All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 2, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
37:26
Edition 492 - Malcolm Robinson & Gary Campbell

Two guests - a quick update from Malcolm Robinson on a current Scottish UFO case and Gary Campbell on the long history and amazing times of the Loch Ness Monster...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is still Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Some listeners who've been listening for a long time but have just decided to get in touch for the very first time I've been hearing from.
Really nice to hear from you.
Emails from Australia, the United States, all kinds of places.
Thank you for those.
You know who you are.
And if your email requires a response, you know that I will do my very best to get one straight out to you.
You can email me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell for his work on the website and getting the shows out to you.
Also, thank you to Haley for booking the guests on the online version of this show.
Now, what I'm going to do this time round is going to be different from what I planned.
You know, what did they say?
Was it John Lennon who said, life is what happens when you're making plans?
Well, the plan for this edition had been to do a special with my old friend Linda Moulton Howe in the US.
And Linda and I have been speaking on radio and other places for about 20 years now.
She was, of course, a stalwart guest and friend of Art Bell back in those days.
And I've been speaking with her for a long time.
Sadly, she had some technical difficulties on her end, and those problems mean that we cannot do the conversation as planned right now, but we will be doing it very soon, and there's a lot to catch up on.
So what I thought I would do is take this opportunity to bring you a couple of items from my radio show that are worth hearing and wouldn't have been heard on the podcast otherwise.
This edition of The Unexplained will be shorter than a regular edition.
So this is going to run to something like 40 minutes.
We normally do an hour or somewhere north of an hour, but this will be shorter.
I hope you understand.
And I'll be back on track and get that show done with Linda very, very soon.
So we'll be back where we're supposed to be.
Plus, planning continues for the 500th edition of The Unexplained.
It is beginning to look like I'm going to have a very special guest on that edition.
And I will tell you more about that a little nearer the time.
Edition 500 coming reasonably soon, I think.
Okay, plan for this edition then.
We're going to talk to Malcolm Robinson from the SPI in Scotland, regular guest on this show too, to do with a UFO sighting, a persistent one, over and around Grangemouth in Scotland.
This was reported by Edinburgh Live, a newspaper in Falkirk and other newspapers in Scotland, and I think even south of the border too.
Very strange story.
This is from the news segment of my radio show.
It'll be about three minutes worth, just to get an idea of what the story is from Malcolm, and we will catch up with him on the radio show or here soon to see what's happened, what developments there have been.
So that's thing number one on this show.
Thing number two on this show is an old friend of mine, wonderful man, Gary Campbell, at Loch Ness in Scotland.
He is the keeper of the official record of sightings of Nessie.
And we're going to talk about the history of and developments in the sightings and search for Nessie with Gary Campbell, the official keeper of the official record of Loch Ness Monster Sightings.
So two things on this edition.
Like I say, this will be a shorter edition than normal.
And I hope you'll forgive me for that.
It's just because of the problems that I had putting together a regular edition this time.
I wanted you to have some material to listen to, something to enjoy, I hope.
You can always get in touch with me.
Let me know what you think.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the links, send me a message from there.
You know the form.
Okay, thing number one on the show then from my radio show.
This is Malcolm Robinson and a strange UFO sighting over Grangemouth.
Well, it's very similar to the objects that were sighted in the Stirlingshire skies about 10 years ago.
It seems like we've had another influx of strange sightings across Grangemouth, Bonney Bridge and Falkirk.
Now it's clear to say that these objects do not conform to a conventional type helicopter or aircraft.
What this witness has seen is this ball of light which initially remains motionless and then traverses across the sky and screams off at an alarming rate.
And we have checked with the Police Scotland, we have checked with the Glasgow Airport, Edinburgh Airport and various other establishments to try and get a rational explanation to account for not just this gentleman's sighting but quite a substantial amount of other people who have now come forward from the Falkirk Herald article.
And I presume the authorities and yourself have been trying to do the usual thing of ruling out all the things that might be military aircraft, missed sightings, misreportings, but if there are so many of them, how could that be?
Yes, that's part of my job.
It's to find out if there was any aircraft in the vicinity at the given time.
And at the moment, I'm still waiting to hear back from Edinburgh Airport.
The National Air Traffic Services are saying that that airspace does not really operate for them.
I've really got to go through Edinburgh and Glasgow.
