The Real Explanation Behind Loch Ness Was Hidden All Along — And It’s Terrifying

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[00:00:00]I went 200 miles north from here, right up to the top of Scotland to Loch Ness.

[00:00:05]You have to say it like that.

[00:00:05]>> Loch Loch Loch Ness Monster >> Loch Ness Monster >> The Loch Ness Monster >> Loch Ness Monster >> legendary Loch Ness Monster >> The Loch Ness Monster in more than half a century is underway this weekend in Scotland.

[00:00:17]>> What happened that day, what we saw can't explain it.

[00:00:21]>> For 90 years, the world has been looking at Loch Ness the wrong way. Every camera, every sonar sweep, every submarine lowered into that black water, all of them searching for the wrong thing. And in 2019, the results of one single experiment quietly confirmed what people living along those shores had been trying to tell us for 1,500 years.

[00:00:42]The Loch Ness Monster is real. It was always real. It was just never what we thought it was. And the actual answer, the one nobody wants to say out loud, is more terrifying than any plesiosaur [music] ever was. A wound in the earth.

[00:00:56]Before we get to Gemmell and what he pulled out of the water, you have to understand what kind of place he was sampling. Because Loch Ness is not just a lake. It is the second largest freshwater body in Scotland, 23 miles long, 755 feet deep at its lowest point.

[00:01:13]It holds more water than every lake in England and Wales combined. And here's the catch. It sits directly on top of one of the largest active geological wounds in the British Isles.

[00:01:23]>> So, we're going to pass the moon in really close, right over the top of Ponzi, so we can get the best possible three-dimensional representation of the of the river.

[00:01:31]>> A 62-mile tectonic scar called the Great Glen Fault that split the northern half of Scotland sideways from the southern half over hundreds of millions of years.

[00:01:41]The rocks on either side of that fault have slid past each other by roughly 65 km over geological time. The fault is not dormant. Micro earthquakes are recorded along the Great Glen on a routine basis. The bedrock beneath that lake is still moving. This is the only freshwater environment in the British Isles where a large creature could realistically live an entire life without ever being clearly observed. And before any modern scientist ever pointed a camera or a sonar beam at it, the people who lived along its shores were already trying to warn the rest of the world about what was inside it. The first witness.

[00:02:18]The earliest of those warnings has a date on it. Around the year 565 AD, on the bank of the River Ness, an Irish missionary named Columba is standing over the body of a man who has just been pulled out of the water. The man is dead. The wounds on his body, according to the account that survives, were made by something in the river.

[00:02:38]Columba's companions are pacing the bank.

[00:02:41]>> [music] >> They have already heard what the locals say about this water. And then it happens again. Something rises. A second man, sent into the water on Columba's instruction, is being followed. The surface breaks. Something is coming up toward him fast. Columba raises his hand. He makes the sign of the cross.

[00:02:59]And whatever was in the water, whatever had killed once already that day, turns back [music] into the dark and disappears. That account was written down by Adomnán, a biographer working roughly a century after Columba's death.

[00:03:13]And yes, it is hagiography. Yes, it follows the religious pattern of holy men commanding nature. But here is the part nobody really sits with.

[00:03:21]>> You will see a tree trunk or log out on the lock. But then you realize it isn't. It can't be.

[00:03:29]It can't be. It's swimming. It's swimming against the wind.

[00:03:32]>> The story sat in church archives for over a thousand years. It was not commercialized. It was not popularized.

[00:03:40]It was simply recorded at a time when no one had any reason to invent a creature in a body of water that almost no outsider in Europe had ever heard of.

[00:03:48]And it was not just Columba. Long before Christianity ever reached the Scottish Highlands, the indigenous Picts told stories about a thing called the Kelpie, a shape-shifting water spirit that lived in lochs and rivers that took the form of a horse or a person, and that lured travelers to their deaths. Kelpie stories existed all across Scotland, but the Highlands carried them with a particular intensity. Generations of people who lived along Loch Ness had been telling their children to stay away from the water, not because the water was deep, because something was in it.

