starting point is 00:29:24 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,
Starting point is 00:29:40 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,
Starting point is 00:29:58 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.
Starting point is 00:30:12 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,
Starting point is 00:30:32 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.
Starting point is 00:30:52 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,
Starting point is 00:31:12 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-
Starting point is 00:31:29 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
Starting point is 00:31:51 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.
Starting point is 00:32:16 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
Starting point is 00:32:39 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.
Starting point is 00:33:02 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,
Starting point is 00:33:23 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
Starting point is 00:33:38 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.
Starting point is 00:34:04 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,
Starting point is 00:34:25 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.
Starting point is 00:34:45 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,
Starting point is 00:35:09 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.
Starting point is 00:35:22 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
Starting point is 00:35:45 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.
Starting point is 00:36:03 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,
Starting point is 00:36:23 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
Starting point is 00:36:41 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.
Starting point is 00:37:08 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.
Starting point is 00:37:28 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.
Starting point is 00:37:46 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,
Starting point is 00:38:05 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
Starting point is 00:38:22 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.
Starting point is 00:38:44 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.
Starting point is 00:39:00 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.
Starting point is 00:39:18 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
Starting point is 00:39:37 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.
Starting point is 00:39:54 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,
Starting point is 00:40:10 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.
Starting point is 00:40:27 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
Starting point is 00:40:51 that was published in 1934. And we will talk about that after this message break. No, stuff you should know, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.
Starting point is 00:41:18 We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references
Starting point is 00:41:35 to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?
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Starting point is 00:42:02 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.
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Starting point is 00:43:04 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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?
Starting point is 00:43:37 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.
Starting point is 00:43:54 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
Starting point is 00:44:11 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.
Starting point is 00:44:35 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.
Starting point is 00:44:59 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.
Starting point is 00:45:17 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.
Starting point is 00:45:41 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,
Starting point is 00:46:03 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.
Starting point is 00:46:17 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.
Starting point is 00:46:42 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.
Starting point is 00:47:10 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.
Starting point is 00:47:32 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.
Starting point is 00:47:50 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
Starting point is 00:48:18 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,
Starting point is 00:48:44 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
Starting point is 00:49:04 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.
Starting point is 00:49:26 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
Starting point is 00:49:48 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.
Starting point is 00:50:07 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
Starting point is 00:50:27 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,
Starting point is 00:50:49 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,
Starting point is 00:51:09 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.
Starting point is 00:51:29 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.
Starting point is 00:51:50 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.
Starting point is 00:52:16 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
Starting point is 00:52:37 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
Starting point is 00:52:59 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
Starting point is 00:53:29 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
Starting point is 00:53:50 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.
Starting point is 00:54:12 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.
Starting point is 00:54:31 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.
Starting point is 00:54:48 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
Starting point is 00:55:11 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
Starting point is 00:55:35 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,
Starting point is 00:55:56 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,
Starting point is 00:56:15 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.
Starting point is 00:56:34 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,
Starting point is 00:56:55 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?
Starting point is 00:57:11 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.
Starting point is 00:57:30 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.
Starting point is 00:57:53 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
Starting point is 00:58:16 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.
Starting point is 00:58:32 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,
Starting point is 00:58:54 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,
Starting point is 00:59:11 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
Starting point is 00:59:38 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
Starting point is 00:59:56 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,
Starting point is 01:00:16 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,
Starting point is 01:00:43 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.
Starting point is 01:01:06 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
Starting point is 01:01:29 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.
Starting point is 01:01:46 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.
Starting point is 01:02:10 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,
Starting point is 01:02:34 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
Starting point is 01:02:53 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.
Starting point is 01:03:12 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.
Starting point is 01:03:26 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.
Starting point is 01:03:44 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.
Starting point is 01:04:07 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.
Starting point is 01:04:28 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,
Starting point is 01:04:40 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,
Starting point is 01:05:00 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.
Starting point is 01:05:19 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
Starting point is 01:05:34 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
Starting point is 01:05:54 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.
Starting point is 01:06:14 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,
Starting point is 01:06:35 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,
Starting point is 01:06:58 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.
Starting point is 01:07:34 On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.
Starting point is 01:07:51 We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself,
Starting point is 01:08:10 what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen
Starting point is 01:08:28 so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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