So we're still waiting, you know, to hear back from the airports.
Still waiting back to hear from the police to see if other members of the public have called in.
But it's fair to say to your listeners, Howard, you know, the vast majority of UFO reports have naturally identifiable solutions.
But we're still dealing with some cases that defy explanation.
Can we check in with you about this in a week or two, or you know, if anything else breaks about this?
Yes, please do, because what I'm finding is that not only are we getting sightings from that area, people who have read The Herald are now talking about sightings they've had five, six, seven years ago.
I've also had sightings from people in England based on this paper and also Kilmarnock and various other Scottish towns.
So it clearly has drawn a vast amount of attention to what's going on in the Scottish skies.
And yeah, I'd be more than happy to give you an update in the weeks to follow.
How fascinating.
We need to follow up on this.
Malcolm, listen, good to talk with you again.
And thank you for doing this late at night on a Sunday.
Malcolm Robinson, founder of Strange Phenomena Investigations SPI, check out his website.
You will be glad that you did.
Malcolm Robinson from the SPI.
We'll get an update from Malcolm Robinson as soon as there is one here on that story because it sounds like a fascinating one.
Just a short piece from my radio show's news segment.
I thought you might want to hear that.
Right, an old friend of this show, also in Scotland, is Gary Campbell.
In fact, I think that Gary Campbell appeared on the original talk sport radio show that I did back in 2004 to 2006.
I've been talking to him for that long.
He is these days the official keeper of the official record and register of sightings of the Loch Ness Monster.
He knows, as you will hear now, the history of the Loch Ness Monster inside out and upside down.
Gary Campbell.
Loch Ness Monster.
Gary Campbell, who is the keeper of the register of Loch Ness Monster sightings.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Loch Ness Monster, but were afraid to ask.
Gary, thank you very much.
Sorry, we're coming to you slightly later.
How are you?
I'm very well.
How are you?
Oh, I'm absolutely fine.
And how is Loch Ness on this Sunday?
Loch Ness is fine.
It's actually been a remarkably productive year in terms of people seeing things at Loch Ness.
You know, given that, obviously, the whole COVID crisis and people not being able to travel.
And it's, I mean, on a more serious note, it's devastated the tourist industry in the Highlands as it's done across the world.
But for us, it hasn't stopped people seeing things in Loch Ness.
And you would expect that most of them would be sort of online sightings, maybe from the webcam.
But actually, half of the 10 sightings so far this year have actually been by people beside or on the loch.
So we're getting the same level of interest that we get in most normal years.
So Nessie's as active as ever.
And Nessie never fails to make the newspapers, never fails to make the television.
Look, I think you and I are of a similar kind of vintage, but when I was a kid, we had a black and white telly.
And I can remember that every year, at least, there would be something on the news about a humpback shape in the Loch.
And being black and white, of course, the film looked even more stark and even more scary.
But it's been going on for years, hasn't it?
Yes, and there's two sides to this.
One is that generally people think that the Loch Ness Monster is something that it was a number of years ago.
It was grainy pictures like you're talking about, you know, coming and going in old 405-line TV pictures.
But actually, things are probably as busy today, if not busier than ever, in terms of evidence.
But of course, the story started back in 565 AD.
So it's almost 1500 years ago that there was first mention of the Loch Ness monster when St. Columba, the good Christian, came to convert us heathen Pict here in the north of Scotland.
And he travelled north to Inverness to a place called King Brood's Hill to see the veritable King Brood, who was, I suppose, a bit like anyone with any religious convictions.
They were moving around the world trying to convert people.
And he was here to convert our local Pictish king.
And when he was here, he came across a creature or a monster or something large that came out of the river Ness beside Loch Ness and went to attack one of his men.
And the man, St. Columba, being a good Christian, basically sent the creature back into the water and told it never to attack people again.
And Nessie has never attacked anyone since.
So that's where the story started.
That's why that worked.
Yeah, so that's where the story started of something in Loch Ness.
And it's gone on from there.
And it's been pretty consistent from sort of the mid-1600s onwards in terms of reports and writings about it and people talking about it up till today.
What did, in those far-off days when people didn't have the scientific knowledge and the media that we have today, of course they didn't, what did they think it was?
I mean, this will be familiar to many, many of your listeners across the world, the concept of the water horse, or in Scotland they call it the water kelpie, of something that is horse-like with a head and a neck that lives in deep, dark lakes across the planet.