[00:04:20]And what Columba described that day would not be described again in those same waters by the outside world for almost 1,300 years, until the day a road was built. The road that broke the silence. In 1933, the A82 road along the northern shore of Loch Ness was completed. Before the road, this place had been almost impossible to reach. The terrain was steep, the shoreline rugged, the communities small and isolated. The lake had existed in a kind of cultural blackout. Then suddenly, a paved road ran the entire length of it, and for the first time in human history, ordinary travelers could drive past those waters with a clear view of the surface. And get this, people had been seeing things in that water for 1,500 was a continuous oral and written tradition warning the world about it.

[00:05:13]And the moment we finally paved a road that let outsiders look at the lake, the sightings exploded. On April 14th, 1933, a couple named Aldie and John Mackay were driving along that brand new road when they saw something in the water.

[00:05:27]They described an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface for nearly a full minute before vanishing.

[00:05:33]>> Surgeon's photograph is the icon. It is what most people see as Nessie. It is their Nessie. It's instantaneously recognizable, but there's still an enigma attached to it.

[00:05:44]>> They reported what they saw to a local journalist named Alex Campbell, who published the account in the Inverness Courier on May 2nd. Campbell used the word monster. Within weeks, more sightings followed. Within months, the story had reached national newspapers.

[00:06:00]By the end of 1933, Loch Ness was no longer a quiet Scottish lake. It was an international sensation.

[00:06:08]The timing was not an accident. The early 1930s were the tail end of what historians sometimes call the golden age of exploration. The discoveries inside Tutankhamun's tomb [music] were less than a decade old. Expeditions to the Amazon and Central Africa were still returning with reports of unknown animals. The idea that something large and undiscovered might be hiding in a remote location was not considered absurd. It was considered likely. And then, a single photograph turned the whole thing from rumor into legend. The hunter's revenge.

[00:06:41]You have seen the image even if you do not realize it. A long, slender neck rising out of dark water. A small head silhouetted against the surface. The shape that became Nessie. The Daily Mail published it on April 21st, 1934. The credit went to a London gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson, who refused to put his own name on it. People called it the surgeon's photograph. The implication was clear. A respected medical man had captured something so impossible that even he was afraid to publicly claim it.

[00:07:13]>> [music] >> That single image was reproduced millions of times. For 60 years, it was the proof. It was a lie. And the man who built that lie was not Wilson at all. He was a big game hunter named Marmaduke Weatherall. And to understand what he did and [music] why, you have to understand what was done to him first.

[00:07:32]In 1933, The Daily Mail had hired Weatherall to find the Loch Ness monster. He was a hunter with a reputation. He went up to to with cameras and trackers and the full backing of a national newspaper. [music] And within weeks, he announced that he had found tracks, massive footprints pressed into the mud on the shore that he claimed belonged to the creature itself. The Daily Mail ran the story across the country, [music] and then it turned out the tracks were hippopotamus footprints made with an umbrella stand.

[00:08:01]Wetherell had been fooled, and the newspaper that had hired him published the humiliation in full. He was finished as a serious figure. His name became a punchline in pubs across Britain. And here is the catch. Wetherell did not let it go. He spent the following year planning. He bought a toy submarine from a local shop. He worked with his stepson, a sculptor named Christian Sperling, to mold a small head and a long curved neck out of plastic wood and fix them to the top of the toy. He waded out to the edge of the loch in the early morning. He photographed his own miniature in the calm shallow water. He cropped the image tight so the surrounding shore could not give away the scale. And then he routed the photograph to the Daily Mail through Robert Kenneth Wilson, a respectable London gynecologist with no obvious motive to deceive anyone. The very newspaper that had publicly destroyed him published his hoax as the most important monster photograph in modern history.

[00:08:58]>> So, I might see an object [music] on Loch Ness and think, "Well, that's a log." And then I see that it's swimming into the wind.

[00:09:05]So, I've rationalized that because it's moving against the wind, it's swimming.

[00:09:09]>> And it stood there, on the record, fooling the entire world for 60 years.

[00:09:15]It only collapsed when Sperling, on his deathbed in 1994, finally confessed. The toy submarine, the plastic neck, the whole heist. The most famous monster photograph ever taken was a 40-lb prop photographed in less than a foot of water by a hunter taking revenge on a tabloid. If this is the kind of mystery worth following all the way to the bottom, the kind where every official answer turns out to be hiding a stranger one.

