Could the Loch Ness Monster Actually Be a Catfish? | History's Greatest Hoaxes | Season 1 Episode 2

[00:00:04]Since the first photographed sighting at the beginning of the 20th century, folklore has it that a large, possibly prehistoric sea monster lurks beneath [music] the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland.

[00:00:19]Over the years, grainy photos and even some tantalizing but inconclusive footage has emerged to keep the legend of Nessie alive.

[00:00:29]But are there any real facts to back up the [music] story? Or is it all down to clever hoaxes, the public's wishful [music] thinking, and an eager local tourist industry?

[00:00:41][music] The myth of Nessie came out of sort of that local mythology, but then was probably co-opted by a need to perpetuate that myth because it brought some sort of notoriety and monetary gain to the area.

[00:00:57]All I've ever wanted to do is put my own piece of evidence in that jigsaw puzzle.

[00:01:02]Be it a photograph, be it a piece of film or at worst just [music] an eyewitness sighting. And that would be my life's dream. Anybody that has got anything of a naturalist in him, and I am one, would love to be a Loch Ness monster. I've been to Loch Ness and chose Loch Ness over the others because uh you never know might be there when it when it pops up. Every decade or so a new tantalizing piece of evidence emerges from the depths. Is it because the hotel trade is dipping a little bit around Loch Ness and oh we need another sighting. Let's get another 10 years prosperity. Could be. I'm not quite that cynical. I think that these sightings tend to happen when some people get together over a drink and think, "Let's do another Nessie fake." So powerful is Loch Ness [music] as a as a mystery that if we could drain the water away from Loch Ness, search it thoroughly and satisfy ourselves. There was absolutely no incredible monster and then fill it back up. We would have the monster would reappear within a day or so.

[00:02:42]So, How much of the Loch Ness monster story has been written by [music] mischievous hoaxes?

[00:02:48]Could there really be a large sea monster with prehistoric origins [music] living in the freezing lock?

[00:02:56]Some locals and many of those who set out to find it are certain there is.

[00:03:01]Academics, however, are equally sure that it's all down to hoaxes or simple misightings.

[00:03:08]What is the truth then about Scotland's most enduring story?

[00:03:13]>> I think the Loch Ness myth has become so enshrined in Scottish culture that um not only would uh they you know find it difficult to to kind [music] of make it disappear, but I don't think they they wanted to. You know, it's it's something that identifies them as as a little bit different, as a little bit quirky, and something that again [music] people will flock to see. And that's that's to their benefit.

[00:03:39]>> That boat's going to hit it.

[00:03:42]>> Probably get a >> There have been, you know, over the last hundred years, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of sightings, not all of which have been reported of something in the deeps, that occasionally comes to the surface, it moves around pretty quickly on the water, and then it disappears again. Now, are all these people just, you know, is their imagination playing tricks? Are they seeing things? And if they're seeing things, what exactly are they seeing?

[00:04:08]Um, you know, is it an otter? Is it a seal that somehow managed to get all the way through? Um, is it perhaps a a bubbling uh sort of school of salmon that have all come together and are creating the impression of a much larger single creature. Um, there are lots of possibilities what these people can be seeing. The other possibility of course is that you know when you go to Loch Ness and no matter how cynical and skeptical you are, it's just human nature to look out across that expanse, that vast expanse of water and just strain your eyes a little bit more than you would do with any other lake in the world. And when you do that, oh, you know, was that a log? You know, was that an otter? You know, you just can almost convince yourself, as I say, no matter how rational you are, that maybe there's something there.

[00:05:05]The problem with saying, "Is she real or not?" is uh um you know, it's it's you can never disprove a negative. Uh you can search Loch Ness up and down and and they've done that. There's been Loch Ness has probably been searched more than any other body of water out there.

[00:05:26]Uh but the Loch Ness, the Nessie believers are always going to say, "Well, you searched here, but maybe she was hiding over there, and so you searched there." Well, what if she was there? when you could you just can never entirely disprove Nessie as folklore. She's wonderful.