And it's not just Scotland, I mean, it's across the world.
There's a lot of folklore and stories being passed down through generations in the Northern Hemisphere, certainly in Russia, in China, especially in Scandinavia and North America.
And that story, the Water Kelpie, was what was the story in Loch Ness and also 23 other Scottish lochs that have also got a history of sightings.
And it's really funny because looking back at old newspaper articles from the past, because things all changed in 1933 and I'll come to that in a while.
But back then, so in the mid-1900s, you know, sort of 1852, mid-19th century, there was a story and they talked about, there was a scene at Loch End.
Now, Loch End is at the top end of the loch.
This was in the local paper, the Inverness Courier.
And they talk about people seeing these creatures in the water and the kids being scared and they didn't know what it was.
And the actual words, I'll quote it here, it says, though not actually the much dreaded Kelpies, they actually proved to be a valuable pair of ponies belonging to the local estate.
So what the story there was that it wasn't unusual or strange for there to be Kelpies there.
It was an accepted fact that there were Kelpies in Loch Ness and elsewhere.
And the funny story was actually the fact that it was some ponies.
And even if you move forward a few years to 1868, there was another story again in the Inverness Courier called A Strange Fish in Loch Ness.
And that story was actually about people who had gone through Loch Ness as part of the Caledonian Canal, which had opened in 1822.
And they dropped a dolphin which had been skinned on the shore of Loch Ness, basically to wind up the local population that the Kelpie had come ashore and died.
And the word thing's fantastic.
It says here, it says the fish had, of course, been caught at sea and had been cast adrift in the waters of Loch Ness by a waggish crew to surprise the primitive local inhabitants.
So again, the whole tenet of these stories, and right up to 1930, and again in the Northern Chronicle newspaper, there was talk about these creatures and all the rest of it.
But it was completely normal.
It wasn't a sensational thing at all.
It was just like, yeah, that's a Kelpie.
It lives in Loch Nest.
We've known about it since time began.
Thanks very much.
And it's the same with other Scottish lochs as well.
And then, as I say, in 1933, things changed ever so slightly.
But it's interesting to hear that there's a history of scepticism, a history of a bit of messing about and fakery going on that goes back a very long time.
When do you think that we can trace the scepticism about Nessie back to?
Is that really more for the modern era?
That's the modern era because it very clearly in all the things that were written down before 1933 was just accepted.
This is this creature.
It lives in Loch Ness.
It's the same as all these other lakes around the world.
The other most famous ones are in North America, Lake Champlain in Vermont, and Lake Okanagan in British Columbia.
These are big, big monster lakes as well.
But what happened in 1933 and the 2nd of May, and again, the same local paper that had run these earlier stories had a story called A Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness.
And that article is actually the first time the word monster was used.
And apparently, it was the editor at the time had put it in.
And the quote was, you know, the watchers, because they reported seeing something in Loch Ness, the watchers waited for almost half an hour in the hope that the monster, if such it was, would reappear.
And that's where this story, monster, came up.
And for some reason, at that point, it was picked up by both national media and international media, and off it went.
It's funny when you look back at other previous newspaper articles because they weren't much different.
They talked about this creature, this large creature in Loch Ness, but this particular one, for some reason, was picked up.
It looks like it was just a quiet news day.
Or the other piece of evidence, I suppose, behind it that's pretty much accepted now is the fact that two months before to the day the film King Kong had been released as a massive worldwide hit across the planet.
And all of a sudden, there was people interested in big creatures, such as it was.
And rather than saying, well, obviously, you know, a big creature hanging off the Empire State Building was Hollywood, but wait a minute, here in our own backyard in the United Kingdom, which of course was the British Empire at the time and was very important across the world, here in our own backyard is another monster.
And should that be investigated?
And immediately that's where the Loch Ness monster took over from the water Kelpie and became a phenomenon in its own right.
And that's when the scepticism started as well, very clearly at that point.
Yeah, no, no, just to dive in there.
So the phenomenon seems to be the same.
What has changed is our perception and description of it.
Yes, and it's really interesting, again, taking that tack on it, that even then after 1933, it's this monster, it's this huge creature.
The scepticism comes in because at that time, although people have argued that it was a stunt by the local tourist industry, which not helped by the fact that the people reporting this owned a hotel in Loch Nessa.