[00:09:42]Go ahead and hit subscribe because what comes next is where the story [music] stops being a legend and starts being something worse. The three that moved.

[00:09:52]The Spurling confession should have ended the mystery. It did [music] not because by 1994, the legend had grown roots that did not depend on the photograph at all. There were thousands of sighting reports from people with no connection to each other. There were sonar contacts no one could explain.

[00:10:08]There were films that aerial intelligence experts had analyzed and called probably animate. The most famous of those films was shot on April 23rd, 1960 by an aeronautical engineer named Tim Dinsdale. He filmed a hump-shaped object moving across the loch under its own power. The footage was sent to the Royal Air Force Joint Aerial Reconnaissance Intelligence Center, the same unit that analyzed Cold War surveillance imagery.

[00:10:34]Their official conclusion was that the object was probably animate, not a boat, not a log, something that was moving itself through the water. From 1962 to 1972, a group called the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau maintained a continuous shoreline watch and recorded numerous sightings they could never definitively explain. The sonar era arrived in the 1970s with an American patent attorney named Robert Rines who in 1972 captured what he called the flipper photograph. An image showed a large diamond-shaped appendage attached to a much larger body. Critics argued the enhancement had created the flipper out of digital noise and Rines died in 2009 still convinced he had photographed something real. Three decades later, the BBC ran a much larger acoustic survey in 2003 using 600 beams deployed simultaneously, concluded that nothing large was present and announced that the mystery was finally over. But sonar struggles in complex acoustic environments, steep walls, great depth, thermal layers, sediment that absorbs sound, and Loch Ness has all of them.

[00:11:45]And stop and think about this. The one sonar expedition that did capture something, the most serious investigation of its era, did not produce a quiet result. [music] It produced three. In October 1987, a naturalist named Adrian Shine, the most respected scientific figure ever to dedicate his career to the loch, coordinated something called Operation Deep Scan. 24 boats moved across the water in formation, their sonar beams overlapping to create unbroken coverage of the entire water column from surface to bottom. The operation detected three unexplained contacts. They were larger than any known fish in the loch. They were hundreds of feet below the surface, and they moved. Shine did not claim they proved a monster. He simply noted that they were unexplained. They have remained unexplained ever since.

[00:12:36]>> Loch Ness was one big ice cube until 10,000 years ago.

[00:12:40]>> While the boats and the cameras and the sonar arrays kept coming and going, >> [music] >> one man simply stayed. In 1991, an Englishman named Steve Feltham sold his house, gave up his job, and moved to the shores of Loch Ness to watch the water full-time. He is still there. He has been watching for over 30 years, longer than any continuous monster hunt in human history. He holds a Guinness World Record for it. Feltham has seen things, surface disturbances he cannot explain, objects moving in ways that do not match boats or logs or known wildlife. He has never caught the answer on camera. We will come back to him.

[00:13:19]The question no one had asked.

[00:13:22]Because here is the thing about Loch Ness as a place. It is almost designed to hide things. Below about 100 m, the loch enters a zone of permanent darkness. No sunlight penetrates. The temperature stays at 5 to 6° C year round, regardless of the season. And the water itself is stained dark brown by peat, the same peat that gives Scottish whisky its color when it ages in the barrel. Underwater visibility at depth approaches zero. You can be a foot away from something massive and never see it.

[00:13:52]The depth, [music] the darkness, the volume, the geology of the fault running underneath it. Every previous expedition had been trying to fight that environment, to penetrate it, to photograph through it, to bounce a sonar pulse off of whatever was inside it. And every previous expedition had reached the same wall, which is exactly what made Neil Gemmell stop and ask a different question. Gemmell was a professor of genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He looked at the entire 90-year history of Loch Ness investigation and noticed something obvious that no one had ever acted on.

[00:14:28]Every previous expedition had been trying to spot the monster. They were all trying to confirm what they could see. Gemmell decided to confirm what they could not see. He decided to sample the water itself. Every living organism sheds genetic material into its environment just by being alive. Skin cells, mucus, waste, microscopic fragments of DNA float through every body of water on Earth, carrying the signatures of everything that lives in it. The technique is called environmental DNA, or eDNA. You do not need to see an animal to know it exists.