[00:05:49]But to academics, the Loch Ness monster is just a colorful myth. Dr. Darren Nich is a respected paleozuist who's an expert on rare and extinct species. He says that there's no way that the monster of legend could exist.

[00:06:06]So Loch Ness is quite an unusual geological feature. It's something like, you know, 10 to 15,000 years old, been carved out by a glacia and then filled in by glacial meltwater. So in geological terms, it's a very it's a very young structure. It's it's not a thing that's been here for tens of millions of years. Now, this idea that if there is a lockchess monster, that it is some creature from prehistory, a plesiosaur, an animal that's a group of animals that we think went [music] extinct 66 million years ago. The idea that those kinds of creatures could be p could persist as relics in [music] the lock is a complete non-starter.

[00:06:39]>> I I think historically we know that people have a fascination with sort of these >> [music] >> um these big undiscovered creatures. So whether it's the abominable snowman or Bigfoot or the Lochness monster, uh there's some people that actually become quite [music] fixated and and interestingly enough that fixation is is sort of self-perpetuating. If I've invested a long time of of of my life sort of researching this and believing it, kind of walking away will just punctuate what a waste of time [music] that was.

[00:07:12]>> Do you think people are seeing things that [music] make them think they're seeing monsters, but I don't think we have any good evidence to say that they are seeing unknown species. I think people are seeing known animal species and [music] misidentifying them. And there are all kinds of strange atmospheric and lake events that have tricked people into thinking they've seen unusual things.

[00:07:32]Loch Ness is a particularly remarkable body of water. I mean it's something like 36 km long and about 2 km wide. So very very long and very narrow. [music] And we know that the water within it is quite clearly stratified. You have uh [music] upper layers that are distinct from lower layers. And we have these moving waves within the body of the water. So you have large waves moving the length and from side to side across across the loft which are not always reflected on the surface. Sometimes there is turbulence [music] between these layers and we do see strange surface effects.

[00:08:03]There is no compelling scientific evidence for a Loch Ness monster. But I would say the situation is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that the people today, the trained scientists who are interested in ideas about lake monsters and sea monsters and Lochess monsters. So um there is this growing idea that there's mostly a kind of socioultural psychological perspective behind these monsters.

[00:08:30]But despite the academic world's strong opinion that there's nothing even vaguely resembling a monster in the depths of Loch Ness, there are still no shortage of sightings.

[00:08:43]Dick Raino was part of the original hunt for the Loch Ness monster back in the 1960s.

[00:08:49]He has spent most of his adult life combing its waters looking for strange creatures, but has never found anything.

[00:08:57][music] He agreed to meet with Dr. the niche to review all the best evidence for the monster that's been collected so far.

[00:09:06]>> So, the classic Loch Ness monster image, the the famous [music] so-called surgeons photo of April 1934. And I like I like the fact this is the uh the uncropped version that you never see in books. You always see this tightly cropped version which of course classically shows this shape. But well, I think this the story behind this is now quite well known, I would say, >> from several different sources. It's a a prank. Um, [music] and interestingly, it was supposed to be based on a toy submarine that was adapted by the son, a stepson of Mr. Weather. Uh, and they made it in London and then drove up very quickly and photographed it in Loch Ness.

[00:09:53]The supposed sighting took place in 1934, [music] but it was not until 1994 that the man who made the model of Nessie confessed to the hoax.

[00:10:04]He revealed that two long lines had been attached to the small two-foot model [music] and dragged through the waters of Loch Ness.

[00:10:13]>> The case for this being a toy submarine with this plastic wood material on top is is looking quite strong. The fact is from several sources, but this I think is the smoking gun. The fact that you can see the wires.

[00:10:27]>> I think when you were confronted with [music] a photograph like this, you know, famous photograph taken by the surgeon, you know, which was supposed to be a sighting of Nestie, it's all about the context within which we see it.