And you can see where it came from, but I generally don't think it was.
I think it was just another story that happened to me by then.
But what the local tourist industry did do was very, very, very quickly picked up on this as something that money could be made from.
And by the end of 1933, I mean, a matter of seven, eight months later, there was a well-established tourist industry running from Inverness where people were coming to the area.
There were coach tours, there were boat tours, instantly go look for this monster.
Helped by a lot of the national papers, including the Daily Mail, really leading the charge at the time, were sending big game hunters to go and see if they could find this creature.
And then Bertrand Mills Circus was putting up £10,000 as a reward if somebody could capture it and all the kind of PR snuff that goes with it.
But the interesting thing was that it moves forward then to the first photographs that were taken at Loch Ness.
And the very first one was in 1933 by a guy called Hugh Gray, late 1933.
You'll see it online.
It's not the famous photograph.
The famous one with the head and the neck sticking out, known as the Surgeons photograph, was taken in April 1934.
And if you look at the tourist industry postcards, this is a really interesting bellwether in terms of perception.
The postcards pre-90, April 1934, that, as I say, had been latched onto Instantly all showed this dragon-like creature superimposed onto Loch Ness.
Here's your souvenir of it.
And people were saying, this is what people are saying.
It must be a monster.
It's a big dragon.
It's got teeth and eyes and all the rest and ears and it's got a spiky bit down its back.
Immediately, the surgeon's photograph was pictured with this much more smooth, just head coming out of the water.
All the postcards changed the next month to reflect that and have done ever since.
So there are various things in the story of the Loch Ness Monster or the Water Kelpie that definitely have changed perception in terms of what people think it is.
And along with them come the sceptics.
Of course, they say this shows the proof.
You know, that's really where the nub of it with people saying shows the proof.
And Nessie and the proof have been elusive.
Why do we always refer to Nessie as she?
Well, that's an interesting one because again, over the years, there's been a number of talk about the Loch Ness Monster and Nessie and who owns the name and who can have it.
And actually, they're both in the public domain because the Loch Ness Monster was named by the Inverness Courier and was allowed to go into the public domain so anyone can use the name.
And Nessie as well was actually first coined in 1938.
So again, very shortly afterwards, there was a book published by the Venerable Monks of Fort Augustus Abbey who weren't shy in cashing in on this either.
And that's the first written reference to Nessie as the name.
By that point, they were almost making the Nessie and the Loch Ness monster something that was almost quite friendly because the problem is if you're promoting a monster, obviously, you don't want to scare people off.
So they're saying, no, Nessie, give it the diminutive.
Well, you want families to come on holiday.
You don't want to scare the kids off.
Interestingly, though, in 1934, the first attempt at naming Nessie was Bobby, because Again, the tourist industry in the Highlands, never short of coming up with ideas, decided this creature needed a name, and it was short-lived.
It was Bobby.
So, Bobby was short-lived, and Nessie took over.
And ever since then, it's been Nessie, her family, and then helped by things later on, by the BBC's family in S, in the 1960s and 70s, where people remember it, where Nessie was the matriarch of the family.
And so Nessie then created this image was created of this helpful, friendly creature.
Might be a monster, but it's really quite nice.
And remember, since St. Columba banished it into the waters of the River Ness back in 565 AD, it hasn't touched a soul.
So you're safe when you come to Loch Ness.
Well, I'd like to hope so.
But all of this plays into the wonderful Scottish storytelling tradition.
You know, I can almost hear corporal Fraser saying, you know, it was a dark and stormy night and a beastie emerged from the depths of the loch.
Well, it's funny you say that because one of the most famous sightings was in the mid-1960s, a detective Ian Cameron, he was a detective constable at the time.
He went on to be quite senior in the police.
And he had a sighting that lasted almost 45 minutes and was corroborated by people on both sides of the loch.
And he could tell that story so well.
And it was, we've got a copy of it on video that was taken 20 years ago.
The man's sadly passed away since then.
And he got the whole story word for word on video.
And it was like, it was a dark and stormy night.
And here we go.
And just like what you've said.
And at that time, again, most of your listeners will be familiar with the 14 Times magazine.
We had a symposium in 1999 looking at monsters and such across the world like Nessie.
And they sent one of their chief reporters to report on it.
And the man came to me afterwards and he said, you know, I was fairly sceptical about this whole Nessie stuff.