[00:15:03]You just need to collect a cup of water and read what is dissolved inside it.

[00:15:07]Biology does not allow you to hide from genetics.

[00:15:10]>> [music] >> In 2018, Gemmell and his team collected 250 water samples from Loch Ness. They sampled the surface, the middle layers, and the deep bottom water. They tested every region of the loch. They processed the samples using standard genetic extraction protocols and ran the results against the global database of known species. If anything large was living in that water, its DNA had to be in those samples. There was no way around it. In September 2019, the results came back.

[00:15:41]The line on the printout. Imagine Gemmell sitting in his office at the University of Otago, the printout in front of him. Page after page of species matches. Salmon, trout, stickleback, pike, deer DNA washing in from the shore, sheep DNA, human DNA, birds, bacteria. Every native species that should be there in the concentrations he expected. And then the absences. No plesiosaur DNA, [music] not a single fragment. The idea of a surviving prehistoric marine reptile, the long-necked, four-flippered survivor of the dinosaur age that had defined the popular image of Nessie for 90 years, was finally, definitively, scientifically dead. No unknown reptile DNA of any kind. No mystery species. No genetic signature that did not match something already in the international database. No large unknown mammal. No misidentified seals. No sturgeon. The popular fallback theory that ancient long-bodied fish might explain the sightings was eliminated on the same page. Every monster candidate that researchers had proposed for 90 years, gone. None of them are in that water.

[00:16:55]And then Gemmell came to the line on the printout that nobody was prepared for.

[00:17:00]One species present in every sample, at every depth, in every region of the loch, in a concentration far higher than anything they had expected for a lake of this character. Anguilla anguilla, the European eel. Stop and think about what that result actually means. Because the headlines just say "Loch Ness Monster is an eel" and move on. But the headlines are skipping the part that matters. How big a normal European eel lives most of its life in fresh water before migrating thousands of miles back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.

[00:17:33]>> [music] >> It usually grows to about 4 or 5 ft long. That is the documented maximum in normal environments, normal lifespan, normal predation, normal food competition. The eels of Loch Ness do not live in a normal environment. In captivity, eels can live for astonishing periods of time. A Swedish eel named Ale lived in a well for over 150 years before dying in 2014.

[00:17:58]150 years in a small well with limited food and zero room to grow. Now, picture an eel in Loch Ness. 230 m of dark water beneath it. No predators large enough to threaten it. Salmon and trout returning to the loch every year in massive numbers. [music] Cold, stable temperatures that slow the metabolism and reduce the calories required to stay alive. The deepest, darkest, safest refuge [music] an eel could possibly imagine. How long could one live in that environment? How large could it grow? We do not know because we have never caught one. Because the place is 23 mi long and 755 ft deep. And the water is stained black and the eels have absolutely no reason to ever come to the surface for human observation. They could be down there for 50 years, 100 years, longer, growing slowly, steadily in total darkness. Reaching sizes that have no comparison anywhere else in the scientific literature. And here is the catch. Eyewitnesses at Loch Ness over the past 90 years have consistently described creatures of 15, 20, even 30 ft in length. For most of the modern era, scientists treated that gap between 4-ft eels and 30-ft sightings as proof the witnesses were exaggerating or hallucinating. But the eDNA results force the question back open. The witnesses were not seeing nothing. They were seeing something. And the only confirmed large biological presence in that water is eels, which means either every witness across nearly a century misjudged the size of what they saw, or some of the eels in Loch Ness are very, very far from the documented norm. There are giant eels in that water, plural.

[00:19:41]The eDNA concentrations indicate a population, not a single individual. We do not know how big the largest one is.

[00:19:48]We have never seen it. The conditions in that loch allow individual eels to potentially exceed every documented size in the species by a wide margin, and they are still down there right now, living, feeding, occasionally surfacing.

[00:20:02]Because that is the other thing. Eels do surface. They are predators. They follow prey. And when a long, dark, muscular body rises briefly through stained brown water, what does it look like from the road above? It looks like a hump. It looks like a long, thin neck breaking the surface. It looks like exactly what people have been describing for 1,500 years. What the hydrophones are still hearing.