[00:10:37]We're told that that was taken in a place where there was sighting after sighting for for decades of this monster. So, your brain is primed to see that. It's primed to see within that context, within that story, what it's been told to look for.

[00:10:56]>> If you imagine the situation, say in the 1930s, you've been reading all these reports in the paper about a a monster in Loch Ness, and you're a tourist from London. You you go up to Loch Ness, and boy, wouldn't it be great if you saw the monster, too? So, there's some weird disturbance in the water. Oo, isn't that Isn't that the monster? And I that's what happened. People's brains just uh they'll they'll use the ideas kind of in circulation in society and they'll project that onto onto what they're seeing in the actual world. And this happens again and again [music] and again.

[00:11:42]So we move on to the famous Lackland Stewart photo of of 1951. [music] these three humps which uh which I I think people said right from the start that it's obvious they are not in a line. It's not part of a >> an Stuart himself uh claimed that the animal came charging along the lock and then they had to retreat from the shoreline in fear. Um, it was supposed to be taken on a Saturday morning, but if you look at the background of the photograph at the right hand corner at the top, you can see the sun is facing the camera and the camera is facing west. So, that is actually an evening photograph. Uh, if it was an evening photograph taken on a Saturday, I doubt very much they could have got it in the papers on the sun on the the following morning because that's not the way Sunday papers work.

[00:12:32]>> No. Wow.

[00:12:34]We human beings just are drawn to mysteries. And some of us want them explained. We can't stand it if we if you don't let us see the answer. At the same time, some people are inclined not to want the answer. And those people want to keep Loch Ness or a haunted house. They want to keep them as enduring mysteries.

[00:12:57]And because of those factors, because of those types of people who want things explained or not explained, you have the media driven to take a mystery and puff it up a bit or or um dice it up or uh expose it.

[00:13:17]>> And this was later revealed to be bales of hay wraps in um top hauling, isn't it?

[00:13:25]>> Yes. a chap called Richard Frier who lived in Drum the Drockett. Uh he went to visit uh Lacklan Stewart on the business of buying a horse and although the horse deal fell through, Lacklan Stewart actually took him [music] down to the beach and showed him the bales of hay.

[00:13:41]>> Again, I can't really tell from the literature whether people ever really did think that this was meant to be an image of a real animal anyway. It's [music] so strange.

[00:13:51]As a journalist, there's no doubt that Nessie makes great copy. And if someone came to me with something pretty damn plausible that showed that um the Loch Ness monster did exist and it was some kind of dinosaur or pesiosaur, um I would think that I had a great story on my hands. I would obviously want to give it as much checking as was possible.

[00:14:16]If you had a story tomorrow photo of the Loch Ness monster verified not to be a fake, yeah, you would be shifting a lot of newspapers and you know any journalist name attached to that story would be up in lights.

[00:14:32]Over the past 50 years or so, there have been literally hundreds of sightings of unknown creatures in Loch Ness.

[00:14:40]They include Torque Willil Mloud's sighting in the 1960s and Peter McNab's photograph taken in 1955, which appeared to show some sort of creature [music] in the lock near the castle.

[00:14:52]There's also Okconor's 1960 picture [music] of what looks like an upturned boat in the water, the well-known underwater flipper photo from 1972, [music] and the fulllength creature image from 1975, which were taken by the Academy of Applied Science.

[00:15:12]That's without mentioning the so-called Muppet Head captured in 1977 and the infamous Hugh Gray photo taken in November 1933, which was explained away as a swan.

[00:15:26]Finally, there was the infamous George Edwards hump in the water from 2015.

[00:15:34]This is the evidence we have, isn't it?

[00:15:35]This is we seem to have >> explained most of it away.

[00:15:40]>> I this we've just gone through pretty much all of the the classic I mean there are a few obviously indeterminate photos where we're never going to know there are ripples in the water and lumps and so on but all the classic ones. Yeah.

[00:15:50]>> 80 years and that's all we have >> exactly.