He said, until I heard that cop.
And now I'm, he says, now I'm really beginning to think.
So yes, it is that his story convinced a hard-bitten journalist and it has done so since.
And yes, it is part of the story, but I think you'll find it's the same with lots of the things you look at, whether it's Yeti's an Abominable Snowman or all of the unexplained, there's normally a story that goes with it.
And there's normally a history that goes with it as well.
And pre-writing, of course, it was an oral history.
And that's what you're really looking for, is that oral history to be captured and taken forward and just carry it on because nobody knows.
It's back to the sceptics.
Nobody knows.
My answer to the skeptics is prove that it's not there.
And then we kind of an actual discussion.
But in the meantime, the story keeps it alive and it keeps it next generation.
And the 30s, as you say, the story almost fuels itself.
The 30s was very much the era that kick-started all of this and brought it into the modern era and got us to understand Nessie as we understand her today.
There was the famous surgeon's photo, 1934, and then, of course, came wartime.
Now, if there'd been fakery, and if this was all a put-up job, and if Nessie didn't really exist, then chances are that once war was declared and people had a lot of other things to do, we would stop getting sightings of Nessie.
But we didn't.
That's correct.
And that's the really interesting thing is that Loch Ness, in terms of continued sightings, the Loch Ness monster has never really stopped having had sightings in the modern areas from 1929 until today.
There was a bit of a hiccup in 2013 when we thought nobody had seen anything.
But then someone subsequently reported one.
And it carried on through the war years.
And this is the really interesting thing, because as you say, if it had just been a tourist, for example, maybe a tourist stunt, it would have stopped dead in 1939.
And it would have been unlikely that it would have carried on.
But during the war, for example, again, because the Loch Ness is part of the Caledonian Canal, there was a report of a Navy boat going through and it actually hit something.
But at the time, it was classified information because nobody wanted to muck up the war story and the patriotism by saying, by the way, notwithstanding the fact we're in the middle of the worst war in history, we've actually now got proof of this thing that this guy talked about nine years previously or whatever.
But even now, again, in our website, just two years ago, a chap called Callum McFarlane Barrow and he came to us, a man who is in his late 80s, and he said, I need to tell you a story about 1941 when we had to move to the Loch Ness area.
And they were living in a boat at one point because their father had moved to Fort Augustus because of the war effort and was doing stuff.
And he told the story about him and his brother and what they'd seen then.
But they'd been told to keep quiet about it.
It's like, no, that's something that's nice, boys, that's okay.
But you don't need to be telling anyone about it.
But he told us because he felt it was something that was important to record, that even in times when sometimes we call Britain's darkest days, people were still seeing the Loch Ness monster.
And it carried on thereafter, as I say, every single year since.
And it's had various bursts of activity in terms of interest and such like ever since.
It's never stopped.
All right.
Coming next, after we've taken some commercials here, we'll pull the story forward through the 50s, into the 60s, into the 70s, which I remember clearly.
Then there was an operation to try and scan the lock in the 80s, then more activity in the 90s and right up to the present day with Gary Campbell.
But just one quick thing, if you can cover this off in a minute or so, Gary, before we take a break here.
Craig in Northern Ireland, regular listener, hello Craig, asks you this question, and I'm not sure.
I think he's just basically asking you to plumb your instinct for this one.
Do you believe, Gary, that there will be a confirmed sighting this year?
There's already 10 confirmed sightings, Craig.
That's the thing.
But unfortunately, they all fit what we call a sighting, which is something unexplained in Loch Ness.
If you want to know whether there'll be definitive proof of what people are seeing in Loch Ness, then I don't know because she's been hiding for almost 1,500 years.
And I think we might have a little bit to go yet.
And she's become very good at it, too.
Gary Campbell, the Loch Ness Monster Man.
Gary Campbell, 1950 then.
Is interest Beginning to wane in the Loch Ness Monster because you say that it was all given a kickstart by a book.
Yeah, and what happened in the 1950s, probably it was waning.
Interestingly enough, the booklet I talked about earlier on that the monks in Fort Agasus Abbey had done, they continued to publish new editions of that.
They did nine editions between 1938 and 1971, so that was a constant all the way through.
People are still coming to look, but the sensationalism and the worldwide interest had really died off.
Then a lady called Constance White took an interest in it.