[00:20:27]The geology of the lake completes the picture. Loch Ness experiences seiches, large internal waves caused by wind and temperature differentials acting on the long, narrow shape of the basin. These waves move below the surface and produce sudden upwellings and surface disturbances. A seiche combined with a large eel surfacing at the same moment produces precisely the visual signature that witnesses keep reporting, a hump, a wake without an obvious source, >> [music] >> a disturbance that vanishes as quickly as it appeared. And the Great Glen Fault, the geological wound the entire loch sits inside, is still seismically active. Micro earthquakes occur along that line on a regular basis, producing sounds and pressure pulses that travel through the water.

[00:21:13]Hydrophone recordings made in 2023 and 2024 captured clicks, low rumbles, and pulses that researchers have not yet been able to identify. Some may be geological, some may be biological. We genuinely do not know yet. In August of 2023, the Loch Ness Centre partnered with a group called Loch Ness Exploration for what they called the largest monster hunt in 50 years. They named it the Quest Expedition. They brought in thermal imaging drones that can detect heat signatures on the water surface.

[00:21:46]They deployed hydrophones at multiple depths across the loch. They watched.

[00:21:51]They listened. And what they recorded was strange. The thermal drones detected surface disturbances that did not match any expected source. The hydrophones captured underwater sounds that did not cleanly correspond to any known biological or geological signature. The findings were not conclusive, but they were unusual enough that the team chose to continue the work into 2024 with expanded equipment. They are still listening.

[00:22:16]>> [music] >> Which brings us back to Steve Feltham.

[00:22:19]Feltham has been on those shores since 1991, 33 years. He has watched the surface through every season, in every kind of weather, longer than any human being in history has watched any single body of water for a single answer. For most of those years, what Feltham was watching for was a monster, a prehistoric survivor, a long-necked creature out of the dinosaur age. He has admitted in interviews that he now believes the most likely explanation for what people have been seeing, what he himself has been seeing, is a very large eel. And once you understand the biology, you understand what that admission really means. Feltham did not stop watching when he changed his mind. He is still on those shores because the question did not go away when the plesiosaur did. The question got bigger. The question became, how big? What they have always been seeing.

[00:23:13]For 1,500 years, every culture that lived near that lake said the same thing. There is something in the water.

[00:23:19]The Picts said it. The medieval Christians said it. The Highland farmers said it. The Victorian travelers said it. The modern witnesses said it. They were all describing the same phenomenon.

[00:23:30]They were just describing it through the framework their own time and culture had given them. A water beast, a kelpie, a demon, a plesiosaur, a monster. The framework was always wrong. The sightings were always real. And now, 90 years after the modern legend began, we finally know what people have been seeing all along. Something enormous, something ancient, something hidden in plain sight, mistaken for a legend for nearly a century >> [music] >> because no one thought to look for what was actually there. The eels of Loch Ness are still in that water. They were there last week. [music] They were there this morning. They are there right now, sliding through 200 m of permanent darkness, indifferent to human legend, doing what they have done for centuries, living, feeding, surfacing, and being mistaken for monsters by a species that has always preferred drama to biology.

[00:24:22]The real explanation behind Loch Ness was hidden all along. And once you understand what is really down there, you may find yourself agreeing with the people who say, "The truth is more terrifying than the myth ever was."

[00:24:35]Because the myth could be dismissed. The myth could be laughed at. The myth could be filed away as a Victorian curiosity or a hoax with a toy submarine and a sculpted plastic neck. The truth cannot.

[00:24:48]The truth is that there are real animals down there, animals we have only just begun to understand. Animals that have been quietly outliving every generation of humans that has tried to find them.

[00:25:00]And the next time you stand on the shore of that loch and watch the surface of the water, you will know exactly what is moving beneath it. You just will not know how big it has grown.

[00:25:10]The listening has not [music] stopped.

[00:25:12]The Quest hydrophones are still recording. Steve Feltham is still on the shore. The largest eel in that loch has never been seen by a human being and may never be seen until the day it surfaces on its own terms. If finding out what comes back from that water matters to you, subscribe. Because when the answer finally surfaces, this is where it is going to surface first.