[00:16:01]But contrary to the scientific views, there are still people who believe that there is something fascinating living [music] deep in the lock.

[00:16:12]Steve Felum is perhaps the most well-known Nessie hunter in the world today.

[00:16:18]He holds the world record for the longest time [music] spent hunting for the creature, having devoted more than two decades to a personal search for the truth about Loch [music] Ness.

[00:16:29]He's even built a research facility in his camper van which sits on [music] its banks.

[00:16:36]>> I would love it to be a plesiosaur more than anything but the odds are so stacked against [music] that. I mean firstly you got 60 million years or 70 million years since the last recorded plesiosaw but how many ice ages this lock has been through this lock has formed in that time. You know the it's it's utterly implausible that we're still looking for plesiosaurs in here.

[00:17:06]After more than 20 years at the edge of the lock, Felum has reached the conclusion that Nessie is most likely to be a Wells catfish, a species that was introduced to the locks waters in Victorian times.

[00:17:20]Wells catfish are believed to live for at least 50 years in large freshwater rivers and lakes. They can grow to up to 5 m in length and weigh over 300 kg.

[00:17:35]>> I think the catfish is one of the more mundane potential explanations of what we're looking for here. So for that reason alone, I would guess that the uh scientific community would consider it to be a much nicer prospect than what so many people are still looking for of giant plesiosaurs. And it would be very embarrassing if we all turned out to be right and it was a plesiosaur for them.

[00:18:04]I think they'd like a catfish to be in here because they'd be justified in not getting excited. It's documented that in the Victorian era, catfish were released for sport in several lakes in England by estates that wanted the fishing. We've got several big estates on the side of the lock and it would be in their interest to release a dozen of these Wales catfish into the lock. So Victorian era to 1930s, that's when it reaches maturity. That's when you've got maybe 12 big catfish swimming about in here. And if they weren't breeding then in the last 15 20 years the numbers would finally reach maturity drop off and die which would that fits with the sightings as well. So that's the best guess as it stands.

[00:18:57]I think what we're looking at here is sort of conspiracy theory and um theories that um aren't grounded necessarily in logic or in science, but rather in the need to believe that something really exciting is out there.

[00:19:11]And I think that's admirable. I think the type of person that would do this is probably someone who probably has quite an an obsessive element to their personality, right? So once they focus on something, they can't let it go. But also, you've got to remember that once you focus on something and become known as the authority on that, well, that's very reinforcing, right? So, if you're getting invited to speak about these things and and to write about these things, you know, you're not going to want to believe that it's not true.

[00:19:38]>> BS are much more drawn to this sort of stuff. There seem to be far fewer women uh who look at this and go that I'm going to devote my life to that, to proving that there's a that there's a thing here.

[00:19:52]>> [music] >> was quite often blok and you know if I were being cruel and [music] cynical which let's face it is my job I would say quite lonely uh don't quite fit in it was either that or a life in standup you know I am that close to being a [music] full-time Nessie hunter I'm just a lone Nessie hunter with big pair of binoculars 35 mil camera with a 400 lens lens on it and a video camera.

[00:20:25]And I'm like a coiled spring ready for Nessie when it comes up. It's just two and a half decades of [music] being a coiled spring waiting for that sighting.

[00:20:36]>> Given that we've had all sorts of pinger devices going up and down that lock looking for Nessie, no sign whatsoever.

[00:20:44]Is it time to give up and say that actually there isn't a lock Nessa monster? All I'm currently saying is that looking at all the evidence, talking to all the eyewitnesses, the most the most likely solution is a thing called a whales catfish.

[00:20:58]>> I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm not saying I'm not saying the mystery is solved for one minute. And I'm not saying I'm about to stop. I'm still looking for a better explanation than that.

[00:21:08]>> Why do seemingly rational people believe that there are these monsters out there?

[00:21:13]Maybe these kind of monsters out there represent the dark corners of our subconscious which we're projecting out onto the world. Or or maybe, you know, in this in this kind of uh modern civilized world where we seem to have tamed nature so much and domesticated everything, maybe there's an enormous appeal to think that these fantastic untamed wild bits of prehistory still somehow exist out there.