And the first thing she did was she published a pamphlet in the mid-50s that started to look at the Loch Ness Monster and gather together more of the more recent sightings, sort of post-war sightings.
And in 1957, she published a book called More Than a Legend, which really kick-started things again.
And what she put into that book was like a call to action.
This really needs to be looked at.
And that took us through to the 1960s, where two things happened in the early 60s.
One, a chap called Tim Dinsdale, really, I suppose he credits Constantine White's book of getting him interested in it.
And he came north to have a look.
He lived in the south of England.
He came north to have a look.
And he took a film that is, you can see on the internet.
And it was that film.
Many people will say it's a boat.
It can certainly be very, very easily replicated by using a small rowing boat with an outboard engine to do the same manoeuvres.
What he saw, again, is unexplained, but at the time he then got it, he got it analysed by the RAF, the Joint Air Reconnaissance Centre in the RAF, and they said, we don't know what this is.
So all of a sudden, between Hardburg in 1957 and his film in 1960, the hunt was back on.
It's like, here's something, and here, by the way, is this piece of film that our armed forces, intelligence guys, are saying they can't understand what it is.
And at that point, Nessie was back, very much so, in the early 1960s.
And in fact, back bigger and better, the mystery deepens.
70s and 80s then.
There was a very famous picture in the 70s that further caused excitement.
And then, of course, there was Operation Deep Scan that I remember really well, a solar sweep of the loch.
So the 70s and 80s, very active time.
Yeah, and it really started in the mid-60s.
If you take Dinsdale's film, then there was a thing called the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau that ran through to the 1970s and had a series of people around the loch, especially every summer, lots of volunteers.
They had a camp.
It was run by Peter James, who was an MP.
And that itself gave an element of respectability because a member of the Parliament was involved in it.
It gave this almost scientific credibility to looking for the Loch Ness monster, which was picked up by a chap called Robert Rines, who ran the Academy of Applied Science in the United States.
And he got involved in it towards the end of the 60s and early 70s, again through the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau.
And he came out with a couple of really famous photographs.
One called the Gargoyle's Head, and the other one, a very famous photograph called the Flipper photograph, taken underwater in Loch Ness.
And it looks like a flipper of a big creature.
And this is where the plesiosaur idea came from, because this flipper looks like something that would be on a plesiosaur.
And I get that at that time it was a global sensation, that picture, there's no doubt about it.
Those who saw the original picture say that what was actually published in the press was, for want of a better word, enhanced.
And his argument was that what they'd done, they'd enhance it to show what the substance was in the picture.
And others have said, no, he was enhancing it to make sure it actually looked like a flipper.
People can make up their own mind because all the evidence is out there one way or the other.
But what it did do was take the Loch Ness monster to a North American audience, very much so, and a global audience because the LNIB, the investigation during the 60s, was a kind of British thing.
And this again took it across the world.
And moving on from that, that inspired a chap who's still here today, Adrian Schein.
He's been a longtime Nesty Hunter.
He started at Loch Morrow, which is one of the other Scottish locks.
In fact, it's the deepest inland waterway in the UK and it's got a monster in it.
And he started the late 60s there and gravitated to Loch Ness in the 1970s.
And through the 1980s, he was working on more scientific approaches, for want of a better word.
And this is when he did Operation Deep Scan, which was taking then the best sonar technology in the world with a company called Lawrence, which is still around, and doing a sonar curtain, if you can imagine, with boats going across the loch and going a sweep of sonar right the way down the loch from one end to the other to see if they could get something more than just a grainy picture or some eyewitness evidence.
And they got two or three contacts.
And again, it was like, here's something else and explaining Loch Ness.
But by now, this is science getting involved.
But people tried to debunk those, I seem to remember.
They did.
And there is a lot of argument about sonar at the time, especially in saying you could get false bounces off the side of Loch, because of course, Loch Ness is essentially a long, narrow, deep gorge filled with water.
And if you put, especially if you put you side scan sonar or something that's not going directly down, the sonar waves will bounce off the side and come back against each other and it will create this false image.
But the images, again, it's all available online to look at.
The images again are sufficiently unusual that they would constitute something unusual, something that would be unexplained as opposed to a sonar bounce.
And right up to today, only last month, one of the local boats got a very similar contact again.
So that kind of evidence was started by DeepScan in 1987 and has carried on ever since, right up to the present day.
