Tag Archives: Monster

The internet hasn’t killed the Loch Ness Monster.

nessie

I’ve just read a really interesting opinion piece on The Guardian website by Philip Hoare that questions if the internet has killed the Loch Ness Monster. I can somewhat identify with Hoare’s feelings that the mystery and wonder brought forth by monster stories gracing the headlines has disappeared. A memory that always stands out strongly for me was being a young child when a monster scare broke out in the village I lived in. I can remember being at Primary School but I forget my exact age, but I do know that it was before the internet was a thing in my house. The local paper was (and still is) The Wiltshire Times and they ran a story on a Big Cat that had been seen prowling the fields near my house and right next to the warehouse that my mother worked in. I will filled with pure fascination and terror that can never be replicated by a story breaking on the internet.

However I’m not so keen to consider this a terrible thing. I believe that any decent Paranormal researcher, Fortean, Cryptozoologist or whatever they identify as wants to know what is really causing what is or has been witnessed, whether it be a ghost, monster or UFO sighting they are dealing with. There are, of course, those who revel in the pseudo-scientific and the answers they fancy that aren’t necessarily logical, but don’t be mistaken in thinking that they represent every researcher out there. The majority of researchers I know are rational thinkers who aren’t led by their biases.

When a new monster sighting occurs we now have masses of information at our finger tips. More than that even… we have the experience of so many others at our finger tips too. I have witnessed the buzz of activity borne when it is reported somewhere in the world that a strange beast has been spotted, caught on film or captured. Communities of people who were never connected before the internet swap notes and speculations, the reporters and eye-witnesses are easy to track down, experts around the world – biologists, marine biologists, ecologists – are contactable immediately, and we can examine what happened and where it happened in great detail because all the details we need are often online. More often than not researchers can discover what it is that has really happened – whether it be hoax, misidentification or the next new discovery of a real monster that has never been seen before! If it’s going to happen, then I truly believe that now is the time.

Before the internet made it possible to connect to the bigger world I was a young girl who clung to mystery as though it were essential, not because I loved the mystery but because I loved the ‘what if?’. Today modern technology and social media make that ‘what if?’ easier to answer. Before, there were ‘what if?‘s that went unanswered and led me down the path to becoming a pseudo-scientific ghost hunter, and as a result I wasted so much money and time on the wrong questions. So yes, although it is a shame that a lot of the mystery in these stories is now lost by the instant media that our world has come to know, I feel it has been replaced with something much more valuable and important – the ability to answer the mystery once and for all. I know of nothing more wondrous that resolved curiosity.

On a parting note – I visited Drumnadrochit last year, and Nessie is looking as well as she ever did ;)

photo credit: Artist unknown (if you know, let me know)

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James May & the shark that never was

James May should be in my bad books right now, but the fact that he is responsible for the Skegness Sea Monster is both baffling and beautiful at the same time. You couldn’t make it up… unless you are May, in which case you probably already have. James May is best known for his presenting role on the Television Show ‘Top Gear’, but he also hosts a show called ‘Man Lab’ in which he ‘helps modern man relearn some vital skills that are in danger of being lost.‘ Such as faking Lake Monsters. What? Bear with me…

In August of 2012 many news sources reported on video footage (which you can view below) that was captured from Skegness beach by alleged tourists. Many – including me – concluded that it was a basking shark, because that seemed the most sensible option. The Daily Mail quoted Senior biologist Marcus Williams from the National Aquarium in Portsmouth as suggesting it could be two sharks feeding together.

He was wrong however, as during this weeks episode of ‘Man Lab’ James May revealed that it was a hoax perpetrated by the cast and crew of the show in a bid to boost the resort’s economy by giving it a monster to rival Loch Ness’ Nessie. A hoax that they didn’t think had worked after things went wrong and the fake monster lost its head. May said

“It was a devastating turn of events [when Susan’s head fell off]. With Susan lost to Davy Jones our hopes of a monster-led Skegness-related economic miracle seemed sunk without trace. And that seemed to be the end of that; but actually, it wasn’t, you see, in a heart-felt tribute to our tragically lost monster one of our beach crew decided to upload the only existing footage we had of Susan in action; shortly before her head fell off. The crew weren’t prepared and, as a result, the footage was shaky, blurry and indistinct. In short, it was perfect. Slowly views started to increase and before we knew it was well into the hundreds… and then we hit the headlines. The local Skegness paper picked up on the story and suddenly Susan was front-page news. The views leaped into the thousands.”

He added that other websites started linking to their video of Susan and, after the nationals picked up on the story, the monster went global, with news organisations and websites across the planet covering the tale.

“What we had just about written off as a colossal failure had somehow become one of the biggest successes we have had on Man Lab,” [source]

So we were wrong and it wasn’t basking sharks at all, but instead a headless fake monster. Is it bad that the majority of people reached the wrong conclusion? I don’t think so. It’s how a rational mind should work because the logical solution to the question of ‘what is that?’ in this case is that it’s either something misplaced in the later (a log, for example) or it’s an animal you’d expect to see in the water – such as a basking shark. To not cry “HOAX!” when there’s no evidence of a hoax is a good thing, I think.

So James May isn’t quite in my bad books yet because I think this is a lovely monster story, however if it turns out he’s been anywhere near Windermere with his sodding fake monster then things might change…

head of skeggy

The monster used by the show being tested in a pool

h/t to Mike Hall & Shaun Sellars for this story.

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The problems with the latest Nessie photo

For just over a week I have attempted and failed to contact George Edwards who took the latest photo it is claimed shows the Loch Ness Monster. Clashing work schedules coupled with  a busy season for Loch Ness boat tours means being able to chat just hasn’t happened so I haven’t been able to get answers to the questions I have about the photo from the man who took it. However, even without speaking to Edwards there are still problems I have with the photo.

“The best evidence” 

Many who have commented on the photo have refered to it as the best evidence they’ve seen for the Loch Ness monster for decades. Steve Feltham, the only full time Loch Ness Monster researcher who lives on the shore of Loch Ness on the small beach at Dores is quoted as saying

“It is the best photograph I think I have ever seen… I think the images are fantastic – that’s the animal I have been looking for all this time,”

and

“I would say it doesn’t prove what Nessie is, but it does prove what Nessie isn’t, a sturgeon which is a fish that has been put forward as one of the main explanations as to what Nessie could be but this hasn’t got a serrated spine like the sturgeon.”

The problem with this is that if it doesn’t prove what Nessie is then what is it evidence of? How can this photo be proof of something when we don’t know what that thing actually is?

The photo shows an unidentified object in the water of Loch Ness a short distance away from the boat the photo is being taken from. To conclude that this is evidence for there being a Loch Ness monster is illogical because if there is a monster or unidentified animal causing strange sightings we don’t know what it is and don’t know it’s characteristics. Without knowing it’s characteristics it would (and is) impossible to comment upon what does count as evidence of the monster/creature existing, and what doesn’t.

There have been so many sightings of the Loch Ness Monster over the years and it is true that many of the eye-witness testimonies contain similar defining characteristics for the creature – a long neck, humps, a grey colour, large in size… but to suggest that these characteristics popping up time and time again in eyewitness testimony makes them true characteristics of the monster in residence in the Loch suggests that it is impossible for the eyewitnesses to have been mistaken about what they saw, or not primed to see a monster in the water that had characteristics reported by previous eyewitnesses. This is not so, and because of this, the photo cannot rationally be presented as evidence of a monster in the water.

The postcards

In my initial attempt to get in touch with George Edwards I also got in touch with various other people I know who research Loch Ness sightings. I was surprised to learn from one contact that the photo being presented to the world media by George Edwards was being sold to tourists on a postcard – a postcard which had been on sale for months. In his interviews with various newspapers, George Edwards claimed he didn’t come forward with the photo straight away (after taking it in November 2011) because he was having it examined by “experts”. However the fact that the photo was being sold to tourists prior to him taking the photo to the press makes me doubt the sincerity of the delay in publishing it internationally.