[00:21:45]I think there is something absolutely splendid about people like Steve Felum.

[00:21:51]And I say frankly, good on him. I think anybody who decides to abandon just a normal humrum life, sell their house and dedicate their life to sitting on the side of a lake in Scotland with a pair of binoculars and and trying to spy the Loch Ness monster, then great. You know, the world needs eccentrics like that. Is he enjoying himself? Is he having fun?

[00:22:12]Does he entertain us? Um, does he teach us in some way something about, you know, that human desire to know the unnerable? Yes, he does. And you know, good on him.

[00:22:28]But Steve Felum isn't the only obsessive Nessie hunter still keeping a close watch on the waters of the lock.

[00:22:36]Roland Watson is a prominent Nessie blogger who believes despite the doubters that it really has been seen by many local people over the years.

[00:22:47]He also believes that he will capture the Loch Ness monster on camera. It's just a question of time.

[00:22:54]Watson has set motion activated cameras around the edge of the lock.

[00:23:00]I get my motion detection camera out on and off. I've been using it for maybe 3 years now. I get some interesting pictures of coralance, herand canoes, boats, people looking at the camera.

[00:23:16]And uh but no monsters yet.

[00:23:27]You want to get you want to get the the background in to prove it was taken at Loch Ness.

[00:23:34]Uh and then you want something which gets as much as little the front end as well cuz waves tend to trigger the motion detection. So, it's a kind of halfway house between not too high, not too low for these factors.

[00:23:50]This might be too dense. I'm not sure.

[00:23:57][snorts] This is fine. This range is limited because, as I said, it's 60 ft. So, uh probably the odds of getting something big passing you at that range. Remember the lock is about 27 square miles. It's a lot of room to not appear in front of this camera.

[00:24:19]I do believe there's creatures here.

[00:24:22]I'm intrigued by the mystery and the maybe the romance of it as well. The fact that in a body of water just 4hour drive from my house there's uh claims of a large 30ft creature swimming just below the surface here.

[00:24:38]Uh and that's attracted thousands of people in the past. Many people come up searching for it. They just want to be the person who gets that definitive picture, that bit of footage which will convince those who don't believe there's anything in here.

[00:24:57]The central appeal of the Loch Ness monster is this idea of a prehistoric creature still alive in the present day world. Recently, one one researcher pointed out the extraordinary coincidence that uh just a few weeks before the first major sightings of Nessie in the in 1933, what movie happened to open but King Kong, which had a scene in it where people are attacked by a giant dinosaur.

[00:25:33]So you you have this history of this fascination with the idea that what if dinosaurs this this fascination with dinosaurs and what if they were still alive in the present world.

[00:25:48]If we try and imagine how the the Loch Ness animal could hypothetically be discovered, it is not going to be some person chasing it on a boat and hooking the monster by the tail.

[00:25:58]>> [music] >> uh um if this creature is real, it's either so elusive or it's so powerful that that's those aren't really possibilities on the cards. It's going to be through somebody discovering uh some biological trace of the creature.

[00:26:12]Now, [music] we tend to think when I if I mention biological traces, we think of like a dead body, a rotting body. But of course, today the state we're at with science now is we can detect the existence of animals by their DNA in the water, the skin that they slop off their bodies, their waste products. This is called Edna, environmental DNA. People have discovered, documented many species that they've never seen, but they found their DNA in seawater and lake water.

[00:26:36]Well, at the moment, there are no indications at Loch Ness that there is the DNA of any unknown weird animal here.

[00:26:49]Despite their differences of opinion, boat captain Dick Raina [music] agreed to take Roland Watson out onto the lock.

[00:27:00]>> Roland, what we're going to do just now is to head out across to Urkut Castle.

[00:27:06]Uh the scene of the McNab photograph.

[00:27:09]>> Yeah.

[00:27:09]>> And then after that, we'll head over across the lock to the other side over the deepest part of the lock. This is our low side scanning sonar. shows the bottom of the lock underneath us.

[00:27:22]This is the the the bottom on the left hand side of the boat >> and this is the bottom on the right hand side of the boat. And the deeper the water gets, the uh the wider the black bit.

[00:27:45]You see that there's weed growing there, but that's 4 mters around 12 [music] 13 ft. And below that, there's not enough light to allow plants to grow. So, we will see no more weed after that.

[00:27:57]In a moment, we will be able to line up the top of the castle tower with the hill in the distance, and that will give us a precise fix on the location of the object in George Edward's photograph.

[00:28:10]>> All right.

[00:28:13]This was his hump photograph taken a few years back.

[00:28:16]>> Yes. This is the the plastic hump that was being used for a TV documentary.

[00:28:20]>> Yeah.

[00:28:21]>> We've had a couple of well-known photographs taken here. think proportionally we we see a lot of stuff here we read in past old newspaper reports that made themselves the ways into books and such things this in some sense is an important part of the lock for the Nessie story purely because it's so wide open so many people visit the castle they stop here they look out in the lock and just because of that people are going to see more stuff on the surface whether it's real or People see what they expect to see. So whether it's, you know, the face of [music] your favorite deity and your potato chips because you're particularly religious, or whether it's a giant monster in a lock because you really want it to be true. The fact that a lot of people see it doesn't necessarily make it more true, but we think it makes it more true. I think this is one of the other idiosyncrasies of hoaxes uh and and and how people uh formulate beliefs. We tend to believe what most people believe >> right there.

[00:29:28]>> Expectant attention explains a lot at Loch Ness. That is to say, we bring to Loch Ness our expectations and our attention to u look at something that might fit that.

[00:29:45]So, no matter what we see, it might be might be a wave. [music] It might be a piece of floating driftwood, it might be three or four ducks, it could be a very incredible looking creature that does look pretty much like the myth says.

[00:30:02]Whatever it is, your mind is already set to see Nessie.

[00:30:08]>> So, one of the things we can say quite confidently about the way people behave is that no person is a blank slate.

[00:30:14]Nobody will come to Loch Ness and not be thinking of the monster. Everyone will have in their mind this kind of image of what it's meant to look like. People come to Loch Ness with a Loch Ness monster bias. And I think this explains why so what why there are so many sightings, but also why so many of the sightings are really kind of vague and unsatisfactory. [music] If someone said to you they saw a surging wave or a little dark hump on the water, many other places around the world you wouldn't pay any attention to it. It would just be dismissed as, well, that was, you know, a fish or a lump in the water. At Loch Ness, people will see that and they will automatically fixate on it being a monster. They will specifically identify as a monster. So, it's almost true to say that people do see Loch Ness monsters, [music] but they they're not seeing an unknown giant animal. They're seeing their kind of projections on natural phenomena and other animal species.

[00:31:08]Adrien Shine is very much the godfather of Loch Ness. He's been searching for the truth for over 40 years and today runs the most popular museum in the area.

[00:31:20]He is now convinced, however, that there's nothing to be discovered.

[00:31:25]I've been looking at the Loch Ness question for quite a long time now and I I would say that Loch Ness is not Jurassic Park in the sort of paleontological realm. I don't think that there is a Loch Ness monster. People sometimes ask me, do I deeply resent the hoaxes? Well, the answer is that a lot of the subject is [music] founded within hoaxes. The surgeon's picture being perhaps one of the best examples. Uh the flipper picture is a on another level is another one. Uh because they have had enormous popular appeal to understand what's happening with hoaxes and forgeries [music] and the like. We have to we have to sort of define the word gullible because it's a very natural thing to be interested in something new. reasonable people should appreciate uh hearing about new discoveries and the like. The problem is gullible people uh gullibility means that you persist even when you shouldn't. When someone has warned you, this is very unlikely. There are warning signs here that point and the person persists then we call that person gullible and that is not a good thing.