Okay, we've got about five minutes.
So the 1990s, I'd forgotten this one, Project Urcut.
Yeah, a man who's more well known to the Royal Watchers just now, Nicholas Witchell, the BBC's Royal correspondent, was actually a very fervent Nessie hunter through the 1960s, 70s and 80s and into the early 90s.
There's lots of story.
He wrote a book about the Loch Nest Monster.
He was actually, for those with a bit of pub trivia, he was actually published in a Mayfair magazine that those might remember from way back talking about The Loch Nest Monster.
Yes, it's one of these, it's a bit of these trivia things.
And he ran a thing called the Project in early 1990s.
And it picked up again from the work that Adrian was doing on the back of the deep scan work.
Let's look at this more scientifically.
I think from memory, it was back to the Discovery Channel at the time.
And they put a boat on and they went looking for physical evidence in terms of creatures or what could they out and samples from the bottom of the loch, looking for physical evidence of something.
And they did.
They found something unknown.
It was a bit of a laugh at the time with the press.
They said they found the Loch Ness microbe because they found an unknown creature in Loch Ness.
It just happened to be about two millimetres long.
So it didn't quite match that.
But again, what that did was that gave all of these things have given another boost to the Loch Ness monster.
And then through the 90s, when we first got involved, when I saw something almost 25 years ago, March 1996, but at that time, the interest again was peaked because I'd seen because of the X-Files.
And the X-Files at the time when the television was looking at strange creatures across the world and unexplained phenomena.
And that itself gave another boost to the whole Loch Ness monster story because once again, yes, here's Hollywood talking about something.
But wait a minute, here's this unexplained thing that no one's been able to look at for almost 1500 years.
What's that all about?
And again, there was interest generated at that point.
Which kind of rides us up to the modern era, sort of late 90s, post-2000.
We've got cameras, webcams, smartphones, all the rest of it.
And of course, there was the DNA test that was done by the guy from the University of Otago last year.
And there's some eel DNA that they can't quite explain.
So we've talked extensively about that.
So it remains an enduring mystery.
With the three minutes, two and a half minutes we've got left.
I want to try and work through quickly a couple of questions.
Faisal, thank you for this.
We've got so much technology now.
Why can't we send a craft down there to check?
I think this has been done a number of times.
It has.
A combination of hydrophones and sonar has been done.
They all pick up unknown sightings, contacts, call it what you want.
The problem with looking at Loch Ness through a camera lens is that 10 feet down it's black because of the peat in the water and you can't see your hand in front of your face.
But the real problem is a logistical one because the thing you've got to remember is the volume of water in Loch Ness, a very much quoted statistic, is more than the water in all the lakes and reservoirs in England and Wales combined.
It is a vast body of water.
And in terms of mass, you could hide the whole human population of the world in Loch Ness.
So if you're going to send in.
Aha.
So if you're going to send something in, you're going to have to send something in that needs massive resources.
And nobody's done it yet.
And where would you get the resources?
Peter asks this.
I think you could probably deal with this one quite quickly.
Why do we talk about Nessie in the singular?
Surely there should be both a male and a female family.
Yeah, the family, yes.
And there are sometimes multiple sightings.
There have been a few recently.
They're very, very rare, but people do see two or three creatures at once coming out of the water.
And so, yes, you would assume that if it's not an alien, a ghost, or a portal into another dimension, and people are seeing things along those lines, then it's got to be something that's got a breeding population.
But again, if you think about it, the average size of things that people see is no more than 20, 25 feet, and you've got an area that can actually hide the human population of the world.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out.
There could be two or three thousand monsters down there.
It would be difficult to find.
Gary Campbell, and before that, you heard Malcolm Robinson.
Two stories that I would say are meat and drink to the unexplained.
UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.
If those things didn't exist, I don't think we'd have a show.
Now, my apologies again for the shortness of this edition.
You heard at the beginning of this the reason for that.
Promise that I will do the show with Linda Moulton Howe as soon as she and we are able to get that together.
But I wanted you to have a show, and here it is.
Your thoughts, comments, suggestions, always welcome, and more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So if you need to contact me, please go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link, send me an email from there, and when you get in touch by email, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Also, you can connect with me and find out what's happening on the show by going to the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That is there for you to be part of.
That's all I have to say for now.
So, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And until next we meet, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection