NESSIE TIDBITS PART 2

I’M NOT SURE HOW I got into researching the Loch Ness Monster, but it’s fun to tiptoe between truth and supposition. Indeed, here in Part 2 matters seem to reside principally in the latter. 

Gray’s Lab. Wikipedia describes a photo taken in 1933: “It was slightly blurred, and it has been noted that if one looks closely the head of a dog can be seen. Gray had taken his Labrador for a walk that day and it is suspected that the photograph depicts his dog fetching a stick from the loch. Others have suggested that the photograph depicts an otter or swan.”

“Slightly” blurred? This reminds me of “adversarial perturbations” of early A.I machine learning.

Image from “Quantum and A.I. Tidbits Part 2.”

The “Surgeon’s Photograph.” The most popular photo of Nessie was published in the Daily Mail, April 21, 1934, a middle-market tabloid even back then. It was supposedly taken by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, who, Wikipedia reports, refused to have his name associated with it. And likely for good reason. 

“The Surgeon’s Photograph,” as it became known. Image from Wikipedia. 

“For 60 years,” Wikipedia says, “the photo was considered evidence of the monster’s existence, although skeptics dismissed it as driftwood, an elephant, an otter or a bird.” 

Apparently even skeptics can be overly imaginative, as verified in the 1990s. 

“The creature, “Wikipedia recounts, “was reportedly a toy submarine built by Christian Spurling, the son-in-law of Marmaduke Wetherell. Spurling admitted the photograph was a hoax in January 1991. Wetherell had been publicly ridiculed by his employer, the Daily Mail, after he found ‘Nessie footprints’ that turned out to be a hoax.” 

Ridiculed, apparently with reason: Wetherell’s Wikipedia entry notes that he “claimed to have found footprints, but when casts of the footprints were sent to scientists for analysis they turned out to be from a hippopotamus; a prankster had used a hippopotamus-foot umbrella stand.” 

Image from liveauctioneers.com.

 A Toy Submarine. Wikipedia picks up the tale: “To get revenge on the Mail, Wetherell perpetrated his hoax with co-conspirators Spurling (sculpture specialist), Ian Wetherell (his son, who bought the material for the fake), and Maurice Chambers (an insurance agent). The toy submarine was bought from F. W. Woolworth, and its head and neck were made from wood putty. After testing it in a local pond the group went to Loch Ness, where Ian Wetherell took the photos near the Altsaigh Tea House. When they heard a water bailiff approaching, Duke Wetherell sank the model with his foot and it is ‘presumably still somewhere in Loch Ness.’ ”

Other Nessie Tales. Filming, sonar, video taping, and even underwater robots have been employed to verify the existence of Nessie. Wikipedia notes, “Adrian Shine of The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland [Hmm…] supported a survey of the Loch using an underwater robot operated by Kongsberg Maritime. While investigating the depths of the loch, they found the resting place of a Nessie prop created for Billy Wilder‘s 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wally Veevers had designed the prop initially with a neck and two humps but Wilder disliked the humps and ordered them removed. This change altered the buoyancy and the prop promptly sank into the loch during a filming test.”

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1970. Image from Wikipedia.

Nessie Gets Scientific. Matthew Wills writes in JSTOR Daily, November 23, 2018, about Nessie getting a proper scientific binomial. 

Image from “Why Won’t Scientific Evidence Change the Minds of Loch Ness Monster True Believers?” by Artūrs Logins, USCDonsife, June 6, 2018.

Brewer’s offers a summary: “The ornithologist Sir Peter Scott dubbed the creature Nessiteras rhombopteryx, after its appearance on a photograph taken by some Americans. The name was taken to mean ‘Ness monster with a diamond-shaped fin,’ but crossword fanatics pointed out a short while later that it was in fact an anagram of ‘monster hoax by Sir Peter S.”  

As noted, I generally dislike anagrams, but I applaud Sir Peter and his colleague Robert Rines for this one. Douks! ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024