[00:32:43]And that's when um the people who perpetrate hoaxes like [music] to make fun of them or realize they can make money from them.

[00:32:54]We are in a golden age of hoaxes thanks to [music] the internet.

[00:32:59]Uh I think the idea that somehow we could train ourselves to be immune to hoaxes is absurd. We will there there's always going to be fallibility. there there's just no way around it. And in fact, one perhaps the first [music] step to resisting hoaxes is is to accept how fallible we are and how uh accept the kind of biases and uh the way that our brains don't assess evidence rationally.

[00:33:36]I I once looked for Loch Ness monsters.

[00:33:39]I am now looking for what [music] it is that people are seeing and actually what it is about Loch Ness which generates monsters because there are some rather strange things and counterintuitive things that do happen here which actually create the forms of illusion that then confirm the cultural stereotypes [snorts] of what you might expect to see here.

[00:34:11]Shine knew years ago that the surgeon's photo was a hoax and even has a modern version of the remote control Nessie that [music] caused such a stir at the time.

[00:34:24]One last small thing in relation to the surgeon's picture and it is actually a small thing.

[00:34:33]It is something that I've had some success with in uh reconstructing the surgeon's picture. Uh the object was probably about that size. This is a modern reconstruction, [music] but uh it can be quite convincing when uh filmed in black and white on uh a calm surface because those waves around the surgeon's picture [music] are not big waves. You can all tell they're just oily little ripples.

[00:35:10]The skepticism of the scientific community hasn't held back projects on the lock aimed at discovering what, if anything, lies beneath its waters.

[00:35:22]One such operation employs a 2 million pound URV or underwater remote [music] vehicle to scan the hidden depths of the lock.

[00:35:46]So the mission we've ran was a general overview assessment of an area around the corner here.

[00:35:53]The primary aim was to assess this the real seafloor and where the bank meets that real seafloor. So the sonar is capable of visualizing actually the water column. So it sends out this energy and it looks between the fish, our vehicle and the seafloor and we look for anything in that water column.

[00:36:11]You'll see schools of fish. You'll see salmon, sturgeon. Some people even claimed that sturgeon come into the lock. So you'd be able to see that. And as small as maybe 30 cm fish you'd be capable of identifying. The problem is of course we're flying quite low. So there's always a chance there's something big above us. I think if some more money is put into the investigation, as technology improves, if for example, we investigate the bottom of the lock and look for carcasses, bones, that kind of thing could definitively prove that there was a monster there and possibly there still is.

[00:36:49]>> Now got quite a few studies on the ecology of the lock that demonstrate the biological productivity here is so low.

[00:36:55]Yes, you can support fish. Yes, you can have a few birds that eat water weed and small fish, but it seems that there is not the there is not the content here, the nutrient productivity to allow the survival of any animal any bigger than like a salmon. We know there are salmon and char and pike here and so on. There is not the possibility of a persistent population of large animals which remember lost afficionados tell us these creeds have been here for not just decades but centuries even hundreds of thousands of years. That is not plausible.

[00:37:27]The lock is so huge. It's one of the largest freshwater bodies in in Europe.

[00:37:30]And to be able to survey it simultaneously, um it's simply cost prohibitive. You would need 10 of these vehicles all on the surface, all to sail the whole lock at the exact same time. And in addition to that, because of the steep contours, there's every possibility that there's hidden channels, caves, subc caves.

[00:37:48]There could be any form of subc network.

[00:37:50]So there's always the possibility that she's hiding there somewhere.

[00:37:59]There was an extraordinary development a few days after our cameras left Loch Ness.

[00:38:05]The underwater remote vehicle [music] Munan picked up an unidentified mass on the bottom of the lock.

[00:38:12]Closer analysis revealed something quite unexpected.

[00:38:16]The mass appeared to be [music] monster-shaped.

[00:38:22]Nessie finally caught on camera. Yes, you heard that right. Not the flesh and blood version, unfortunately, but a 30 foot long film prop which sank back in 1969.

