Are the hundreds of eye-witness accounts to be disbelieved?
Is she there?
Could she be?
Why the hell not! I think so… come get some!
Come get some what?
Are you planning a clambake?
Neeps and tatties, for goodness sake, if you’re going to have a go at least get it right!
We don’t have clambake in this poor deprived little country. I still have to change the butane tank on my TV every three days just so I can get Dallas re-runs!
We have our own version here in Vermont: Champ. About 4 years ago a fleet of Japense-funded highly sophisticated radar boats formed a bigass V shape and moved across Lake Champlain, which is the largest freshwater lake in the country, after the Great Lakes. They didn’t find anything.
I never liked the idea of a giant amphibian swimming around waiting for poor little me to jump in the water. ::shiver::
DON PEDRO: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour.
BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. -Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Sc: i
I don’t think Nessie exists. I think the sightings can be attributed to either:
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poor visibility
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oddly-shaped ripples in the water’s surface
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floating dead wood
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hallucinations
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intoxication of the observer
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hoaxes, photographic and/or otherwise
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any combination of the above.
The notion that a population of animals as large as Nessie could sustain itself in a land-locked lake is ridiculous if you analyze it closely enough. Most people don’t like analyzing cherished myths. Mysteries have a romantic appeal and without them, life seems mundane and boring.
Real science has enough mysteries to sustain one who bothers to look for them.
When all else fails, ask Cecil.
What country? Do you live in Scotland? Great accents. Did you like “So I married an axe murderer”?
Regarding Nessie, I think jab1 has it right. Alas, there is no Nessie…no bigfoot…no alien ufos…no Santa Claus. Sorry kids.
Well, real or not, Nessie sucks. She’s lame.
I mean, gimme an MONSTER to believe in. Nessie’s a big, shy, dumb, fish. What fun is that? Why are people so into that? I want something that represents a danger, that kills and rends and shreds. Something to scare kids with. What I’m saying is, Nessie’d be more interesting if she was like that gator in LAKE PLACID.
There’s some Yeti stories which include human bones found in caves and stuff. And one or two bigfoot stories in which they attacked trailer parks. But even that’s a little lame. I want a story where some guy comes out of being lost in the woods and says a big missing link jumped out and ate his brother Earl alive.
Ah, but Ness is a dour loch, ye canna e’en raise a kelt, much less a salmon.
Nae, when I was a laddie on Loch Awe, now THAT were a loch…
Oh, and JAB. Nessie’s not an animal, man. She’s a kelpie, one of the water-cows. The Great Orm herself.
- Quantify population.
- ‘as large as Nessie’, that’s a bit familiar isn’t it? Would you be referring to suggestions by hallucinating, intoxicated hoaxers by any chance?
- Who told you the lake is ‘land-locked’? More geography lessons for them methinks!
- Ridiculous is a subjective term.
- We are not ‘most people’. This is a place for debate and discussion.
and finally, - Such irony in your last statement - real science to those who bother to look!
'nuff said.
--------------------Nessie lives!--------------------
I saw Ogopogo, and so did my friends!
Last summer two friends and I were boating on Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. We saw the fabled lake monster Ogopogo. It was a long, serpentine thing that was on the surface for several minutes.
Was it a “monster”? No. It was a wake. But even on this warm sunny day it looked like a sea serpent. I heard that the famous photo of Nessie has finally been proven a hoax. IMO, people who have seen Nessie (or Ogopogo) were seeing wakes cause by currents and/or boats. (Although I still suspect that “ogopogo” is an Indian word meaning “big-ass sturgeon”.)
Then again, they did find that supposedly long-extinct fish (ectholantus?) off Madagascar (Cecil even did a column about it recently), and no one has ever seen a giant squid alive (but remains have been found).
There are stranger things in Heaven and Earth… yadda yadda yadda.
Esprix
Aaah the famous “Surgeon’s Photograph” (surgeon not sturgeon). Apparently he mounted a monstrous piece of wood on a toy submarine et voila…one of the most enduring monster hoaxes ever. There have been other photographs (some very compelling ones), video footage, literally thousands of eyewitness accounts, the famous “is it or ain’t it” underwater photograph that looks like a giant flipper. The Loch Ness legend is an enduring one, the first reported account being circa 550 AD when St Columba supposedly tamed the beast as it was attacking a man on the banks of the River Ness. Columba chastised the monster and ordered her to never do it again. Recent interest was revived around the turn of the century and the modern myth continues to this day.
For more info:
http://www.lochness.co.uk/
‘Apparently’ being the operative word. The last remaining member of the group of people who first came up with the Surgeon’s photo renounced it on his death bed. He has been posthumously accused of ‘doing a Darwin’ (double-bluff to the average punter) since attempts to recreate the picture using similar ‘props’ to those claimed came not to fruition (simply not scientifically good enough).
Some more for the affray -
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the only not-admitted-to-be-a-hoax video footage of ‘something’ in the Loch has been independently assessed and described by experts to be of an object exhibiting animal behaviour and with a wake formation that confirms this. Further to that even - subsequent overlaying of the 5/6 most detailed frames and enhancing the result shows a ‘body’ between 25-35 feet long just beneath the water.
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the original view that the Loch did not contain enough food for one or more large creatures has been turned upside-down recently since scientific tests showed 9 times more fish actually live in the Loch than were previously suspected.
--------------------Nessie Lives!--------------------
Here’s the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on the Loch Ness Monster: http://skepdic.com/nessie.html
It’s a pretty long piece, at least when compared to other entries in the Skeptic’s Dictionary.
Cite?
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
The Shadowlands Sea Serpent Page has some really nifty photos, including giant octopi and such. My favorite pictures are of the unknown carcass caught by a Japanese fishing boat. Although I’ve read a lengthy and convincing (and almost certainly correct) article asserting that it’s a badly-decayed basking shark, it sure looks like something else…
Has anyone explained away that famous flipper photo from Loch Ness? IMHO, that’s the best evidence they’ve got yet.
The photo of Ogopogo looks like an oddly-shadowed powerboat wake. The photo of Champ looks like a bent fender someone dumped in the lake. Oh well.
I tend to be a skeptic about sea serpents, although the bodies that have washed up on shore lend powerful support to the idea of giant octopi and squid. Still, it’s fun to speculate.
MaxTorque wrote:
You mean the one that was a plastic/wooden fin attached to a 14-inch-long toy submarine?
I presume you mean the underwater photograph I described above? It hasn’t been explained away but it is pretty inconclusive. I remember reading something about there not being sufficient grounds for judging the scale of the “flipper”. Could just have been any old flipper-shaped bit of debris.
Yeah, it was on the discovery channel the other day!
Nessie Lives!
Yeah, you’d think if he was gonna drool on for so long he’d at least get his facts straight.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the skeptics dictionary, but when you put your faith in a piece of literature littered with ‘evidence’ (in the loosest possible sense) from 1993 and 1994 you’re gonna make a fool of yourself. Oh, I tell a lie, there was a reference right at the end to a book in 1996.