The postcard – Edwards’ latest photo pictures bottom left.

The 1986 photo

In 1986 George Edwards took a different photo he claimed showed the Loch Ness Monster. Of the 1986 photo Dick Raynor says on his website

I remember him telling me at the time how hard it had been to drag the water filled tube out of the back of a van and down to the water before it was towed out into the loch!

One mans word is not evidence of a hoax, of course. However, with the 1986 photo the same problems arise when it comes to presenting the photo as evidence of X when it isn’t known if X exists or what the characteristics of X truly are. I truly believe that this photo is just another photo of something unidentified in the water that people are claiming is a monster when there is no supporting evidence for that conclusion. There is no logic to support the conclusion that it is a monster and just because something is unidentified doesn’t mean it is something unidentifiable.

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New Loch Ness Photo: a disappointing reaction from the skeptical community

It was March, and as we walked along the shore of the lake in Bowness I was telling Joe Nickell about the most popular theories about what had caused the ‘monster’ photographed by Tom Pickles and Sarah Harrington. I told him that most people believed it was a tyre, or a bunch of tyres tied together and floating in the water and how, days after the photo hit the newspapers, a sliced up tyre was found on the shore of the lake (pictured right).

Joe asked ‘does a tyre float upright when sliced up?’ and the answer was of course ‘I don’t know, nobody has tested it’. He then gave me that look, the look that says ‘I know you already know the answer to this so I’m not going to patronise you’. So many people had speculated about the cause of the Pickles photo without taking the time to ask the right questions or to speak to the people involved, myself included. Most people concluded it was a tyre in the lake but nobody had checked to see if it was possible for a tyre to look like that. We were making a claim but not providing the evidence to back it up.

The realisation that so many people had been so eager to be the first to comment on the story that they’d overlooked the basic principles of good research stunned me into realising that I needed to change the way I behaved when it came to research. It is more important to be correct and last to comment than it is to be first to comment while lacking facts.

Yesterday various news sources covered the latest Loch Ness monster photo taken by the skipper of a boat called The Nessie Hunter – various people tweeted and emailed the story to me to see what I thought. Click here to see the full photo. The story made me chuckle because just days before it broke I had been speaking to an audience of about Forty children at Camp Quest UK about paranormal research and one child in the audience had asked about the likely hood of there being a dinosaur in Loch Ness. Another child had responded by explaining he thought the Loch Ness monster was a commercial enterprise which I agree with. I don’t personally think it’s a travesty though, especially when the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre is slap bang in the centre of it all in Drumnadrochit and is the best example of educational outreach I’ve ever seen when it comes to a paranormal myth.

When the media report on something paranormal like this latest Loch Ness photo I never trust their coverage, having been misquoted myself more times than I can remember. The first thing I did was email the people I knew on the ground around Loch Ness to ask for their opinions and what they know about the photo and I also contacted the man who took the photo himself to ask him some questions about it, about the boat he was on, and his thoughts on the Loch Ness Monster. I’m still waiting for a response, which I shall do patiently. I am in no rush to reach a conclusion about the photo, unlike many others.