[00:38:34]One story is that the film director Billy Wilder asked that the humps be removed. Uh, and the story goes that they were associated with the buoyancy.

[00:38:45]And uh well the inevitable happened and um down she went.

[00:38:51]>> So no sign of Nessie herself on this occasion, but this is a vast stretch of water. And so the search continues.

[00:39:01]This discovery by Adrien Shine and his Norwegian crew of of actual Nessie uh right on the floor of the lock is is exciting.

[00:39:12]Not the least of which is because it it actually is the nest monster faked. It's a some kind of of model or [music] contraption from an early uh movie and is sunk and it will have zero effect in debunking the nest legend. People will say, well, okay, there's a counterfeit monster, so that doesn't tell us there's not a real monster.

[00:39:39]Because what people were seeing quite clearly in many cases was not a contraption.

[00:39:55]So did the Nessie of legend ever exist?

[00:39:59]Or have the hoaxes merely combined with a keen local knack for publicity?

[00:40:09]So I think this massive amount of variation that people say they see within Loch Ness monsters [music] reflects the fact that these are not encounters with a single unknown animal.

[00:40:18]These are encounters with all manner of natural phenomena. There certainly is not a core of reports that have anatomical consistency and would make a scientific person think that yes those do sound like good descriptions of a real unknown animal.

[00:40:34]What we see is often culturally informed. If you see something you don't understand or immediately identify in Loch Ness, then your processor will search for what should be in Loch Ness and what should there be in Loch Ness but a Loch Ness monster.

[00:40:57]it it's not kind of inconceivable to assume there was some clever [music] sort of hotel owners that decided well here's a great story to say. So Edinburgh has all those great ghost [music] stories. What we need here is something a little bit different. How about a Loch Ness monster and decades and decades after that people still if you're going that that way if you're going up north in um in Scotland you're going to pass by and see and see that lock just in case.

[00:41:24]I've heard a figure that Loach Nessie is responsible for over60 million pounds in revenue annually for the Scottish tourism industry. Uh certainly the hotel industry up there is in no hurry to debunk Nessie. On the other hand, you can say that it's it's a harmless legend. Maybe maybe it just adds maybe people who are visiting don't really believe but uh it's you know they think maybe we'll see Nessie maybe they won't. So is it really hurting anybody?

[00:41:59]I'm I'm not sure. I don't know.

[00:42:03]I think any tourist who goes to Loch Ness, whether they're from Milwaukee or whether they're from Johannesburg or whether they're from Taiwan, goes there with a secret expectation that they are going to see the Loch Ness monster. And better still, they might even video or photograph it. And so when you go to Loch Ness, now which one of us isn't going to think, hm, I just wonder whether I'm going to see something? And when you look out across that water, you think, hm, that little change of light, is that something emerging? Uh, you know, that twig, is that the uh the dorsal fin of some terrific monster that's been there for millions of years?

[00:42:41]So, of course, it's human nature. Yeah.

[00:42:43]And you get caught up and it is like a kind of mass psychosis. It is like a kind of collective delusion.

[00:42:49]>> The locals have different ideas. They have different motives. Some genuinely believe, some are seeing something, others see it more as a financial opportunity, a tourist, a tourist trade thing. This is an ongoing debate.

[00:43:01]There's there's no final explanation or solution on the table here. Being a skeptic does is not the same thing as being a debunker or a dismisser because I want to be wrong. I want to be able to see a loness monster. [music] All the time we've been here, I've been looking out of the lock and taking photographs of things. I haven't seen anything yet that really amazed me, but I do not dismiss out of hand the possibility I could be wrong at any moment. My conclusions are based on my understanding of [music] the evidence as it stands right now. The fact is that despite many eyewitness sightings, final conclusive photographic or physical proof has yet to be seen.

[00:43:41]So, happily for all, the Nessie legend lives on.

[00:44:01]Heat.

[00:44:02]Heat.