Within hours of the story spreading around social networking sites many skeptics were dismissing it as a hoax despite there being very little to suggest it is a hoax photo. I had posted the story on the Facebook page of the brilliant Monster Talk podcast in the hopes that their US audience might know of anyone in the US referring to themselves as ‘US military monster experts’, as referred to in news coverage. The conversation turned to how the ripples and wake surrounding the object in the water didn’t look as though the thing was moving towards Urquhart castle as suggested in the news coverage by the eye witness. One comment surprised and annoyed me, here is part of the conversation that took place:

Hayley Stevens: Doesn’t the wake look a bit weird for it to be heading towards the castle?
S: I didn’t get the impression that it was even moving, the way he described it
Hayley Stevens: It looks like something in the process of diving. “It was slowly moving up the Loch towards Urquhart Castle and it was a dark grey colour.It was quite a fair way from the boat, probably about half a mile away but it’s difficult to tell in water.”
M: Looks like a log to me or a branch. I’ve seen floating debris in the Loch and that looks just like one of them. It isn’t a monster, obviously.
A: The wake is all wonky, that looks shopped to me.
Hayley Stevens: because the wake is wonky? It could be an animal twisting and turning. It’s more likely to be a misidentification than a hoax, and suggesting a hoax straight off like that is extremely cynical and, with no other evidence of a hoax, illogical.
A: There was no twisting and turning. I’m thinking either it’s a prop on a string behind the boat, or it’s photo shopped.
Hayley Stevens: Where is your evidence?
A: Where is the evidence that it is a Giant Unclassified Aquatic Monster, that lives in a lake that until 15,000 years ago, was covered with 1.5 miles of Ice? Provide some of that, and then I’ll provide some evidence for my opinion that it is shopped. Deal? Do I need to provide evidence that The famous Bigfoot film is really a guy in a costume? Sorry.
Hayley Stevens: I’m not claiming it is a monster so the burden of proof for that claim doesn’t fall to me. I don’t know what it is in the photo, but I’m not claiming to know either. On the other hand, you are claiming it is a hoax photo. You can’t just dismiss things as hoaxes without evidence to back up such a claim even if it seems a more likely explanation. Also yes, if the Patterson and Gimlin film was new and you were claiming it was a hoax you would need to be able to demonstrate how or why you thought it was a hoax. You can’t just make or dismiss claims based on hunches or past cases. That’s irrational behaviour. ’There was no twisting and turning’… if you were there I’m willing to accept that information from you. If not, then I don’t understand how on earth you could know that.

Defining yourself as a rational thinker and dismissing something as a hoax without good reason is irrational and unhelpful. Using newspapers such as the Daily Mail as the source for the information you base your conclusion on is NOT good research practice and provides weak conclusions. The media are the middle man, retelling an eyewitnesses story to you – given the fact that eye witness testimony is untrustworthy in itself, why on earth would any rational person trust this retelling as a source to base their research from?

Many people have also picked up on the part of the news coverage in which the skipper of the boat says the oddity in the water was half a mile away from him when he took the photo despite it appearing to be much nearer to him in the photo, as though this demonstates it is a hoax. Yet the eyewitness said himself that it is difficult to judge distance in water so he wasn’t sure

“It was quite a fair way from the boat, probably about half a mile away but it’s difficult to tell in water.” – George Edward (source)

It is also important to remember that the photo was taken nearly ten months ago and that it is easy to misremember experiences you’ve had in the past,which is why it is hard to rely upon eye witness testimony alone when it comes to reports of paranormal phenomenon.

It’s an interesting photo and poses many questions, and it would be good to find an answer to those questions. It’s fine to hypothesise about the photo and to discuss and suggest ideas regarding its origin and to make comparisons to previous lake monster photos and their causes. However many skeptics are quick to reach conclusions about these sorts of stories without having evidence to back themselves up – this is behaviour that goes against the very thing that skepticism is about – assessing claims for their supporting evidence. Stating that ‘it is a hoax’ or that ‘tourist numbers must be down’ or that ‘it is a log in the water’ are claims, and when you make a claim like this you need to have evidence to back it up. It could possibly be a hoax (though I don’t have any reason to believe it is right now), it could possibly be a log in the water, or perhaps a seal diving back under the water – but these suggestions are merely speculation. Presenting them as anything else is irrational and deserving of skeptical scrutiny.

Accusing a man of hoaxing a photo without having any good evidence to base that accusation on is disrespectful and intellectually dishonest.

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